Where to get it

itch.io

2010 · Racing · Simulation

Speed Dreams

Speed Dreams is a Racing Motorsport Simulator featuring high-quality 3D graphics and an accurate physics engine, all targeting maximum realism. It mainly aims to implement exciting new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents to make a more enjoyable game for the player.

Released: 27 March 2010
Platforms: Linux Windows macOS
Genres: Racing Simulation
Developers: —
Publishers: —
Modes: Multiplayer Single-player
Perspective: First person Third person Bird view / Isometric Side view

About

Speed Dreams, is a free and open source 3D racing video game for Linux, Microsoft Windows, AmigaOS 4, AROS, MorphOS and Haiku. Started in 2008 as a fork of the racing car simulator TORCS, it is mainly written in C++ and released under GPL v2+ and Free Art License, the most recent release being version 2.4.2 as of September 2025.

The development of an accurate driving behavior, with different physics engines available, sets the project among the few open source racing simulation codebases.

Keywords

racing sim
motorsports

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Speed Dreams features several different racing modes; while some offer greater customization than others, most generally try to reproduce real types of races. Complex events, such as various categories of championships or endurance races, are also available. Because racing modes are defined by plain-text configuration files, custom ones can be freely created. 0 − is the "Career" mode: here the player can compete with different car classes, during multiple seasons, on randomly selected tracks and against balanced random opponents, earning points in championship rankings.

0, it is possible to run robot races in the "results-only" mode, that is, ignoring the graphics display of the race; this allows the simulation to be run at a speed limited only by the computing power available, and is mostly used by robot developers. 0 provides also a text-only mode: the race is run without graphics − no hardware acceleration being required − and the results are displayed through a command-line interface.

Development

As of version 2.0, Speed Dreams still relies on OpenGL 1.3 for rendering. Due to the new graphical and physical features, computing power required has risen compared to TORCS. Yet, the use of PLIB, which doesn't need support for OpenGL 2, still lets Speed Dreams run on old – back to 2001 – video cards. In order to increase the performance of the simulation, dual threading was introduced in version 1.4.0: dividing the simulation work between a physics and a graphics thread allows the program to take advantage from multi-core CPUs.

The core architecture, which is still quite the same of TORCS, features a flexible structure that loads as separated modules the components of the simulation, such as the physics, graphics and robot engines. The graphics engine, PLIB's SimpleSceneGraph, offers high-level access to OpenGL functions; PLIB is also a possible choice to deal with sound, the other one − selectable by the user − being OpenAL. 0. An SDL-port of the code, in order to get rid of the need of freeglut, was active from October 2008 to February 2010, when it was merged with the main project's trunk, but in some distributions freeglut still figures as a dependency for the Speed Dreams packages.