This is a set of six sports cars in their "production" state - ie. not specifically modified for racing. As such, you'll see quite a lot of lateral roll while cornering & their hold on the road may leave something to be desired. Nonetheless, each car is quite drivable & fun in its own way. While some cars may have an advantage on particular tracks, on the whole the set is well balanced versus each other.
Also included is a computer driver based on my award-winning hymie robot (well, no awards as yet but I live in hope), with setups for each of the road tracks in the current Torcs distribution. Unlike other Torcs robots this driver will behave somewhat more like a human, with subtle variations in its laptimes & the occasional mistake. In addition there is a Championship XML file that you can use to get the most out of these cars, and in a never-before-seen first for Torcs, you can now edit the robot's skill level to match your own driving ability.
Linux
Extract the contents of supercars.zip to the base folder of your Torcs installation, making sure the directory structure is preserved. For instance, if you have the unzip command-line utility from Info Zip, you would first "cd" to the Torcs directory in a terminal, then type unzip supercars.zip. If you've already extracted the zip file somewhere else then simply move the extracted contents to the torcs-1.3.0 folder.
NOTE: You'll also need to copy the file config/raceman/sc_champ.xml to ~/.torcs/config/raceman, otherwise Torcs could crash. This will need to be done for every user of Torcs on your system. Sorry this is necessary - I'll try and think of an easier method of managing championship files in future.
Windows
On XP & Vista, double-clicking on a zip file will open it in an Explorer window. Do this and then drag the contents into the Torcs-1.3.0 folder, answering "Yes" to any overwrite prompts (it won't actually overwrite anything, it'll just write files to existing folders).
If you use WinZip, open supercars.zip then click Extract & choose Torcs-1.3.0 as the "Extract To" destination. Make sure the "Use folder names" checkbox is ticked.
Adjusting the robot skill level
Edit the file "torcs-1.3.0/config/raceman/extra/skill.xml" in a text editor. There's only one value to change & there's comments there telling you what to do. It'll apply when you next restart Torcs.
Using the Championship
When you start Torcs, go into Configure Player and make a new entry using the Supercar of your choice (details on each car below - you'll probably want to experiment with all of them).
Once you've done that, go into the Race menu and you'll see the Supercars Championship. Click on it then choose Configure, and add your driver to the list. Now you're ready to race :)
The following screenshots will open in their own window (you may need to allow scripting in your browser), with a brief description of each of the cars:-
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Because I don't own a wheel & pedal setup, I originally used the keyboard and then switched to mouse for steering while still using the keyboard for accel/brake/gears.
Keyboard:
If you find keyboard steering in TORCS is over sensitive (as I and many others
have), you can improve it by adjusting the Sensitivity value in Controls. For
some reason, with the keyboard you need to increase the value to make it less
sensitive. Personally I find 1.4 to be a good setting.
Mouse:
To use mouse for steering, go into Controls, click on the field with the character
for left steering and move the mouse to the left. "MOUSE_LEFT" should appear
in the field. Do the same for steering to the right.
Now click the calibrate button & follow the directions, moving the mouse to the extremeties of the window/screen.
When driving with the mouse, the trick is to put the mouse where you want the car to go. If your car starts to skid & you need to correct you'll need to move it further in the opposite direction to compensate (and pretty quickly too), but its worth trying to get the hang of it as its a far superior steering method to using the keyboard.
ABS/ASR:
I use ABS for brakes, simply because you need it if you're using a keyboard. The
alternative - 100% brakes when the key is down and 0% when it isn't - is not
really workable. I'm not really happy with how well the ABS works though,
as it eases up on the brakes too much & it can be difficult to stop as a result.
ASR is useful if you go off the track, as it lets you get back on without skidding in circles. On the track though I find it much better to drive without, as it tends to ease off on the accelerator way too much.
I intend to make a human driver with much improved versions of ABS/ASR, plus a
better auto gear changer and auto clutch control, along with some wheel-steering
improvements by Tim Foden.
Special thanks to Tim Foden for test-driving, and Daniel Schellhammer for building
hymie's libraries under linux!
Thanks also to Olaf Sassnick for the beautiful models used for the Lynx 220 and
Ciclon 300.
I hope you enjoy these cars & stay tuned for the next in the series of sets I'm creating.
I've taken every possible care to make this easy to install & play, however - do be aware though that you're installing & running it at your own risk and as such I take no responsibility for what it might do to your Torcs setup or anything else on your computer.
That said, if you do have any problems please email me and I'll try to help as best I can. If everything goes well and you enjoy the car set please let me know as well :)
andrewsumner (at) yahoo.com
March 2007