Vehicle Prototyping

Vehicle Prototyping A free starting point for building driving games in s&box. Note: This is an early access prototype and meant to be a baseline for game creators to port into their game. It is intentionally very sparse on art and content and the physics still need some work. If you have any issues, please let me know on the Discord and I will address them ASAP. Vehicle Prototyping is a playable baseline and the flagship of the Field Kits family of prototyping tools. Press Play and you're driving a tuned car on an instrumented test track in seconds. Open the hood and you have a complete, honest, MIT-licensed vehicle stack ready to take into your own game. New in v0.4.0: the physics core now ships as its own installable library, the Vehicle Physics Kit. This game runs on it directly. If all you want is the driving stack, you don't even need to clone this repo: open the s&box Library Manager, search "fieldguide", install the kit, and you have the exact physics this game runs, demo scene included. The game is the showcase, the kit is yours to keep. Note: The physics still need a lot of work on this one. This is a prototyping tool, not the next Assetto Corsa, but I'm tweaking rapidly as I get feedback. Drive it first. Four cars, four feels: a front-drive hatch, a rear-drive coupe, a light twitchy kart, and a heavier pickup, each tuned toward its own class and drivable straight out of the box. Swap cars, switch worlds, and pull up a live tuning panel to feel the physics change under your hands. Then look under it: • A tuned slip-curve physics stack (this is the Vehicle Physics Kit): raycast-wheel suspension along the contact normal, a slip-ratio / slip-angle tire model with peaked curves, a friction ellipse and load sensitivity, 4x substepping (200 Hz effective on a 50 Hz tick), a drivetrain with a torque curve and auto-shifting, and ABS / traction / stability assists at three levels: Casual, Sport, and Sim. All in SI units, converted only at the engine boundary. • A proving-ground world: an instrumented test track with a skidpad, drag strip, brake zone, slalom, ramps, a banked curve, washboard, hill grades, and a J-turn pad, plus a looser playground world with roads, ramps, and a banked bowl. Switch worlds live, and flip between flat and curvy terrain on the fly. • A data-driven playtest harness: a Python runner drives the live editor through a battery of scripted maneuvers, measures the telemetry, and prints pass/fail against per-class metric bands, so "feels right" becomes a number you can check. The v0.4.0 re-platforming onto the kit was verified byte-identical with exactly this battery. • A multi-part vehicle pipeline: a Blender generator authors each car from separate parts (chassis, wheels, doors, bumpers) with joints at their pivots, so wheels actually compress and steer from the simulation, the foundation for parts interaction and, later, damage. Tune and keep it. Live dials for the whole physics model, save/load named tune presets per car, auto or sequential manual shifting, a full telemetry overlay, keyboard and gamepad support: the working surface a driving project needs on day one. Honest about its edges. This is a prototyping toolkit, so it ships with its ledger in the open: the physics, the four cars, the proving grounds, and the harness are all live and working, and the handful of maneuver-band edge cases are documented in the repo's feature matrix rather than swept under the rug. What you see is what's really there. Out of scope, on purpose: full soft-body (node-beam) simulation, traffic AI, and open-world streaming aren't goals of this baseline. It stays lean and focused on the driving core so it's easy to build on. MIT licensed. Play it, clone it, or just install the kit. Three ways in: play it here, grab the repo and open it in the editor, or install the Vehicle Physics Kit from the Library Manager and start from a driving stack that already feels good instead of a blank scene. Suggestions, bugs, feedback? Join our Discord to let me know all your thoughts!