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Realistic Driving Simulator Games?
modoquasi writes "I have a son approaching the age when it is legal to hurtle through the air at insurance-raising speeds. I would like to educate him to hurtle safely and legally as soon as possible, and not use my car to do it. I thought I would find a number of driving simulator/educators for teens at home. but all I found are the likes of GTA Vice City and Crazy Taxi. Though Big Mutha Truckers might educate him on correct parking procedures in tight spots, I don't think it covers four-way-stops and passing on a double yellow line. Do the readers of Slashdot have any clues where to find this type of software?"
If you don't have your head in the ground, use this. It may be a racing game but the physics are extremely well thought out.
Kinda hard to miss honestly
Get paid to code OSS
I learned in part with Sierra Driver's Education '99 software, which is no longer sold. It worked well, and included audio books of tutorials, multiple-choice tests, and a driving simulator of "Virtual City." I quickly lost seriousness and learned the finer points of running red lights and dodging traffic while going the wrong way on the freeway.
Although you would think that a driving simulator should help a kid to drive, I'm skeptical.
... and they don't come anywhere close to the forces you regularly experience in a car.
;)
I think driving simulators lack a couple of things that are very important to teaching the kid:
- 360 degree vision
- true depth for depth perception and focus at a distance
- actual control sizes and distances (to pedals)
- true control feedback (think steering feedback, brake and especially clutch pedal feedback)
- g-forces and motion
etc...
Having worked on flight simulators and knowing what goes into a real training simulator, I would expect you would end up with negative training (training for something that will actually be different in real life that you will have to un-learn)
Real flight simulators have merit, but they have actual aircraft controls and instruments, have hydraulic motion bases, collimated visuals, meet exact standards for control and visual feedback (both force and timing), etc...
My advice: rent or borrow an actual car. Teach him on backstreets or in empty parking lots. Maybe use a car with a parking brake lever between the front two seats... and keep your hand on it!
Where I live (Denmark), all of that is mandatory (well, apart from driving an AWD vehicle). We spent a whole day on a closed track playing around in wet and dry conditions with and without ABS.
In addition to being educational, it was great fun. And I feel that I really learned something about how drive in slippery conditions and what to do when you lose control.
Eat the rich.
While I nearly spat coke over the monitor laughing, smell does come in handy riding a motorbike: diesel. It's extremely slippery, and damn near invisible without looking at the road. Coming up to a roundabout, and you geta whiff, you know to slow down and go easy...
The game "Driver" might be a good choice. It's got realistic traffic, a damage model that's at least more realistic than most games out there, and a freeform mode that you could put to use for some dry runs before you actually take him out to play in real traffic. You can find it for the PC on most $9.99 racks, it will run on an older machine, and it's been ported to a number of video game platforms as well (YMMV). All this, and it's a fun game, too.
Also, if you don't like the getaway driver/true crime themes of the previous, you might also look for Midtown Madness, which is a racing-themed game with realistic traffic, a freeform mode, and a fairly detailed simulation of downtown Chicago. It might be a bit harder to find, though. Again, a fun game.
It's not going to happen in the US. The insurance industry has a huge influence on auto safety policy, and they don't want advanced/high performance driver training. They really want to dumb us down into sheep. One of the claims I've heard from their safety propaganda is that for example police officers are highly trained in vehicle handling, and their accident rates (off duty) are much higher than average.
The auto makers are happy to oblige by idiotproofing the cars. Powerful RWD like BMWs and Mercedes can be difficult to drive at the limit and in slippery conditions. It also happens BMW and Mercedes have also gone hog wild on electronic driver aids. It started with antilock brakes and traction control. Then came stability control. Yaw sensors combined with braking one corner of the car make it impossible to spin the car no matter how ham fisted you are with the controls. Now BMW has active steering, variable ratio steering based on vehicle speed. Mercedes has cruise control that maintains distance with the car in front and brakes that boost themselves in an emergency stop, the latter because they found novice drivers don't step on the brakes as hard as they could in a panic stop.
Don't get me wrong. A lot of these features are good things, but we are getting to the point where if you build an idiotproof car, the world will build a better idiot.