Skunks

Skunks is an open source, multiplatform and completely free 3D video game implemented in C/SDL and designed from the offset to act as a car driving simulation that features several electric cars, multiple tracks, as well as stunts.

Based on the Open Dynamics Engine

The game’s software rendering is based on the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE). It uses the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) library for displaying the objects in the game, which means that no hardware acceleration is required to provide its 3D realistic driving simulation.

Players will be able to easily modify and create new tracks, as well as new cars, thanks to Skunks’ engineering team. At the moment, Skunks includes 7 electric cars that you can drive on 11 tracks.

Getting started with Skunks

If you’re wondering how to install the Skunks game on your GNU/Linux distribution, we can tell you that it is not that difficult, but first open the Software Center app and see if the isn’t already available on the official software repositories of your operating system.

If you can’t find Skunks there, grab the latest release from either Softoware or the program’s official homepage (see link at the end of the review), save the archive on your Home directory, and extract it using an archive manager utility.

Open the Terminal app, go to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softoware/skunks-4.2.0 - replace ‘softoware’ with your username), install ODE by running the ‘./inst-ode’ command, then run either of the ‘./comp’ or ‘./comp2’ commands (depending on the SDL library you have installed) to compile the game. Run the game by executing the './skunks' command after the compilation process.

Runs on GNU/Linux, BSD and Microsoft Windows

The game has been designed to run on all GNU/Linux distributions, as well as on the Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD operating systems. It has been successfully tested only with 32-bit computer platforms. Besides the standard C library, the game requires SDL 1.2 or SDL 2.

What is new in this release:

• New tracks, new vehicles, improved landscape (trees are more detailed, new scenery elements were added) and vehicles are easier to control.

What is new in version 4.1.0:

• improved lighting
• added aspect correction
• added support for OpenGL
• made houses more detailed and added 2 new types of houses
• improved programs used for generating tracks
• made 5 new tracks

What is new in version 4.0.0:

• made cars more detailed
• added 2 vehicles with trailers, including a large truck
• improved some of the tracks
• added camera that follows the car from behind but doesn't bob up and down with the car
• made rendering faster again
• added the option to use double sized pixels, useful for running the game in a window, on a slow computer (like a Pentium 2 at 400 MHz, for example)

What is new in version 3.0.0:

• added replay
• improved sound
• added some track elements (corkscrews and steeper slopes)
• added 3 more tracks
• made rendering faster

What is new in version 2.0.0:

• added support for joystick / steering wheel
• made road 40 cm wider and modified landscape
• improved handling
• made some new tracks

Requirements:

• SDL