Speed Dreams

   Speed Dreams is an Open Source motorsport simulation (sim) and it is freely available. Speed-Dreams is brought to you by an international team of developers and artists, who aim to bring the very best of Open Source racing to your PC. Speed-Dreams simulates a wide range of cars from high-tech Open Wheelers and Super Cars, to 1930's 'monsters'. It includes Grand Prix tracks located around the world, as well as Ovals and Road courses.  Am personally a really big fan of rally racing games and am glad to see rally cars and tracks in this game.



Speed-Dreams is available for Windows and Linux, and available for free download from
http://www.speed-dreams.org

    Speed Dreams is a fork of the famous open racing car simulator Torcs, aiming to implement exciting new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents to make a more enjoyable game for the player, as well as constantly improving visual and physics realism.

In other words, Speed Dreams is the place:

• where developers can try their ideas and have every chance to get them released to the end-users (democracy is the main principle ruling the dev team),
• where end-users can enjoy the completion of these ideas and give their opinion about it, and/or make new suggestions.

So, if you find your or some people's Torcs patch proposals don't integrate the official release as quickly as you would have loved, you have reached the right place!

Anyone can join the development team, contributions to Speed Dreams may take place in many domains:

• The core code itself, and its numerous subjects : user interface, physics engine, 3D graphics engine, race management, input device related code, file formats, ... to enhance, optimize, make more up-to-date, fix bugs, port to another platform ...
• the robot(s) code (AI racing)
• the cars design or tuning
• the tracks design
• the documentation

Current features of Speed-Dreams as of 2.0 beta:

• 38 tracks
• 16 tracks with full scenery and terrain
• 28 cars
• Animated drivers with some cars
• 10 camera modes
• Close to realistic physics
• Experimental full 3D physics engine (user selectable)
• Supported input devices: Keyboard, Wheel, Joystick, Mouse, Gamepad
• Customizable controls
• Automatic shifting, ABS, ASR
• 2 completely different AI opponent sets, Simplix and USR

MyPaint

    A friend has a laptop that is like a tablet, the screen rotates around and sits on the keyboard. There is pencil like pointing device that is pressure sensitive. First thing that came to mind was PAINTING, and there's an Open Source tool for that. Surprised?

    MyPaint is a fast and easy open-source graphics application for digital painters. It lets you focus on the art instead of the program. You work on your canvas with minimum distractions, bringing up the interface only when you need it. MyPaint runs on GNU/Linux as well as Windows

    Instead of explaining all the cool features and power of MyPaint lets just look at some screenshots and finished paintings.

This is a screenshot of MyPaint running in Ubuntu 11

This screenshot is taken in an older version of Linux

Screenshot of adjusting some brush settings in MyPaint

Another screenshot taken in Linux

Instead of listing the technical aspects of MyPaint let's look at some finished paintings. These are found at deviantart http://mypaint.deviantart.com/gallery/.

    For Windows users MyPaint is available at MyPaint, there are also extra brushes and a gimp plugin for download. There is a tutorial for people who've never used MyPaint, Basic Usage Tutorial. After going through the basic usage tutorial check out the wiki to learn more advanced tricks MyPaint Wiki.

    See MyPaint in action with a timelapse. This was posted in 2009.

Kristen Stewart, portrait in MyPaint approximately 1 hour into lees than 10 min