Irving is my father in law, he's a gentle man who likes to take people on an E-ticket ride in his dunebuggy at a location known as Dumont dunes, and scare them half to death. Dumont is a piece of dessert located just outside Death Valley in California. There are dunes there over 300' tall and you can go driving around in dunebuggies, threewheelers, quads, motorcycles and whatever else you want. It's total motor mayhem and a lot of fun.
Irving himself
I decided to create a virtual simulation of the place for thoose long days when you're stuck at home but wish you could really be out in the dessert and roar around in the dunes.
I created the simulation in C++ using using a combination of an open source 3D engine called Ogre3D and a physics engine called ODE. Ogre is a very capable and well designed 3D
engine developed under LGPL (Lesser Gnu Public License) by some very competent programmers. I highly reccommend it.
The terrain was created from DEM files of the actual area so the dunes are quite recognizable to anyone who has ever been there. The skybox is rendered in terragen and is also created from DEM files of the actual area, thank god (or the taxpayers) for USGS.
A download will be made available when I'm satisfied with the simulation.
