TORCS Project History
---------------------

TORCS started 1997 and was called RCS (Racing Car Simulator). In the beginning
it was a 2D simulator. Later Eric and Christophe bought a 3DFX graphics card and
created a 3D version with OpenGL. The RARS project was very important at this
time as reference. This version was called ORCS (Open Racing Car Simulator)
because RCS was already known in the Unix world (Revision Control System).

In the first versions the cars did not have engines and just rolled downhill
(soap box derby simulator), there where as well no textures on the cars at this
time.

As next step the cars got engines, engine sound and were able to drive on flat
and elevated tracks. Another name change happend at this time, ORCS was
not related enough to cars, so the new name become TORCS (from torque??).

Christophe made the first camera following the cars from the side of the track,
and it was very nice how the cars were coming out of the haze (the haze
was very near for a good frame rate).

Another important event was when Eric found out that the forces were not
computed in the correct frame of reference (car local instead of global) and was
able to resolve a related car steering problem (steering back at the end of the
turns was necessary).

Later Christophe added multitexturing, this was a big step. Generally he created
a lot of the original graphic code, and Eric converted it into the final
"product".
