Rigs of Rods: a soft body physics sandbox built on community made vehicles

A physics sandbox that has been running since 2005

Rigs of Rods, also known as RoR, is described as an open source physics sandbox simulation game that can simulate the motion and deformation of vehicles in real time, and the README says it was originally started in 2005 and has grown into a flexible and powerful simulation sandbox supporting a wide range of vehicles, physical objects and environments. The word soft body in the repository description is the crux of it. A conventional racing game gives you a vehicle with a suspension model and a set of handling parameters, and the deformation is a visual effect, while here the frame twists, the chassis bends and the cargo shifts, and the outcome of a landing is a consequence of the simulation rather than a scripted animation. That is why the project has survived two decades in a niche, because the community that comes for the physics stays for the content, and the content is made by the community.

Vehicles of all kinds, and control setups to match

The feature list starts with range, and it is genuinely wide. There are cars, trucks, trains, boats, airplanes, helicopters and heavy machinery, which is a list that spans several distinct vehicle dynamics problems, since a boat and a helicopter do not share a suspension model. The gameplay is described as intuitive, with the specifics spelled out, that you walk around, enter and exit vehicles, and can spawn multiple vehicles at once, which matters in a sandbox where the interesting question is what happens when you put a crane next to a truck. The control story is equally varied, ranging from arcade style keyboard driving to full gamepad, wheel and pedal setups, and the fact that a wheel and pedal rig is a supported input rather than a hack tells you what the simulation expects from the player. The community support features are built into the game rather than bolted on, with a built-in browser for mods, vehicle part swapping and scripting through AngelScript, which is a C-like language embedded in the game for defining behaviour.

The content model, and why the licence splits in two

The section on community mods is the part every potential user should read, because it explains what you are actually installing. By default the game includes only a small selection of built-in content, and most vehicles, terrains and other additions are user generated mods available through the official Rigs of Rods repository. The README is explicit that these community created assets are separate from the core project and are not covered under the project's licence, being contributed and licensed by their individual creators, and that as a result they will never be included with the game by default. Since version 2022.04 resources can also be installed from within the game itself, with a guide to installing mods in the documentation. For people who want to make their own, the documentation is said to provide step-by-step guidance, and the community is described as active and welcoming through the forums and the Discord server. The practical consequence is that the game you install and the vehicles you drive have two different licences, and only one of them is the GPL.

Multiplayer through dedicated servers and an in-game browser

Multiplayer support is listed as dedicated servers and an in-game server browser, and the split is worth understanding. A dedicated server is a machine that runs the simulation for other people to join, which for a physics sandbox is a meaningful hosting decision, because the physics is the load and a server has to keep the same simulation for every connected client. The in-game server browser is the discovery half, letting a player find those servers from inside the game rather than from a web page or a Discord message, which for a project whose community is spread across time zones and countries is the piece that makes the multiplayer actually usable. The rest of the project surface follows from that community shape. There are community forums, a documentation site, a developer portal, and a Discord server, with the forums carrying the announcements and the resources repository, and the project describes itself as a community of creators, players and developers who share a passion for physics simulation.

Building it, and the dependency handling behind the scenes

Getting the game is a download from the project website, and the README is careful to separate that from the source route, telling you to read the official compilation guide for every supported platform and pointing at the guide to building Rigs of Rods in the wiki for Windows and Linux. The repository shows what a build of this kind involves. There is a `CMakeLists.txt` at the root, a `cmake/` directory, a `conanfile.py` for C++ dependency management, a `BUILDING.md` with the build notes, a `DEPENDENCIES.md` that records the licences of the libraries used, an `external/` directory with a `.gitmodules` file for the vendored third party code, and a `tools/` directory. There is also a `snapcraft.yaml` for a Snap package and a `renovate.json` for dependency updates, which together suggest the project automates the boring half of maintaining a large C++ tree. The continuous integration badge is for a workflow named Build game, so the game itself is compiled on every push rather than only the library parts, and a Coverity scan badge points at a static analysis project for the same code.

From GPLv2 to GPLv3, and who holds the copyright

The licence section is a history rather than a notice, and it is worth reading in that form. The project went open source under GPLv2 or later on the 8th of February 2009, and it is now licensed under GPLv3 or later, with the full GPLv3 text quoted in the README and the file itself linked. The copyright lines record the passage of the project through its contributors, with Pierre-Michel Ricordel for 2005 to 2013, Thomas Fischer for 2007 to 2013, and Petr Ohlidal and the Rigs of Rods contributors for 2009 to 2025. The standard disclaimer is included, that the software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful but without any warranty, and the README separates the licence of the libraries it uses into the `DEPENDENCIES.md` file, which is the right thing to do for a project that vendors a lot of third party physics and rendering code. The mix of a strong copyleft core with separately licensed community assets is a deliberate structure, and it is the same split that the mod section describes.

Release rhythm, tooling and the shape of the project

The tagged releases are dated rather than numbered, with 2022.04 in April 2022, 2022.12 from January 2023 and 2026.01 from 4 January 2026, and the last push was on 2026-10-15, so the project is actively worked on even though the release tags are infrequent. The tooling badges tell the rest of the story, with a Weblate widget for translations, which matters for a game with a community that spans languages, a Coverity scan status badge, and a build workflow for the game. The repository root is a proper game project layout, with `source/` for the engine, `resources/` for the shipped content, a separate `content/` directory, `languages/` for localisation, `meta/` for the project metadata, `doc/` for the documentation images and guides, and the usual governance files, an `AUTHORS.md` for involved authors, a code of conduct and a contribution guide. DigitalOcean is listed as a sponsor. For a two-decade-old open source game, the combination of a maintained engine, a translation workflow and a documented build is the story, and the mods are the payload.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Rigs of Rods if you want a vehicle simulator that models springs and deformation rather than arcade handling, and if you are prepared to source your vehicles from the community repository rather than expecting a bundled library. Do not adopt it expecting a modern game with a curated vehicle roster, since the shipped content is deliberately small and everything else is a mod with its own licence and its own maintenance. Before you install, read the licensing section, because the core game is GPLv3 or later while the community assets are not covered by that licence and carry the terms of their individual creators, and check the build instructions for your platform, since compilation is a documented manual step rather than a one-click installer. The project is GPL-3.0, the newest release is 2026.01 from 2026-01-04, and the last push was on 2026-10-15.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: GPL-3.0
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. RigsOfRods/rigs-of-rods on GitHub