The cross-platform free open source motor-sport simulator, Speed Dreams, released new 2.4.1 version a few days ago.

Speed Dreams is a fork of the famous Open Racing Car Simulator TORCS, and it features high-quality 3D graphics and an accurate physics engine. The last 2.4.0 release introduced a in-game download manager, allowing to easily fetch new cars and tracks from a configurable repositories.

The new 2.4.1 version enhanced the feature. It redesigned the page allowing to show up-to 8 entries per page, and increased the assets database size limit from 32KiB to 10MiB. And, now there are 83 more cars and 67 more tracks available to download in game.

It also improved Linux AppImage support. The CI/CD has been improved to generate AppImage for each pull request and merge to the main branch, allowing Linux users easily to try out the latest improvements and fixes.

The game engine has also been improved to detect wall collisions so that invalid laps are now sent to the master server. And, the master server now shows valid and invalid laps accordingly, which is important for the weekly championship events held recently.

Other change in the new release of this car racing simulator include:

• Removed all simulation engines other than simuv5 (i.e., v3, v4) to improve maintainability.
• Removed multi-threading and thread affinity support.
• Use any joystick button to start racing.
• Fix crash exporting a track from Windows with sd2-trackgen
• Many other bug-fixes.

How to Install Speed Dreams 2.4.1

The game packages for Linux, Windows, macOS, as well as the source tarball are available to download at its website via the link below:

For Linux users, select download either AppImage (amd64 for Intel/AMD, or aarch64 for RasPi etc). Add executable permission from file properties dialog, then run it to launch the game.

NOTE: Ubuntu since 22.04 does NOT support AppImage out-of-the-box. You need to open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to install libfuse library first:

sudo apt install libfuse2

For choice, Speed Dreams 2.4.1 can also be installed as Flatpak package, which runs in sandbox environment. And, Ubuntu users may run the 2 commands one by one to install the package:

• First, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to enable Flatpak support:

  sudo apt install flatpak

• Then, install the game as Flatpak package:

  flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.speed_dreams.SpeedDreams.flatpakref

  For updates, run flatpak update org.speed_dreams.SpeedDreams to check.

NOTE: If this is the first time you install flatpak, then you need a log out and back in to make app icon visible.

Tips: For those who are new to this game, and don’t even know how to start a race. First, choose a racing mode (e.g., Practice, Quick Race), add/configure players, then in “Configure” add your player/players into competitions list, finally start. And, to switch camera position, use F2 ~ F9 keyboard shortcuts.

Uninstall Speed Dreams

For the AppImage, just delete it using your file manager.

To uninstall the Flatpak package, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.speed_dreams.SpeedDreams

And, you may also run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless run-times that were installed along with the motor-sport simulator.