Panthera Free

Cosmo° · Mar 31, 2016

The folks at Cruden recently announced Panthera Free on their website, to be released following the Automotive Testing Expo in Stuttgart (May 31 to June 2). You can find the official info here:

http://www.cruden.com/Cruden-Panthera-free-simulator-software.html

Due to a lack of communication from Ruud' side, I'm not sure what this means for Racer and the future of our content creation processes. Some of us have repeatedly tried to get in touch with them over the last year or so, without hearing back. When I visited the Expo last year, I briefly talked with Edwin de Vries (Senior Modelling & Simulation Engineer at Cruden) about where Racer was heading at the time and he had hinted at the possibility of a "re-branding" of Racer towards the Panthera brand. It seems this is now taking place.

Interpreting the press release, it looks like the physics engine might change from what we're currently using in free Racer. It's not clear to me whether what they refer to as CSVM Lite is the familiar platform or something different for us to work with.

I'm not sure yet if I can make it to the Expo this year, in order to talk to people at the Cruden booth in person. In any case, it would be really helpful to finally get some line of communication going with them again.

radome · Sep 3, 2018

<Smacking forehead with palm>Must. Upgrade. My. Linux.

Mr Whippy · Jan 20, 2020

Has anyone tried the latest Panthera Free version?

I might download it and give it a try again.

It's obviously still horribly set up out of the box, but we can hope issues have been resolved.

I'd been scratching my head a lot over trying to get the graphics working properly (a core issue for me)

I figured out that Panthera Free was offered only with GLSL, and since GLSL was beta, half the CG>GLSL shader conversions were not ideal, so things could look wrong.
Also features like old cube maps and stuff were not working which kinda made Panthera Free very hard to do any quality graphical work with... it was essentially a beta graphics system, vs the old but very refined CG one.

Funnily, Panthera Pro still uses CG.

So it's like the Pro version gets you the old graphics engine. Free gets you the new one that doesn't work very well haha. Is there a face palm smiley?