Rigs of Rods

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Rigs of Rods is a free, open‑source vehicle simulation game that uses soft‑body physics to show how vehicles bend, deform, and crash. Vehicles are built from points called nodes that are connected by beams. When a beam is stressed, it bends and pulls the connected nodes, making the vehicle flex and change shape. Some vehicles deform a lot, while others stay mostly rigid. Crashes can permanently deform a vehicle until you reset it.

The game is a physics sandbox with no fixed goals, but you can create missions and timed events with scripting. Vehicles can have simple skins or more complex static meshes, and a system called Flexbody lets deformable meshes follow a node skeleton. Terrain and maps are created from raw image files, so you can make realistic landscapes from almost any image.

Rigs of Rods started as an off‑road truck simulator and grew to include many vehicle types, including planes and boats. The project uses text files for vehicle configurations. The scripting language moved from Lua to AngelScript in newer versions. Up to 64 players can play together in multiplayer.

The game has earned attention from media and researchers, and its ideas helped inspire BeamNG.drive, which began in 2011 and launched in 2015 as Early Access.

Current development and releases include a stable version in 2022 and a preview in 2025. The game runs on Linux and Windows and is hosted on GitHub.