---
title: "Vehicle Prototyping - s&box game"
description: "A free, forkable driving-game baseline for s&box — a tuned car physics stack, a proving-ground track, and a playtest"
canonical: "https://sbox.watch/games/fieldguide/vehicle_prototyping/"
generated_at: "2026-07-19T09:34:32.320Z"
---

# Vehicle Prototyping

A free, forkable driving-game baseline for s&box — a tuned car physics stack, a proving-ground track, and a playtest

- Type: game
- Ident: fieldguide.vehicle_prototyping
- Creator: sbox Field Guide
- Canonical: https://sbox.watch/games/fieldguide/vehicle_prototyping/
- Markdown: https://sbox.watch/games/fieldguide/vehicle_prototyping.md
- sbox.game: https://sbox.game/fieldguide/vehicle_prototyping/
- Generated: 2026-07-19T09:34:32.320Z

## Stats

- Playing now: 0
- 24h player peak: 2
- 24h momentum: +2
- Terry score: 53%
- Favorites: 5
- Upvotes: 3
- Downvotes: 0
- Total players: 38
- Total sessions: 57
- Cumulative playtime: 13 hours
- Updated: Jul 19, 2026
- Created: Jul 17, 2026
- Size: 4.8 MB
- Files: 381
- Tags: car, developertools, driving, physics, prototype, racing, sandbox, simulation

## Description

Vehicle Prototyping
A free starting point for building driving games in s&box.

Vehicle Prototyping is a clonable baseline — part of the s&box Field Kit family of prototyping tools. Press Play and you're driving a tuned car on an instrumented test track in seconds. Open the hood and you have a complete, honest, MIT-licensed vehicle stack ready to fork into your own game. It's a developer starting point, not a finished game — and it's meant to be taken apart.

Drive it first. Four cars, four feels — a front-drive hatch, a rear-drive coupe, a light twitchy kart, and a heavier pickup — each tuned toward its own class and drivable straight out of the box. Swap cars, switch worlds, and pull up a live tuning panel to feel the physics change under your hands.

Then look under it:
- A tuned slip-curve physics stack — raycast-wheel suspension along the contact normal, a slip-ratio / slip-angle tire model with peaked curves, a friction ellipse and load sensitivity, 4× substepping (200 Hz effective on a 50 Hz tick), a drivetrain with a torque curve and auto-shifting, and ABS / traction / stability assists at three levels — Casual, Sport, and Sim. All in SI units, converted only at the engine boundary.
- A proving-ground world — an instrumented test track with a skidpad, drag strip, brake zone, slalom, ramps, a banked curve, washboard, hill grades, and a J-turn pad, plus a looser playground world with roads, ramps, and a banked bowl. Switch worlds live, and flip between flat and curvy terrain on the fly.
- A data-driven playtest harness — a Python runner drives the live editor through a battery of scripted maneuvers, measures the telemetry, and prints pass/fail against per-class metric bands, so "feels right" becomes a number you can check.
- A multi-part vehicle pipeline — a Blender generator authors each car from separate parts (chassis, wheels, doors, bumpers) with joints at their pivots, so wheels actually compress and steer from the simulation — the foundation for parts interaction and, later, damage.

Tune and keep it. Live dials for the whole physics model, save/load named tune presets per car, auto or sequential manual shifting, a full telemetry overlay, keyboard and gamepad support — the working surface a driving project needs on day one.

Honest about its edges. This is a prototyping toolkit, so it ships with its ledger in the open: the physics, the four cars, the proving grounds, and the harness are all live and working, and the handful of maneuver-band edge cases are documented in the repo's feature matrix rather than swept under the rug. What you see is what's really there.

Out of scope, on purpose: full soft-body (node-beam) simulation, traffic AI, and open-world streaming aren't goals of this baseline — it stays lean and focused on the driving core so it's easy to fork.

MIT licensed — clone it, fork it, ship it. Grab the repo, open it in the editor, and start from a driving stack that already feels good instead of a blank scene.
Controls

Drive
- W / S — throttle / brake (reverse)
- A / D — steer
- Space — handbrake
- R — reset / unflip the car
- Mouse — orbit the camera · wheel to zoom

Transmission
- G — toggle auto / manual gearbox
- E / Q — shift up / down (manual mode)

Cars, worlds & panels
- Tab — session menu (change car · respawn)
- \[ and \] — cycle to previous / next car
- M — world & terrain panel (switch world, flat / curvy terrain)
- T — live tuning dials
- L — telemetry overlay
- H — hide / show the HUD
- I — controls / help overlay

Gamepad
- Left stick steers
- RT / LT throttle & brake
- A handbrake
- R1 / L1 shift up / down
- D-pad up gearbox mode
- X reset

Suggestions, bugs, feedback?
Join our Discord to let me know all your thoughts!



## More by sbox Field Guide

| Package | Ident | Players | Favorites | Upvotes | Score | Markdown |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| World Builder | fieldguide.world_builder | 0 | 4 | 3 | 53% | https://sbox.watch/games/fieldguide/world_builder.md |