TriangleDigger

TriangleDigger is a unique application that simulates a crawler excavator and its basic activities. It can simulate not only the driving of the vehicle, but also operations like digging and dumping soil.

It uses realistic physical models of both the excavator and the terrain. Unfortunately only one excavator model is available. Anyway, the realistic 3D graphics manage to compensate and provide a very accurate simulation.

The realism of this simulator is quite impressive. TriangleDigger takes into account every little aspect when it renders the simulation, including elements like rigid body dynamics, collision detection and response, resting contact using impulse methods, moment of inertia, and many others.

A very important advantage of this simulator is the fact that it also allows controlling the steering device via USB peripherals (joysticks, steering wheels, etc.) instead of the default keyboard, hence enhancing a lot the complexity and the realism of the simulation.

Since the visualization is generated using OpenGL, this simulator should run smoothly and errorless on most modern systems. Unfortunately it doesn’t come with a typical interface that would allow changing any settings, for example. There is no way of tweaking the default keys and the only available settings are toggling the full screen / windowed mode and the graphic quality (the resolution).

To sum it all up, TriangleDigger is an interesting excavator simulator offered for free and packed with plenty of attractive advantages.