Quote: "What this is really all about is a "Real" driving simulation, similar to the likes of Forza Motorsport, or Gran Turismo.
"
Quite, you should not listen to MY preferences its whatever makes YOU tick as you'll need that reservoir of enthusiasm for what you're trying to achieve when the going gets tough. It certainly sounds like you have a well conceived goal and I hope you manage to get there.
With that in mind, I think you're very brave to be even considering implementing the physics yourself! In contrast to what I said above, the danger there is that you'll get bogged down and spend 3 years "Going back to the drawing board" to try build your physics engine.
Quote: "It seems not alot of people have "built" a proper driving simulation yet (going only by whats on this board - apart from Dark GT), "
This is generally true. Off the top of my head I would mention The Dark Coder, the guy doing "Dark Moon", the chaps who did Alien Racer, Barzoule and ... not forgetting that chap doing the ChaseHQ game. I think the latter 3 based their work on an early version of Nuclear Glory Collision and TDC did all his himself based on the "Marco Monster" tutorials, although I believe he was using only a DB matrix as "Ground".
And then there was Dark GT of course. I seem to remember that the handling was not "all that", it was more a case of the fact that he'd painstakingly modelled GT tracks (impressive!) and had full on X model sliding collision (impressive!), which had never been done in DB (classic back then) before.
But this was all way back when. Things have changed.
You seem to be off to a great start and have the attitude required to actually complete your game. And that would be a *VERY, VERY* rare thing indeed In fact you could probably count on one hand the number of driving/racing games actually completed in DarkBASIC Classic or Pro!