Using the Ultimate Stunts program
When the ultimatestunts program is started, music playback starts, and a
menu interface appears. You can start playing immediately, or first change
some things, like cars/players and the track.
Playing
When you choose to start playing, the data files are loaded. Depending on
your hardware, this might take some time. When all data is loaded, the game
starts. The controls of the game (keys, joystick etc.) can be set in the
ultimatestunts.conf file. This is the default for one player:
- Arrow keys: accelerate, brake and steer
- right shift/right ctrl: Gear up/down, including the reverse gear
- Esc: exit the game
- right alt: change camera mode
- /: change camera target car
- F1: play the next song in the playlist
After exiting the game, crashing or finishing, the hiscore of the track
is displayed, and you can optionally choose to view or save a replay of this
race. If you have reached the first place for this track, then the replay is
automatically saved with the same name as the track.
Other functions
Selecting a track
If you want to play on another track, then you can select a track with that
option in the main menu.
Selecting players and cars
You can select the players, and the cars they drive, in the Player selection
menu, which can be accessed from the main menu:

You can either add a player, or change an existing player in the list. Changing
the player's settings or deleting the player is done in the individual player
menu, which can be accessed by selecting a player in the player selection menu:

Split screen multiplaying (up to four players) is possible by adding multiple
human players to the list.
Viewing a replay
You can select this function from the main menu, and select a replay file
to view it.
Changing the settings
In the settings menus, which can be accessed from the main menu, you can change
a large number of settings. The settings are divided into sections, like
graphics and sound, and in each section, you can set a number of variables.
When a variable is changed, the change is applied immediately. Sometimes,
the result of this can be noticed immediately, for instance, when setting
the language, or when changing the music volume. When you have changed some
setting(s), and leave the settings menus, Ultimate Stunts asks you whether
you want to save the settings. If you choose to save them, Ultimate Stunts
writes the settings to a text file with the name "ultimatestunts.conf", and
the next time you start Ultimate Stunts (or one of the other Ultimate Stunts
programs), these settings will be loaded. If you choose not to save the
settings, the settings are still applied to the current Ultimate Stunts
session, but they won't be reloaded the next time. You can still save them
later by entering the settings menus and leaving them again. Ultimate Stunts
will detect again that some settings are changed, and will ask you again to
save the settings.
Multiplaying over a network
Ultimate Stunts uses a client-server model for network multiplaying. This means
that an Ultimate Stunts gameserver program needs to be started somewhere, so
that different computers can login to it. You can start the ustuntsserver
program manually, and control it with the console interface, but you can also
let it start automatically from the game menus. We will only consider this last
option here: the server program is documented elsewhere.
For a networked multiplaying game, the game type needs to be changed, as its
default setting is "local game". This is the game type menu:
The host player
First of all, one of the players (preferrably the one with the fastest computer
and network connection) starts a new network game. After some questions are
answered by the user, a server process is started automatically. Ultimate Stunts
asks for the following things before a server can be started:
- The port number. In most cases, the default should work.
Sometimes a different port number needs to be chosen, e.g. to
work around firewall rules. If you are looking for free port
numbers on your machine, then you should look for UDP port
numbers, as Ultimate Stunts uses UDP instead of TCP. On some
systems, it is not possible to use port numbers lower than
1024. All clients should login using the same port number as in
the server settings.
- A name for the server. The name is used so that other
players can select the right server if more than one Ultimate
Stunts server runs on the network, e.g. on a LAN-party.
- The minimum number of players. The game will not start
until this minimum number of players is reached.
All other players
Then, all other players need to join the game that has been created. After
selecting the port number, Ultimate Stunts searches for servers on the local
network. This will take several seconds. If no server is found, then you can
try to select the server manually by entering the hostname or IP-number of the
server. This may be necessary if the server is somewhere far away on the
internet, or even when the server is in another subnet.
If one server is found, Ultimate Stunts automatically connects to that server.
If more than one server is found, then the user can select one from a menu.