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: 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:

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.