# How to use Ultimate Stunts

Grey sections can be skipped if there is no problem related to that section. If you are having problems, please read the grey sections.

### Which packages?

To use UltimateStunts, you will need both the program files and the data files. If you already have an older version of Ultimate Stunts, and you don't have much bandwidth, then it can be useful to select manually what you want to download, but in other cases it is easier to download a package that contains everything. There are three kinds of packages:

- i386 Linux binaries
- windows binaries
- Source code

"Binaries" are computer programs in a directly executable form, so that is what you want if you can not compile the source code on your system (most windows users can't, because they don't have a C++ compiler). On the other hand, if you want optimal performance in Linux, or if you use an unsupported system (like OS X, or Linux on a PPC), then you need the source code.

There exists a data- and a nodata-flavor of every kind of package. As said before, you'll usually want the data-package. The windows binary + data package is an installation setup program.

### Compilation

If you want to use the source code, you need to compile it. This is described in the Compilation manual.

### Location of the configuration file

You can skip this section if you use Ultimate Stunts in a "standard" way, e.g. with the windows binary installation program. This section is just added to provide you information in cases when you experience problems in starting Ultimate Stunts.

When ultimatestunts is started, it searches for a configuration file called "ultimatestunts.conf". Depending on the compilation settings, there are several locations where Ultimate Stunts tries to find this file. There is always one main location, and if ultimatestunts.conf is not found there, it is copied to that location from one of the other locations.

The main location for ultimatestunts.conf is ~/.ultimatestunts on UNIX-style systems, and "." on windows systems (. is the directory from where Ultimate Stunts is started). If Ultimate Stunts is started from the source directory, then the main location is also ".".

The other locations where ultimatestunts.conf is searched, are (in this order):

    <prefix>/etc  (<prefix> is /usr/share/local by default)
    /etc
    /usr/local/etc
    .

### Starting a game

If you want to play Ultimate Stunts, then you need to start the "ustunts" program (windows users can use the Ultimate Stunts item in the start menu). The other programs can be useful sometimes, and they are documented separately, but ustunts is the main game program. You can find documentation on how to play Ultimate Stunts here.

### Configuring Ultimate Stunts

The behavior and performance of Ultimate Stunts can be configured extensively. Ultimate Stunts loads and stores its settings in a file with the name "ultimatestunts.conf". These settings can be edited in the settings menus in the game, but they can also be changed manually because ultimatestunts.conf is a simple text file (.ini-style syntax). It can be very useful to modify the settings, e.g. if the default values require too much of your computer, and you want to improve the frame rate.

All options are documented in the configuration file. For windows users who wish to edit ultimatestunts.conf manually, I reccomend to use Wordpad instead of Notepad, as Notepad does not support UNIX-style text files.

Two interesting options are datadir and savedir in the [files] section. Both directories are used as locations where data files are searched, but data files are only saved in savedir. This means that datadir can be read-only for the user, but savedir always needs to be writable. If a file is loaded, it is first searched in savedir, and then in datadir. This means that default data files that are in datadir, can be replaced by placing another file with the same name in savedir.

Windows users should be aware that windows-style directory names could give problems here. In case of problems, use locations with no spaces in the path, use slashes (/) instead of backslashes (\), and write "/cygdrive/c/" instead of "C:\" in absolute paths.