# Using the Ultimate Stunts version 0.6.x 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 multple 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.

# 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.