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[Irrgheist]

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* Frequently Asked Questions
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Q: What are the minimum requirements for H-Craft Championship?
A: We recommend to check out the demo. That is the best way to find out if it will run on your computer.
But it should be roughly the following configuration:
1 Ghz Processor
512 MB Memory
A 3D-Card with the power of a Geforce3 or Radeon 7500 (or better)
OpenGL 1.3
Windows 98, MP, XP, 2000, Vista or GNU/Linux (32 Bit)
150 MB free space on harddisk

Q: Help, I keep falling off the track!
A: Just give it a few more minutes. Although it may look like a typical
Arcade racer, the game`s controls lean towards a simulation. It might take a few laps until you find out when to
reduce speed and when to accelerate properly. Once you got the trick it will feel like second nature.
Also see: H-Craft Driving School

Q: How can I play my own music?
A: The music has to be in the ogg format. If you have your songs in another format you can often convert it to ogg for example
with audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net).
The game will play songs randomly from the subfolders
media/sounds/music_menu and media/sounds/music_level. Menu music will play while you're in a menu and
level music will play while the race is running.

Q: Can I try any gamemodes other than the championship on the Demo?
A: Yes, beating the 3 events on the championship unlocks the track "White Camel" for all gamemodes.

Q: I just got the full version of the game. Why can`t I select a track on the Arcade mode?
A: Playing the championship unlocks tracks for the other gamemodes.

Q: How do I find out how fast my framerate is?
A: You can enable a FPS display by pressing F11.

Q: The game has a low framerate. How can I make it faster?
A: The easiest way to improve the framerate is to lower the screen resolution in Options - Graphics Setup.
Do also check the other graphic options, especially disabling Antialiasing will improve the framerate on some cards very much.
Do check if you have anything running in the background. For example p2p services like eDonkey can use a lot of computing power
and should be paused while playing games.

Q: The framerate seems to be very jumpy, it was switching between 60, 30 and 15 fps. What can I do?
A: This is caused by the vsync mode. One thing you can try is to enable "triple buffering" for OpenGL in
your graphiccard settings. Another way is to disable vsync in the graphic options

Q: The upper half of the screen seems to move faster than the lower half. What can I do?
A: Enable vsync in the graphic options.

Q: I do never get more than 60 FPS in the game. It should be faster!
A: We did fix the game to 60 FPS as many people prefer a steady framerate to a high but erratic framerate.
If you want to change that, please check the section about "config settings in media/config.xml"

Q: The colors look all wrong.
A: On ATI cards try setting "Use custom settings" in the control center.
We have no experience yet with that problem on NVidia.

Q: How can I control the menus with a joypad/joystick?
A: You can use the digital joypad or joystick buttons (unfortunately not the sticks) for "steer left", "steer right", "accelerate" and "brake".
in options - controller setup. This allows you to emulate cursor controls in the menu. The joystickbutton used for "pause"
will act like the "enter" key.

Q: The game runs extremely slow in linux. What's wrong?
A: Check if your graphiccard driver is accelerating 3d graphics. You can do so by typing the following into a console:
glxinfo | grep "direct rendering"
This should show the following text:
direct rendering: Yes
If direct rendering is set to 'No' you will have to install a graphiccard driver which supports 3D-rendering.
For most linux distributions you can find information about how to do that on the website of your distribution vendor.
NVidia and ATI do also offer drivers for linux on their websites.

Q: I have big blue triangles all over the screen in Linux.
A: Mostly the same problem as the last question above. You graphic card is not using accelerated 3D drivers.

Q: How to I install/start the game on Linux?
A: Check here: http://www.irrgheist.com//phpForumBB2/viewtopic.php?t=221

Q: The game crashes randomly when starting it on Linux.
A: Check here: http://www.irrgheist.com//phpForumBB2/viewtopic.php?t=220

Q: It just crashes. Can you help me?
A: Maybe. But we will need some more detailed information. If you can reproduce the crash it can help us a lot if you
do produce some logging information for us. Enable logging by starting the game with:
hcraft -logfile=0
After the crash there will be a file called logfile.txt in the hcraft folder. Please do send us this file and we will
try to find a solution.
Also every additional information you have will help us.
- When did it crash (for example: at start, while loading a level, in a certain menu)
- Did you do anything special (like: i used alt+tab before, i pulled the plug of my PC)
- What is your hardware configuration (amount of RAM, processor, operating system, graphiccard)

Q: Is the game still developed? Will there be another patch?
A: We hope so. Right now development is unfortunately rather slow because the pressures of life made us work on other projects.

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* config settings in media/config.xml
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A lot of additional settings can be done in the file media/config.xml, but please notice that changes to the config are done on your own risk. And even more important: PLEASE DO BACKUP THIS FILE BEFORE DOING ANY CHANGES!

The file can be modified with a simple texteditor like notepad.
We recommend only to change the settings documented here.

fullscreen
default: fullscreen="0"
can be: "0" to disable fullscreenmode (windowed)
"1" to enable fullscreenmode
If the game does not start at all it might be worth trying to start the game windowed. Otherwise this is not recommended
as it will slow down the game.

automatic screen resolution
default: use_screen_res="1"
can be: "0" if you don't want that the game does start with the same resolution as your desktop. It will use values in res_x and res_y instead.
"1" to use your desktop resolution in the game
This setting can also be made within the game in options - graphic settings.
Selecting "Auto" there will set use_screen_res to "1".
This settings is therefore only of interest if the game does not start up anymore.

screen resolution and bitdepth
default: res_x="1024" res_y="768" bitdepth="32"
can be: any values which are supported by your graphiccard and monitor
This setting can also be made within the game in options - graphic settings.
This settings is therefore only of interest if the game does not start up anymore.
On problems it might be helpful starting with low resolutions like: res_x="640" res_y="480"
Some cards might also have trouble with a bitdepth of 32 bits and the following could work: bitdepth="16"

Minimum time per frame (maximal framerate)
default: min_time="16"
can be: "0" or any bigger integer value
The calculation for FPS is 1000/min_time.
A fixed framerate allows for smoother gameplay in most cases.
Please take note that the framerate can additionally be restricted by vsync settings (see below).
There are usually two reason why you would like to change that:
a) You have a really fast 3D-Card and you don't want to be restricted to 62 FPS.
In this case just use a lower number here. We recommend using at least "1" to avoid erratic framerate changes.
b) You don't reach 62 FPS and you have an erratic framerate.
If you use higher numbers here it will slow down the maximum framerate but your playing can still be smoother as a result.
We don't recommend higher settings than "40".
Also you should try playing with a lower resolution or with less effects before changing this value here.

VSync settings and frequency
default: vsync="1" freq="0"
This vsync setting can also be made within the game in options - graphic settings

Texture filtering
default: bi="1" tri="0" ani="0"
can be: "0" to disable a filter and "1" to enable it.
On problems you can try disabling all filters by setting them to "0".
This setting can also be made within the game in options - graphic settings.

Gouraud shading
default: gouraud="1"
FPS could maybe be improved on some cards by disabling that by setting the value to "0"

Particles
default: particles="0"
This setting can be changed within the game in options - graphic settings.
"0" for particles on, "1" for weather effects off, "2" for all effects off.
Disabling effects can improve the FPS

Shadows
shadow="1"
Hover shadows can be disabled by setting this value to "0".
But it usually won't improve FPS, so we don't recommend changing this value.

Antialiasing
default: aa="0"
This setting can also be made within the game in options - graphic settings.
AntiAliasing can be enabled by setting the value to "1".
It will look better, but might slow down the game on some cards seriously.

Mipmapping
default: mip="1"
Mipmapping can be disabled by setting the value to "0".
There might be some graphiccards where mipmapping is broken.
So far we know about problems with the "Intel 945gm express" chipset.
This will look not so nice and it will slow down the game, so it's not recommended otherwise.

Texturesettings
default: tex16="0" tex32="0" tex_qual="0" tex_speed="1"
Those settings are just there, so we can react on future problems.
So far there seems to be no reason to ever change them.