Glossary

Saveload

Saveload was a cheat program which allowed you to save your progress during a rec and load it later. DarMoeD used that to get wrs back in 2004 when he was caught by milagros and his anticheating team. Nowadays you couldn't get wrs by cheating.

Screen-toggling

Minimizing and maximizing players' screens when playing multi.

Secret area

A place that is hard to find and/or hard to get to, usually marked with the yellow "Secret Area"-sign with red borders. Often you have to leave the traditional route or make a special trick to reach one. There are 5 secret areas on the internal levels: The Steppes, Upside Down, Pipe, Bowling and What the Heck. You can put Secret Area-signs in your own levels too.

Shortcut

Shortcut is a route which is faster than the normal/easiest route. Shortcuts can sometimes be really hard (for example Ramp FrenZy brutal shortcut).

Skin

In across you could make your own skins to make the kuski and bike look different. Same kind of skin system is nowadays in belma, where you can make your own bmp file and use it as the kuski's shirt. You can see your skin by renaming the bmp to .bmp and putting it to bmp folder. Others can see your skin if you upload it to the server and others download it. At the moment you can upload skins to zworqy's server. Get more info from IRC channel #ballelma.

Sky

The sky is the normal background texture. It consists of a blue sky with white clouds. Since Elma 1.2 there has been an option to set default background to sky. It helps for example in headbanger where there is an irritating brick background by default.

Slalom

A part in the level where you have to go left-right-left-right like in the end of the internal level called Slalom. In Trouble Double there are also slalom parts.

Slesk

A norwegian word meaning similar to crazy, cool, weird.

Slowness battle

A battle mode in belma where you have to try to finish the level as slowly as possible. Do not confuse with survivor battle, where you don't have to finish the level.

Sound

Can be turned off in options. Elma uses same sound buffer as (for example) winamp, so you can't listen both winamp and elma sounds at the same time. Turn sounds off when listening to winamp. Sounds are quite irrelevant when playing elma so you don't need them.

Speed

You can get more speed with gas, gravity, braking, loops etc. There is a maximum speed which can't be exceeded. You can get it in long loops and you notice it when the bike stops accelerating. In such conditions it's very hard to control the bike, especially in pipes.

Speedloop

Level that has relatively few moves / tricks but very high speeds and big loops, often disliked by skilled players because of few skill and luck factor involved.

Spin

You can get more spin by rotating the bike. Supervolt/alovolt gives more spin than the regular volt. If you spin too much, the game will eventually grash and give an internal error.

Start bug

When the wheels are partly in polygon from the start of a level, causing quick accelerating and high jumps. Can cause internal error sometimes.

In Across there is a key combination which gives extra speed in start. Originally this was created by kimitys and some WRs were cheated by using that technic. It was also the trick used in mod.com WRs.

state.dat

Contains the players data, times, key settings. Automatically created if not exists.

Stretching

You can stretch the bike by letting another wheel go freely when other stops. If you stretch the bike too much, you will get an internal error (same as in spinning). In nitropatch, if you increase elasticity you can stretch the bike much more :)

Style

Style is a way to finish the level, containing all the little tricks which are needed. Not to be confused with route; two different styles may use same route.

Supervolt

Press the both rotation keys simultaneously to get a supervolt. That should cause the bike rotate faster. This only works to the clockwise direction (so called right supervolt), but it still helps and is quite important trick when you learn try drive better. This was first considered as a bug but when it only increased the style possibilities, Balazs decided to let it stay. There has been debates whether a left supervolt should be added to elma, but so far it hasn't been added. It's usually needed to make a normal volt before supervolt, because it's really hard to press both rotation keys exactly at the same time, though it's possible. That's why a special alovolt (alone supervolt) key was added to elma. With that you can make a single supervolt much easier.

Survivor Battle

A battle mode in belma where you have to stay alive as long as possible. Note that you don't have to finish the level. Do not confuse this with slowness battle, where you have to finish.