===================================================================== Welcome to Elasto Mania! A motorbike simulation game based on a real physical model. Shareware version 1.0 Copyright (C) 2000 Balazs Rozsa. ===================================================================== TRY BEFORE YOU BUY Elasto Mania is distributed as Shareware. You are welcome to distribute this game freely, give it to your friends or upload it to the Internet as long as you don't change it in any way. If you like Elasto Mania and continue to use it, please register the game with me. ===================================================================== HOW TO REGISTER Register Elasto Mania now for only US $9.95 and you will get the full version with 34 more new levels and the full editor. Registration is fast and easy: ONLINE: Just go to our website at www.elastomania.com and click on 'Order'. You will have a choice of 4 ways of registering: - Filling out an Online secure form (credit card) - Filling out a FAX form (credit card) - Calling a toll free number (credit card) - Filling out a Postal form I will then send you back in an email the location where you can download your full version of the game from the web (usually within one business day). Or, if you prefer, I can send you the game on a floppy disk, for an additional $5 shipping fee. OFFLINE: If you do not have web access, you can fill out a FAX or Postal Mail form found in your Elasto Mania folder. There you will find a phone.txt file that also tells you how to order by phone. Thank you for your support and hope you will continue to enjoy this game. ===================================================================== SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Microsoft Windows 95/98/2000 DirectX 5.0 Pentium 133MHz 16MB RAM 4MB Hard Disk ===================================================================== INSTALLATION To install Elasto Mania run the self installing EXE file and follow the instructions. The game requires DirectX 5.0 or later installed on your system. If you don't have this, you can download it from: www.microsoft.com/directx ===================================================================== ELASTO MANIA'S HOME PAGE Visit our web site for free external levels, competitions and the latest version at: www.elastomania.com We also have a links page where you can find a lot of links to fan sites for the game. If you have any questions about the game, please send an email to: balazs@elastomania.com ===================================================================== HOW TO PLAY THE GAME You have to ride a motorbike and complete the various stages. You can get to the next level only by completing the previous one successfully. You can skip three levels in total, but you can go back and complete a previously skipped level later. You can choose to play on any of the levels you have previously completed. For all stages the best ten times are recorded along with the name of the player. The levels become progressively more and more difficult to complete. To control your motorbike while playing, you use the following keys (unless you have customized the controls in the Options menu): UP arrow: accelerate (this puts a constant degree of force on the rear wheel). DOWN arrow: block both wheels. RIGHT arrow: turn the bike clock-wise. LEFT arrow: turn the bike anticlock-wise. SPACE: turns your bike around so you can go in the opposite direction. During the various stages there are several objects that appear on the screen. You can contact an object by touching it with your helmet or any of your wheels. The three different object types are: - FOOD object: You have to touch all of these before you can accomplish a level. If you touch it, it will disappear. (Though the food objects are moving vertically, the invisible circles you have to touch in order to eat them are not. If this bothers you, please turn off their moving under Options from the Main menu!) - KILLER object: You will die if you touch it. - EXIT object: You can finish the level by touching it. (It works only if you have already collected all of the food objects). The exit object is a flower. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Setting the look of the display You can toggle on/off the visibility of the little view window by pressing the 'v' button while playing or replaying. And with the 't' button you can do the same with the time display. (These two settings are stored separately for the play and the replay modes. For play mode the default is off, for the replay mode it is on.) If the frame rate on your machine is low, you can press the '-' button while playing in order to reduce the size of the screen. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Multiplayer game The multiplayer mode is a split-screen two-player mode. You can play in a co-operative way in order to make a good time, or against each others trying to eat more food than your opponent. In the Flag Tag mode you compete to have the flag on your bike for more time than it is on your opponent's bike. The flag starts on biker A and biker B by turns. To get the flag, you have to touch the wheels of the other bike with your wheels. The head doesn't work for this. After capturing the flag, it flashes for a short while, until the two bikes get a minimum distance apart. During this time the flag cannot be recaptured again. ===================================================================== THE EDITOR Limitations in the shareware editor This shareware version of the editor has severe limitations, it is included mainly to give you a preview of the full editor that comes with the registered version. You can make only a maximum of 5 polygons on a level with only a maximum of ten vertices per polygon. The maximum number of objects (food and killer) is 6. In the registered version these numbers are: maximum 300 polygons, maximum 1000 vertices per polygon (but no more than 5000 altogether), maximum 50 objects. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Getting help about the editor To get help about the various editor functions you should enter the editor and right click with the mouse on the particular buttons you want help for. That is the main help for the editor, but you should read the rest of this file also to get a better understanding how the editor works. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The editor screen On the left of the editor screen is a column of buttons. The buttons in the upper half are command buttons, which means they will take action at the moment you click on them with the left mouse button. The buttons in the lower half are the tool selection buttons. If you click on them with the left mouse button, you select a tool. You can use a tool in the working area of the screen. A one line help of the current tool is always displayed at the top of your screen. You can get help on the command and tool selection buttons by clicking on any of them with the right mouse button. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Getting started with the editor When you start working with the editor, I suggest that you work only with simple polygons and don't work with pictures nor with 'grass' polygons. Only after you are familiar with the polygon aspect of the editor, should you begin to work with pictures. The following information about the editor is mainly in connection with putting graphic objects onto the levels. --------------------------------------------------------------------- What file types uses the program for the levels When you play a level, the topology of the polygons and the placement of the objects and pictures (like the trees) come from a level file (with the extension of '.lev' in the LEV subdirectory). But this file doesn't contain any graphics, like the texture of the background, the pictures of the trees, or the apples you have to gather. The graphics are stored in a separate file with the extension of '.lgr' in the LGR subdirectory. The level file contains only the name of the lgr file. In this way you can have many level files using one .lgr file, thus saving a lot of disk space because the .lgr files are usually much bigger than the level files. Actually all internal levels of the game use one lgr file, default.lgr. If you load a level file to play or to edit it, and there is no LGR file with the name that is specified in the level file, the default.lgr file will be used instead. Probably the names of the pictures in the level and LGR file won't match, so the non-matching objects won't appear on the screen when you play and will be removed from the level file if you load it into the editor and save it. The game works only with maximum 8 character long .lev, .rec and .lgr file names (plus extension). --------------------------------------------------------------------- Making your own LGR files For editing the level files you can use the built-in editor. But you can not change the LGR files with the editor. If you want to add pictures to an LGR file, you have to use a command line program, make_lgr.exe. This program is not part of the game, you have to download the LGR Development Kit separately from our site (www.elastomania.com). It is available for free and the same Development Kit can be used for the shareware and registered versions also. Since this Development Kit is not part of the game, I did not put as much effort into making it easy to use, and polishing it as I should have. I only made it available for the public so that those who want to include their own graphics into the game can do this, if they are willing to spend time understanding exactly how this program works. They should have prior knowledge about manipulating image files, using color palettes and using DOS command line tools. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Working with pictures Pictures don't affect the way you ride your bike on a level, they are only there to make the level look nicer. There are two kind of pictures: normal pictures and masks with textures. The bushes, trees and all objects are normal pictures. In most cases you will create normal pictures and very seldom will you use masks with textures. With the Create Picture tool you can create new pictures. Just click the left mouse button where you want to place the selected picture. But first you must select a picture by clicking the right mouse button anywhere above the working area. A dialog will appear with three fields: normal picture, mask and texture. You can either select a normal picture, or select a mask with a texture. If you select a mask or a texture alone, you won't be able to put it into your level. I suggest that you only use normal pictures and don't bother with Masks or Textures too often. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Properties of pictures Every picture has two properties: distance and clipping. - The distance determines which pictures hide the others. The range of the distance property is 1-999. The distance of the biker and the apple and flower objects is 500. - The clipping property determines if the picture is visible above the ground or the Sky. The clipping property has three states: S-Sky: Only those parts of the picture are drawn that are in the sky. G-Ground: Only those parts of the picture are drawn that are in the ground. U-Unclipped. Most pictures are set to the S-Sky clipping property, so their parts that are underground are invisible. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Grass polygons Most of the time the top of the ground is a bright green band on which you can roll with the bike. To put this band there you need grass polygons. A grass polygon is a separate polygon that makes the region above its line grass textured. It may be a bit confusing how it should be placed. The quickest way to understand how it works is examining the example level file, tutor2.lev. Load it into the editor, play on it and take a look how it is implemented in the level design (you can use the View Options button to display only the grass polygons to see it better). You can change a normal polygon into a grass polygon or vice versa by right-clicking near a vertex with the Move tool and check the property in the dialog. The trickiest part is that a grass polygon always has an inactive line. This line is the one that is longest in the x direction. The other lines determine the lower border of the grass (the upper border is determined by the normal polygons). The inactive line looks the same in the editor as the other lines, you only know which one it is from the fact that it is the longest line horizontally. ===================================================================== ADVANCED FEATURES Exporting the best times statistic When the game quits it writes a stats.txt file in which it lists the best times for all levels. At the end of this file it calculates various total times. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Merging best times from two games If you and your friend for example have two copies of the game on two different computers, you can merge your best times by copying one state.dat file from one computer to the directory of the game on the other computer by the name, 'merge.dat'. Each time the program starts it looks for the file merge.dat and if it finds one, it merges its best times information into state.dat. (One best time won't be imported multiple times into state.dat even if you leave merge.dat in the game directory and start the game many times.) You cannot merge a registered state.dat file into the shareware version. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Removing somebody from the player list If you want to remove somebody from the player list, go to Options, choose Player A or B, then move the selection to the player you want to remove. Press Ctrl-Alt Enter and it will be removed (at least one player always has to be on the player list). --------------------------------------------------------------------- Find out the time of a rec file If you want to find out the time of a rec file without opening it, go to Replay from the Main Menu, move the selection to the rec file and press Ctrl-Alt Enter. The time of the rec file will be given to you even if it was not finished. ===================================================================== TROUBLESHOOTING INFORMATION The sound best quality mode may cause problems. If this occurs, please choose the compatibility mode. The game may run on some NT systems with DirectX 3.0, but it may not be reliable. The game may freeze, the sound may not work and the framerate may be low. You should only try this on your own risk. ===================================================================== ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank the following people for helping to create this game: Csaba Rozsa, my brother, designed more than half of the levels, maintains the WWW homepage of the game and the Best Times table. Geza Szabo helped me to draw most of the graphics. Mate Magyar made the animated objects, most of the textures and level 'Bowling'. He also suggested the idea of Flag Tag. Eszter and Bori Paris also helped with the graphics. Dylan Cooper gave me linguistic help for all written text in the game and gave most of the levels their names. Peter Illyes and Imre Barczi helped me a lot with technical issues. Gabor Gerenyi gave me most of the sound samples. Tamas and Andris Kristyan helped me to record some sound effects for the game. The following persons tested the levels: Csaba Fekete, David Hoover, Jennifer Hoover, Andris Kristyan, Tamas Kristyan, Csaba Limbek, Csaba Magyari, Akos Nemeth Buhin, Andras Torok. ===================================================================== ASP OMBUDSMAN INFORMATION Balazs Rozsa is a member of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP). ASP wants to make sure that the shareware principle works for you. If you are unable to resolve a shareware-related problem with an ASP member by contacting the member directly, ASP may be able to help. The ASP Ombudsman can help you resolve a dispute or problem with an ASP member, but does not provide technical support for members' products. Please write to the ASP Ombudsman at 157-F Love Ave., Greenwood, IN 46142 USA, FAX 317-888-2195, or send email to omb@asp-shareware.org. ===================================================================== COPYRIGHT INFORMATION Elasto Mania and all the file formats the program produces are Copyright (C) 2000 Balazs Rozsa. All rights reserved. ===================================================================== LEGAL STUFF No portion of this software may be disassembled, reverse engineered, decompiled, modified or altered. This Software is supplied "as is" and no liability will be accepted by Balazs Rozsa or any legal vendors of this software for any damage incurred by the use of this software. Disclaimer: Elasto Mania is supplied "as is" and no claims are made as to it's suitability for any purpose, if any. Users installing this software do so on such an understanding and also that the limit of liability of the publisher or his agent is limited to the price paid for the program alone. =====================================================================