Airtime 0.9.13
==============

A voxel racing game.

Starting the DOS version
------------------------
Keep airtime.exe, cwsdpmi.exe and the complete data and res folders
together. Game definitions are data\cars.dat and data\terrain.dat. Change to that folder and run AIRTIME.EXE.

Airtime needs a Pentium MMX 166 or faster, 64 MB of RAM (40 MB of it free),
a PCI video card with VESA hi-colour modes and a Sound Blaster 16, AWE32 or
AWE64. It checks the machine when it starts, and if anything is missing it
says what. Run with --nosound to play without a supported sound card, or
with --force to try a machine short of memory or speed. The normal display
is 320x240.

The cwsdpmi.exe supplied has its swap file turned off, so under plain DOS
the game uses the memory the machine has and pages nowhere. If there is too
little memory, the game says so. To allow paging to disk anyway, run
CWSDPMI -P -SC:\CWSDPMI.SWP before AIRTIME.EXE. Under Windows, Windows
provides the memory and cwsdpmi.exe is not used.

Menus and racing
----------------
Use Up/Down to choose a menu entry and Enter to select it.
Escape returns from a submenu; Escape on the main menu exits to DOS.
Single Player offers Championship, Challenge and Practice.

The keys here are the defaults. Options > Controls sets the keys for driving,
the special, Select and Back: choose a row and press the new key. A key taken from
another row leaves that row with none, and Delete clears a row; Restore
Defaults puts every key back. Select always has a key, and Escape always goes
back, whatever Back is set to. The keys are saved in config.ini (key-steer-left=a and so on), where the
menus' cursor keys can be set too (key-menu-up, key-page-down and so on).

Left/Right steers, Up accelerates, and Down brakes or reverses.
With Auto Brake on (Options > Controls) the car brakes, by the percent
set, whenever Up is let go, and Down does nothing.
Z fires your car's special. Each car has its own: NOS, the police car's
siren, the rider's kick flip, or oil, mud or sand poured under the car or
lobbed ahead. A special recharges after use: lobs and splats in 30
seconds, the rest in 45.
After finishing, Enter leaves the race. Escape during a race goes back to
the menu. F8 changes to the next song. F7 restarts the current song,
or goes to the previous song within the first five seconds.
M turns the music off and on again.
F1 shows the controls and F4 toggles the information display.
F12+X quits at once.

Extras contains the Score Board of saved results, About, Replays, the
built-in Benchmark, Changes and component Licenses.
Up/Down scrolls Changes and Licenses, Page Up/Down a page at a time, and
Home/End jump to the ends.
Advanced Options has Title Replay: On plays recorded races behind menus;
Off uses the splash picture. The setting takes effect immediately.
Replays use Space to pause/resume and Left/Right to seek. Escape leaves
playback.

Alt+I anywhere, or FEEDBACK on the menu, opens a feedback window over the
screen as it is: give a title and a description, and Region marks a part of
the screenshot. Send saves the report in the FEEDBACK folder beside the game.

Saves and recordings
--------------------
Scores, settings, the profile and race recordings are written below the
game's folder by default, which keeps the newest 50 recordings; high-score
replays are always kept. To keep them elsewhere, set AIRTIME_SAVE before starting, for
example:

  SET AIRTIME_SAVE=C:\AIRSAVE
  AIRTIME.EXE

A folder AIRTIME_SAVE names keeps every recording. Keep the save folder
writable. Completed recordings appear in the replay browser. Autopilot,
debug and automated harness races do not rank.

Keyboard steering
-----------------
Steering is full strength the moment a key goes down, and stops the moment
it comes up.

Keys are timestamped and consumed in 8 ms physics slices. A 10 ms tap is
10 ms of steering even inside a 50 ms frame, so a short tap makes a small
adjustment.

Slow-frame test
---------------
  AIRTIME --race=track12 --lowfps

--lowfps caps the race and title replay at 20 fps by padding frame work
before presentation, after input and physics. Keyboard interrupts keep
running. This delays each input's picture as slow rendering would.
It does not emulate a slower CPU or audio; a machine already below 20 fps
is not sped up. Scripted runs need --realtime.

Useful startup options
----------------------
  --race=track12  Go straight into a challenge race on that track; Esc
                  quits to DOS. --ai=0 to 3 sets the AI cars.
  --nosound       Run without sound.
  --highres       Use 640x480 instead of 320x240.
  --no-record     Disable race recordings.
  --verbose       Log the disk and sound timeline at exit (for bug reports).
  --help          Show the full command-line help.

Debug controls and automated benchmark options are for development;
ordinary play does not require them.
