GeneRally
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GeneRally is a freeware arcade racing game created by Hannu and Jukka Räbinä, originally publicly released on May 16, 2002.
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[edit] The game
Up to six cars (either human or computer-controlled) can race at the same time. Although it features a 3-D graphics engine, GeneRally has a top-down perspective, where you can see all the cars.
GeneRally includes arcade physics, pitstops, customizable racing seasons, ghost car, and an adjustable AI level. An official track editor lets the user put different objects around the track, draw the areas with asphalt, grass, mud, gravel, snow or water, and make elevation changes. There are also many different sound packs and palettes to download which give more variety to the audio and visual parts of the game.
[edit] System requirements
GeneRally has relatively low system requirements. To run GeneRally with acceptable quality, a PC should have:
- 200 MHz or faster CPU
- 16 MB or more RAM
- 2 MB or more free hard drive space.
- DirectX compatible display adaptor
- Windows 95 or newer.
- DirectX 8.0 or newer.
- A mouse
- A keyboard.
There is no port of GeneRally for Linux, However, using WINE, and various other programs, it is possible to run GeneRally on Linux.
[edit] The cars
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GeneRally cars are made up of a maximum of 40 polygons. Therefore it is quite a skill to build them, which is done using community built tools. The following cars come in the cars.car file which is part of the basic download.
- General: The general mascot for the game. This car is like a Formula One car, but with no aerodynamic wings. It can be used effectively on almost all surfaces, and guarantees the driver good handling and, with some skill, good lap times.
- Formula: A car similar to the General, but more powerful, heavier and with wings. With its unique handling on tarmac, this is the car of choice of many drivers. Most cars are outperformed on tarmac by this. Although there are thousands of user-made cars, and many are high quality, the Formula is still one of the most popular cars. This car is not competitive off-road.
- Go-kart: A go-kart with half the weight of the General. This is a good car for new drivers because it is slow and fairly easy to control. It is definitely one of slowest cars included.
- Mini: A car that is not dissimilar to the classic car of the same name. The Mini is slow and has a tendency to slide. However, it is not bad on non-tarmac surfaces, and due to its size is often used on the smallest tracks. The Mini, along with the Onewheeler and Go-kart share the title of the slowest car in GeneRally.
- Truck: A truck. This is the heaviest and joint most powerful car that is part of the original download. This car demonstrates the handling difference between light and heavy cars. Rather slow and definitely hard to control, it can easily ram through lighter cars, so it has some chance against middle-class cars. This car takes heavier damage hitting objects but less with other cars due to its extreme weight.
- McTurbo: A car that is somewhat similar to a Top Fuel dragster, but shorter. It is as powerful, but is harder to control, than the Truck. This car has bad understeer. Engine power is more a curse than blessing, and being too throttle happy may cause valuable seconds to be lost.
- Triangle: A three wheeler. Despite an unusual chassis, this car has quite usual and nice driving, with moderate speed, and handling, and overall medium performance.
- Yankee: An American muscle car. Not bad speed but rather poor handling. A mediocre car.
- Onewheeler: A strange car with only one wheel, hence the name. Definitively the slowest and hardest to control car; slow, prone to sliding very much, and light, which causes it to be prone to damage from other vehicles. Its only strength is that it has quite good handling on poor surfaces, but nevertheless it is the least competitive car in the game.
- Monster truck: A monster truck. The second heaviest car in the game. Somewhere between the Truck and General in driving, it is a good general-use car with a little power and mass boost.
- Sidamob: A motorcycle with a sidecar. This is the second lightest car in the game. Like the Onewheeler, it is fast off-road, but it has more power.
- Rallycar: A rallycar, this car is not dissimilar to the Mini. This car is slowed down little by loose surfaces, such as snow, sand, and ice. It seems that it is suited only to those surfaces, as on tarmac its performance is surprisingly low.
[edit] Cars that did not appear in later or normal versions
- Sleigh: The sleigh was included only in the Christmas version of the game, to accompany the track 'Santafest'. The Christmas version can be downloaded here via the GeneRally forums. (Note: The Christmas version is not the latest version)
[edit] The tracks
The tracks that come with GeneRally are small and simple, unlike most current third-party tracks. The game comes with two folders of tracks, a "GeneRally" set, with a variety of creative courses, and a "World Tour" set, with courses based on several countries. They are all fictional, but some hint at or resemble real-life locations.
[edit] "GeneRally" track folder
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- Agari: A letter A shaped tarmac circuit that is raced anticlockwise. It has a long straight after the first turn.
- Bytes: A clockwise circuit with 6 turns.
- Gilwan: A 241 metre long, anticlockwise, B-shaped circuit.
- Gurveln: A clockwise circuit with a section in a forest.
- Kutford: A short anticlockwise oval, buit with no banking.
- Mondega: A street circuit inspired by the Monaco street circuit.
- Nyrporl: A circuit with a few similarities to the current Nürburgring GP circuit. It has a Carousel turn.
- Pargy: A street circuit that was probably designed using only the track editor.
- Sewring: A circuit with 4 turns, the third being banked and having a lake on the inside.
- Snoogy: A circuit which is half tarmac and half ice.
- Tachren: A clockwise circuit with 5 turns.
- Tantele: A circuit that seems like it is inspired by Circuit Bremgarten.
- Tusaye: A stunt track with a tarmac start, a ramp, a mud section, another tarmac section, some grass, and then back on to tarmac.
- Wendan: A circuit that crosses a river twice. The first crossing has a humpback bridge but the other has no bridge, forcing the cars to drive through the river.
- Wigeno: A clockwise circuit with seven turns. The bulk of the circuit is square.
- Xupong: A sand, gravel and tarmac figure of eight.
[edit] Tracks that did not appear in later or normal versions
A track called Plante (A clockwise oval with a jump) appeared in the 1.0 beta of the game. Sadly this track did not feature in later versions. It is possible to use the .trk file without modification in newer versions. Also, the bonus track Santafest appeared in Christmas editions.
[edit] "World Tour" track folder
These circuits were introduced for version 1.05 of the game.
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- Algeria: A track in the desert. It is criticized for being too long, however some community-built tracks are longer.
- Australia: A circuit with a motorway section. The layout makes it possible for head-on collisions to occur as there is a section where two straights run parallel in opposite directions with no wall.
- Belgium: An anticlockwise circuit with very angular corners.
- Brazil: A circuit in a hotel car park. It is one of the more narrow tracks in the game.
- Canada: A circuit set in a forest, bearing a small resemblance to Mosport Park.
- Egypt: A bumpy, anticlockwise and square circuit around a pyramid.
- Finland: The only completely non-tarmac circuit to come with the game. It is a rally track around a lake.
- France: A fast circuit inspired by many road circuits in the country, especially the Reims-Gueux circuit in northern France.
- Germany: A fast circuit with part of an oval and a carousel hairpin. Very similar to AVUS.
- Indonesia: A modern race track that is very similar to Sepang International Circuit.
- Italy: A circuit using rural roads that has a jump.
- Japan: A circuit almost entirely made up of hairpins with different profiles.
- Sweden: A circuit that is also made up of different hairpins.
- Switzerland: A circuit near a lake.
- USA: An oval with 4 turns. This track also has an infield circuit which is not drivable.
[edit] Other editable materials
Most of GeneRally is customizable.
[edit] Drivers
Drivers can be created easily within GeneRally, and each can be assigned to be either a computer-controlled driver or a human-controlled driver. If human-controlled, the commands for Accelerate, Brake, Left, and Right can be assigned to any combination of 4 keys. If computer-controlled, a skill level from 0-200 can be chosen, with 200 being the "most-skilled". Also, each driver can choose primary and secondary colors for themselves, both of which are selected using a "color mixer" which allows 16,777,216 different combinations of color. In total, 281,474,976,710,656 color combinations per driver are possible.
[edit] Sound packs
Sound packs may be created by editing .wav sound files. An engine sound (Engine.wav) is the engine sound of the cars. It is possible to have a sound played when the car the player is driving does not have enough fuel to complete 2 more laps of the circuit. The game's two sound packs do not contain a fuel.wav sound, so no sound is played and the player will need to look at a small bar graph on the bottom of the screen to check if he or she is about to run out of fuel.
[edit] Language packs
Whilst the game comes with English and Finnish language packs, it is possible to download language packs for a large number of other languages from the official website.
The Greek pack Greek pack is not on the official website, and it requires modification of the font file due to the fact that Greek does not use the Latin alphabet.
[edit] Fonts
Various third party fonts for GeneRally are downloadable. However, it is quite difficult to create new fonts for GeneRally, as the font is stored in a .BMP file rather than a TTF file.
[edit] Palettes
There are several .pal palette files available for GeneRally. There are night, rain, autumn, and winter palettes available for GeneRally. However, there are some problems with the palette format as the pit crew's blood is the same colour as the soft walls, so if the soft walls are made green (which is recommended for some tracks so that they can look like hedges) so is the pit crew's blood. Another such problem is that a pallette used to make fences grey to look like Armco can also make tree trunks-which are the same colour-grey.
A palette changer utility is downloadable here.
[edit] Non-customisable sections of the game
It is not possible to change the models of in-game objects, or the layout of the user interface. However, the source code has been recently cracked. (Edit: Ummmm... NO, it has *NOT*).
[edit] The racing community
There is a large GeneRally community where players can exchange tracks, lap records and cars (which can be made with fan-made tools). There is even a Track of the Month competition - every month the community nominates which tracks can be candidates for the election, a secret ballot decides the winner of the award.
Despite not having an online play mode, GeneRally has a large competition community. These competitions can take the form of lap-time challenges, replay based races, or AI competitions. The former are judged on data from the .trk file's lap records. "Racing" events, are time trials using computer cars to simulate traffic, then comparing the average speeds of each user. AI competitions are held by assigning each user a computer car to take part in a season of races, sometimes combined with replay timing.
[edit] Future development
GeneRally v1.05 is the latest released version of the game, although this does not mean that there will not be an upgrade to the game released at a later time (refer to section 8.1.1 of the GeneRally FAQ). Co-creator Hannu hinted that news related to the future of GeneRally would come out at the end of the summer of 2007. But as of April 2008, this has not materialized.
