GeneRally

GeneRally is a freeware arcade racing game created by Hannu and Jukka Räbinä, originally publicly released on May 16, 2002.

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.

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.

Other editable materials
Most of GeneRally is customizable.

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.

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.

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.

Fonts
Various third party fonts for GeneRally are downloadable. However, it is fairly difficult to create new fonts for GeneRally, as the font is stored in a .BMP file rather than a TTF file, but can be achieved by using Microsoft Paint's text tool.

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.

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.

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.

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 July 2008, this has not materialized.

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See Also

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