Early preview of a Lotus-type of game for Falcon.
The complete game will probably have these features:

*	Texturemapped road (already implemented)
*	Texturemapped sides (already implemented)
*	A car! (already implemented, but no brake)
*	Lots of cars! (implemented, but a bit buggy)
*	Quite a lot of objects by the road (partly implemented)
*	Some nice sceneries like forest, desert, winter, tropics, 
	city and more. A scrolling background (implemented), and 
	bugfixed.



This can be viewed as version 0.46.

Controls:
	Joypad A:
		Left, right, A to accelerate
		
	Keyboard:
		Arrow left	Move left on the road
		Arrow right	Move right on the road
		Arrow up	Accelerate
		Space		Quit

	Joystick 1:
		Left, right, fire to accelerate
		

Credits:
	Idea(s)		Henrik Gild (irc: HencoxNAT)
			Torbjrn Gild (irc: InStreamNAT)

	Coding		Torbjrn Gild
	

Well, now it seems very likely that this game won't be finished 
before X-mas. We are both doing our military service now, and can 
therefore code only during weekends. But you knew that already, didn't 
you? ;-)

The DSP isn't used as yet, but will soon be. At least so we thought 
2.5 months ago when we released v0.3. Now we've (almost) decided to 
use the DSP only for music and FX. If we'd use it for mixing sound 
it would be so busy that it wouldn't be of much help for the CPU to do 
the calculations. The texture-mapping routine has been optimized a 
little, so we think the game will run acceptably smoothly anyway. (If 
not - buy an accelerator!)

The other cars are realtime rescaled to save memory, but the rescaling 
doesn't seem to take that much CPU-time anyway. If we'd have done it 
the same way as with the side objects, the cars would take up so much 
memory, that the game would require more than 4MB RAM to run. This way 
users of accelerators with TT RAM will benefit, since the car sprites 
may be put in TT RAM (no BLiTTER-usage).

Bugs:
	There are also some bugs to fix, as you can see from this 
	preview. The background scrolls nicely now, but the side 
	objects still flicker. You can also sometimes see an upcoming 
	slope through the hill you're currently climbing. The other 
	cars are a bit buggy also.


Request for help:
	One thing that takes unnecessary huge amounts of time when 
	creating games is usually the graphics. That applies to this 
	case also, and since time is one of the things we don't have 
	in unlimited supply, we would be very grateful if you (yes, 
	Y.O.U) helped us a bit.
	If you think you can draw reasonably nice trees, signs and 
	other objects by the road, or raytrace them, then please send 
	them to my E-mail address and we'll see if they will suite the 
	game. If you draw something please use at least 65536 colours, 
	preferrably the .F16, .TIF or .TGA formats (if TGA please use 
	24bit uncompressed). Try to keep the objects in the same 
	scale. I mean, so that there won't be a tree that's smaller 
	than the road signs, for example. The curve signs are 40x40 
	when they are closest to the car, which is about half the 
	width and height of the car. You only have to draw one picture 
	of any one object (of course the biggest one), we'll scale 
	them down later.
	Another thing to keep in mind is not to draw too long shadows 
	on the objects. The shadow should be right below the object, 
	and not stretch too much in any direction. To more clearly see 
	what I mean study the objects in the original Lotus III, for 
	example.
	All contributors will be listed in the credits in contributing
	order.

Request for testresults:
	If you happen to have some sort of accelerator installed in 
	your Falcon, please tell us about the behaviour of the 
	program. Preferrably with some estimated fps, frames per 
	second, (or spf, seconds per frame, if it is a poor 
	accelerator ;-) ).


Greetings:
	Greetings fly out to the following people and demo groups we 
	have been in contact with:
	
	Avena (esp. Tat), DHS (esp. Evil), some guys on irc #atari
	(yeager,Sage,Prof, and the others I've been talking to), Grey 
	of Mystic Bytes (thanks for the postcard!!), David Valry 
	(Hades of Tool8 Technologies; thanks for the letter, and yes 
	of course we'll try to finish this game, we're no company so 
	we're not dependent on income, only on worshippers of our 
	games ;-) ) and then to everyone else active on the atari 
	scene.
	 

Disclaimer:
	If you happen to get brain damage from looking at those ugly 
	dead trees spread around the course, or if anything else 
	happens to you or your computer while (ab)using this program, 
	we take absolutely no responsibility whatsoever, only the 
	credits. ;-)

	


	Send your Falcon040/Hades060/Phenix060 to:
	
	Henrik Gild		Torbjrn Gild
	Prinsgatan 3c		Prinsgatan 3c
	541 31 Skvde		541 31 Skvde
	Sweden                  Sweden
	
	E-mail: hencox@hotmail.com
	Homepage: www.update.uu.se/~yomat/hencox/welcome.html (please 
	note that the e-mail address on those pages is not correct)
	
						/Henrik Gild, 8 Dec 1997
