F.A.Q.

Contact us using the forum if you have any other question !

Answers

- The game is slooow ... I get not more than 3 or 4 FPS

The main reason of this problem is missing or outdated graphic drivers.

We've also seen some case where the game is asking too much to the video card, making the driver switching to software mode (or sort of). To correct this, here you are a few hints:
  • Disable shadow support (in game menu or raydium.db file)
  • Switch your desktop color depth to 24 bits per pixel (pixel format "bug")
  • Switch your desktop color depth to 16 bits per pixel (low memory card)
  • Switch to windowed mode, adding --window to the command line of the game. You can then change the window size with Generic-WindowSizeX and Generic-WindowSizeY options in raydium.db file
  • If you own a Intel video card, see this bug report about Xorg 7.0

The last uncommon reason is outdated sound drivers. ManiaDrive is using 3D spatialized sound thru recent OpenAL API, so an up-to-date driver is needed.

- The game is way too hard ! I'm unable to complete the first track ...

This is right, the game is challenging, and since the solo mode is quiet short (12 tracks in version 1.01), the challenge starts at the very first track. The other point here is that tracks are, for most of them, very short (less than 10 seconds for "Simple", for example) so some players feels quickly frustated to turn 20 times in a row on the same small track.

The worst enemy of ManiaDrive's player is nervosity, and most players needs something like 20 minutes to be comfortable with the physics. Don't try to complete the track as quicker as possible, but try to be "clean", learning how you can get your car perfectly straight before a jump, how and when you must brake and accelerate to keep the car stable. Speed will come after (and is not needed for first tracks).

ManiaDrive now features a beginners mode, so you can learn all this on dedicated tracks.

- The car is reversed !

Yes. And this is the case for a few reasons, including the need to avoid trademark troubles, since logo and car name are reversed too. Let's said that this car is a "oilC" from "tluaneR" :)

- My joystick/joypad is not detected under windows

Sadly, Raydium, the game engine under ManiaDrive, has no support for joysticks and joypads for windows platforms yet. If you think that you can help us on this subject, contact us !

- My joystick/joypad is not detected under Linux

Be sure that your device is detected by Linux itself, and that a device exists under the name /dev/js0 or /dev/input/js0. For other device names, you can use the --joydev command line switch. (./mania_drive.sh -- joydev /dev/input/js3)

- The game is crashing at startup

In most cases, this problem is solved with up-to-date sound card drivers. The same troubles can be caused by missing OpenGL drivers. If updating sound card and graphic cards drivers doesn't help, contact us.

- This game downloads it's own external dependencies

Two dependencies are automatically downloaded from configure script:
  • ODE (Open Dynamics Engine)
  • PHP (v5)
The problem here is that a lot of Linux distros do not provides PHP as a library, but only as a CLI program and an Apache module. ODE is released by distros in a lot of various versions (0.3x, 0.5, 0.6, CVS), wich makes things very complex for us. As a packager, you must know that Raydium "configure" script does not generates anything (no config.h nor Makefile) and is only here to download ODE (from our server) and PHP (from www.php.net) and checks all other dependencies, so it's possible to package the game without calling configure script and provide these libraries in another way.