XRacer is a clone of the popular Psygnosis game Wipeout. At present, it is incomplete, but playable.

XRacer is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Please see the file COPYING for details.

For best results, this program requires Linux 2.2 or above, X11, Mesa 3.1 or above, GLUT 3.7 or above, libjpeg and a supported 3D accelerator card.

An analogue joystick is highly recommended. In fact, it is the preferred way of controlling the game.

Periodically, I add patches to support other operating systems, and periodically I break support for other operating systems. However, at time of writing, XRacer is (or has been) compiled on the following platforms:

• Windows 95/NT with the Cygnus Cygwin library,
• Sun Solaris for Sparc (requires 2.6 or above),
• FreeBSD,
• MkLinux and LinuxPPC,
• IBM AIX,
• SGI Irix.

You should be able to use any OpenGL 1.1 compliant library. I have also compiled XRacer using the Matrox G200 GLX driver.

The GLUT library is commonly distributed in the MesaDemos package. Note that you have to install this package as well as MesaLib to play XRacer.

A 3D accelerator card is really required. It is unlikely that I will ever do a version of XRacer that can be played without 3D acceleration. Sorry.

Type:

./configure && make

The configure script takes a number of arguments. Try:

./configure --help

for more information.

If the configure script fails to detect something about your system, then please tell me. The most common problem is that you have glut and a GL library installed, but in a strange place, and the configure script can't find them. Use the configure options ``--with-gl-libs=DIR'', ``--with-gl-inc=DIR'' etc. to tell it where you installed these libraries.

If you want to include support for multiple languages, you should define the LINGUAS environment variable. This should list the message catalogues which you want installed. To get a full list of available message catalogues, look at po/*.po.

For example, this would compile in support for French and Spanish (Espanől):

LINGUAS="fr es" ./configure

Type:

make install

(You may need to be root).

After installing XRacer, type:

xracer

In previous versions of XRacer, you were allowed to run the game before installing it. This is no longer the case. You now have to install the game before you can play it.

Before mailing me, check that you can get any GL program to compile and run on your system. If you can't do that, then please ask your local guru, or subscribe to a newsgroup such as 3dfx.glide.linux at news.3dfx.com.

If you have an XRacer-specific compilation problem, then ask first on the xracer mailing list. Copy and paste all the compilation messages, not just the ones you think may be relevant.

If you have a problem when running XRacer, then ask first on the xracer mailing list. Run XRacer with the ``verbose'' (--verbose) option, and copy and paste all the debugging output into the message.

joystick left      bank/turn left
   "     right     bank/turn right
   "     up        pitch nose down
   "     down      pitch nose up
   "     button1   fire weapon or use powerup
   "     button2   accelerate

PAGE UP            accelerate
PAGE DN            brake
LEFT               bank/turn left
RIGHT              bank/turn right
UP                 nose down
DOWN               nose up
SPACE              fire weapon or use powerup
s                  take a screenshot
r                  reset position to beginning of track
f                  display frame rate
n                  invert mouse controls
d                  use mouse to control
.                  increase mouse sensitivity
,                  decrease mouse sensitivity
f                  toggle FPS display
ESC                quit game

Move the mouse to the centre of the XRacer window and press `d' to activate it. Move the mouse around to go up, down, left and right.

Patches are most welcome. Please send them to my email address: Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>.

Please send me UNIFIED DIFFS only! I will ignore other types of patches. The FAQ explains how to create unified diffs.

Periodically people ask me if they can produce a commercial version of XRacer, for example for the cover of a magazine or a Linux distribution.

The short answer is that XRacer is covered by the GNU General Public License (GPL) and so you may produce commercial versions of XRacer without being subject to any license fees provided that you comply with the terms of the GPL. You should read this license in more detail to find out the exact requirements. It can be found here. In particular, if you produce a modified version, you are required to distribute the source code changes that you make along with the binary program.

The slightly longer answer is that some parts of XRacer are (possibly) covered by patents. In particular, the MPEG decompression algorithms are (possibly) covered by patents and commercial versions may require license fees. To remove the video codec from XRacer, you should configure with the --disable-video option.