SODA Tips

SODA Driving Tips
SODA Frame Rate Tips
Create Your Own SODA Screen-Shots

DRIVING TIPS

As in the real thing, many of the vehicles in SODA Off-Road Racing are over-powered. If you experience difficulty driving, try the following:

Use A Joystick
SODA models the actual physics of racing vehicles so accurately that you should not even attempt to use a keyboard to play this game (unless you want to get a traffic ticket for driving too slow and crazy). You have virtually no chance of completing a competitive lap without using an analog input device such as a joystick.

Reduce Horsepower
Reduce your vehicle's horse-power in the garage to the minimum.

Choose The Best Tires For The Current Track
Make sure you have the appropriate tires for the track. Using mud tires on gravel, or gravel tires on mud will cause the vehicle to have less cornering ability, and may make the road seem excessively slippery. Also, choosing the wrong tire in mud can dramatically increase drag.

Turn Into The Slide
Turn into the slide. If your backend slides to the right, turn right.

Be Very Gentle With The Accelerator
Be very gentle with the accelerator. You only need to push the accelerator very lightly to match the power from a "floored" accelerator of a normal car.

Test Calibration
Test your calibration from the calibration screen and make sure your input device is calibrated and working. A bad calibration can make it impossible to control the amount of torque delivered to the rear wheels.

Drive Slowly at First
At first just try to drive 30 or 40 MPH until you master the track and vehicle. Driving with 800 HP is much more challenging than driving a normal passenger vehicle.

Always Down-Shift To First Gear When Starting From A Stop
Always down-shift to first gear when starting from a stop. If you try to get going in third or fourth gear it is difficult not to spin out again.

Do Not Accelerate Or Brake While Turning
Try not to accelerate or brake much while turning. Acceleration and braking reduce the available traction for cornering.

Do Not Lock The Brakes When Slowing Down
Try not to lock the brakes when slowing down. Be gentle with the joystick. When the wheels are locked up, all ability to steer the vehicle is lost. Sometimes, if you brake too hard, quickly tapping the accelerator can get the tires back up to speed, and help you to regain control.

Stop Accelerating If Vehicle Gets Too Sideways
If the vehicle starts to get too sideways, immediately stop accelerating, and try down-shifting or lightly tapping the brakes. This sometimes helps get the vehicle back under control. Acclerating when starting to slide will usually cause the backend to "break loose" even more, insuring you completely spin-out!

Reduce Graphics Detail To Optimize Frame-Rate
Reduce graphics detail to get the best frame-rate that your system can provide. When the graphics performance is slow or "jumpy" it makes it harder to drive. You want the animation to be as smooth as possible.

FRAME RATE TIPS

Any or all of the following suggestions can help improve the game's frame rate on many PCs:

Race in the lower resolution 320x200 mode instead of the maximum 640x480 mode.
Race with fewer opponent vehicles. Each car consists of over 500 polygons.
Lower graphics detail settings. Just turning off the texture mapped sky can make a large difference on some PCs.
Do not race in cockpit view. Bumper-Cam has the best performance because most of your car does not appear in the view, reducing the number if polygons that need to be rendered each frame.
Turn off the rear-view mirror. The track map overlay may be more useful anyway, and has a negligable impact on frame rate.
Turn off translucency in the graphics detail settings (for shadows, etc.)

CREATE YOUR OWN SODA SCREEN-SHOTS

Hitting the (Alt) key will cause the game to freeze (during game-play and screen-play). To unfreeze the game, hit (Alt) again. This is standard Windows95 behavior for an application and allows for several (Alt) sequences:

(Alt-F4) Terminate the application
(Alt-Tab) Switch between running applications
(Alt-PrtScr) Copy a screen-shot to the Windows 95 clipboard

Hitting (Alt) or (Alt-Tab) while racing pauses the simulation so that play may resume when the application is reactivated.

Windows 95 also allows you to capture the contents of the current window by hitting (Alt+PrtScr) keys. This copies the window to the clipboard. You can then open Paint (from the Windows95 accessories folder) and paste the picture you captured. Then you can save the picture as a bitmap. Normally, you need to have your display settings set to 256 color for this to work correctly. However, when using a Rendition board, you need to have your display settings set to 16-bit color (High Color) for this to capture the colors correctly (it also produces a larger bitmap file - but it looks better than the 256 color version).