Chequered Flag
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An open-source Formula One Grand Prix/World Circuit editor
Developed by: Klaus Six, Barrie Millar and Rene Smit
Current version: 0.1.0
Homepage: http://chequeredflag.sourceforge.net/

Contents
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1. Introduction
2. System Requirements
3. Instructions
4. Known Issues
5. Support
6. Development Details
7. License

1. Introduction
***************

Chequered Flag is an open-source attempt to create a complete editor for Geoff
Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix/World Circuit. In time, it is hoped that the 
editor will be able to modify everything currently known about the game and 
also be able to change things not presently understood in the community.
However, the main focus of development efforts at this stage has been on the 
track editor.

Version 0.1.0 is therefore an improved implementation of the track editor's 
currently available for the game. Further developments are already planned on 
what has been achieved so far, and more regular updates are expected in the 
future to build on this. Expansion of Chequered Flag into other editing areas is
also likely to be pursued in the near-future. 

Chequered Flag has a small development team and therefore there are limits on 
what can be achieved in a given time-scale. If anybody would therefore
like to join the development team on a long, or short-term basis to improve 
this, please feel free to contact the project administrators to make 
arrangements. Any contributions made will be most welcome.

Contact details for the administrators can be found in section 4 of this 
document.

More information on the entire project can be found at the Chequered Flag 
homepage: 

(http://chequeredflag.sourceforge.net/)

2. System Requirements
**********************

It can generally be assumed that most computer systems produced in the last
five years will be able to easily run this program. However, there are some 
specific issues that need to be mentioned below. 

* Although Chequered Flag could potentially be run on a very small desktop
display, it has been generally assumed during the design of this program that a 
minimum desktop size of 800x600 is being utilized by the end-user. Therefore,
Chequered Flag may not run as expected on anything lower than this. 

* This program has been created using Sun's version of the Java programming 
language and therefore is officially portable to the Windows, Linux and Solaris
operating systems. It may also be portable to other systems unofficially. 
However, this portability comes at a small cost; a Java interpreter 
(preferably Sun's edition) is required for Chequered Flag to run. A suitable
interpreter can be obtained free of charge from the Sun Java website 
(http://java.sun.com). Downloading and installing the latest Java Runtime 
Environment should be sufficient to allow Chequered Flag to run. However, the 
program was designed to run on Java 1.4.2, so any higher version than this 
should work perfectly too.

3. Instructions
***************

To run Chequered Flag, extract all files from the downloaded zip archive and run
one of the following files depending on which operating system you use. Please 
bear in mind that you will need to have your Java interpreter working properly 
before attempting this.

Windows - chequeredflag.bat

Linux/Solaris - chequeredflag.sh (You may need to make the script executable 
before running it, or instead process it through a shell interpreter with a 
command similar to the following: sh chequeredflag.sh)

There are also other ways in which the Java package can be run directly on any 
of the above operating systems. Experienced end-users may use any of these as 
required, but the guide above should be enough for anybody to get started with 
Chequered Flag.

4. Known Issues
***************

* A bug has been found in some versions of Sun Java 1.4.2 which results in an 
exception error appearing after the program has been run. This seems to have 
no other impact on the editor, but users may see an error message appearing 
after loading Chequered Flag if they use specific versions of Sun Java.

* The best line generator on the track map is not working correctly. As yet, 
the developers have not yet had time to implement the new calculations which 
will resolve this issue. Users can expect this to appear in version 0.1.1 or 
0.1.2 of Chequered Flag.

5. Support
**********

Although most modern software packages are designed to be easy to use as well 
as heavily tested to reduce the number of software bugs, it is possible that 
users may run into problems that the developers did not expect. For this 
purpose, Sourceforge provides a number of user areas designed to manage 
communications between the end-users and the program developers to deal with 
potential software issues. These facilities are available to the Chequered Flag 
project.

On the main project page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/chequeredflag), there
is a section called "Project Areas" halfway down the page on the left. The 
following sections are provided for support purposes:

* Bugs - Any software bugs found can be reported here
* Support requests - If you have any trouble using the program, you can use
this section to ask for assistance from the development team
* Patches - If you have created any programming or documentation patches that 
you would like to see merged into Chequered Flag; they can be submitted
in this section.
* Feature requests - Any feature you would like to see in Chequered Flag can be
requested here. 

There is one other section that deserves some documentation.

* Public forums - This section contains two forums which allow discussion 
relating to the project with any other interested party. The "Help" forum is 
designed for people seeking help in using Chequered Flag, while the other is 
designed for open discussion.

If any direct discussions with the project team is required, it is possible to 
contact them directly. The following web addresses will allow you to email the
project administrators.

To contact B-za: http://sourceforge.net/sendmessage.php?touser=830819
To contact Ksix: http://sourceforge.net/sendmessage.php?touser=1214945

Please do not abuse this option if your message can be handled in one of the 
other sections above; as we all have too much work already... :)

6. Development Details
**********************

Chequered Flag version 0.1.0 was built to run on Sun Java 1.4.2.06 and 1.4.2.07.
Most of the development work was conducted with the aid of the Netbeans IDE tool
version 4.0.

This is likely to change in future releases, with newer versions of both
interpreter and IDE tool utilized by the developers.

7. License
**********

Chequered Flag has been created and licensed under the GNU General Public 
License version 2. A full copy of the terms and conditions of this license is 
available in the License.txt file included with the program. All project 
legal disclaimers and restrictions can be found there.
