Playing in the dark

Topspeed 3

Playing in the Dark and Ruby AccessWare are proud to present Top Speed version 3.0 - the final release of the popular, accessible freeware racing game that uses only audio and an optional force-feedback joystick to communicate with the player. As with the prior version of Top Speed, this new version includes a multi-player mode, up to seven computer opponents to race against, and the ability to create your own tracks and vehicles. However, there are also some exciting new features such as:

  • You can now use custom tracks in multi-player mode.
  • Significantly improved the performance and bandwidth usage of the multi-player mode.
  • The port used for Multi-player games is now 25255 instead of 25989, both UDP and TCP.
  • You can now use tracks of up to 8192 definitions in multi-player mode. Longer tracks will be truncated.
  • The Quick Start option in the Main Menu now picks a random track and vehicle and then starts a Single Race.
  • Some menus and menu items have been moved and re-organized. Most notably, the Street Adventure menu item has been moved out of the Main Menu into the various Track Selection menus.
  • You can now select street adventures in Single Race mode.
  • You can now use the horn when your engine is starting and when you are finished.
  • When another player finishes their vehicle will now properly decelerate instead of driving on into infinity.
  • Added a new theme song and updated the menu to make use of it.
  • Improved the sound of automatic gear switching.
  • The vehicles of other players in a multi-player session will now sound (almost) exactly as it sounds to the one driving it.
  • Connecting to a server in multi-player mode should be a little faster.
  • Replaced the old mini-crash sound.
  • Your brake sound will no longer cut out under a certain speed but instead fade away smoothly.
  • The default for the Curve Announcement setting has been changed to Speed Dependent.
  • The computer player artificial intelligence has been updated to be more realistic.
  • The effect of the difficulty setting has been made more noticeable.
  • You can now race up to sixteen laps.
  • Whenever a sound in the soundpack cannot be loaded it will now be replaced with a generic doing-sound.
  • Computer players use their horns a bit more often.
  • Added Laps Only to the Automatic Race Information setting.
  • The game now accepts considerably more joystick buttons to assign to the various functions.
  • The number of laps you raced is now taken into account when reading and writing highscores. This means that if you race a new record on three laps and then race the same track with a setting of two laps, you will make yet another new record.
  • Computer players on the Normal and Hard difficulty level will now decrease their throttle when they see a hairpin coming.
  • It is now possible to press the slash-key (/) on the name of a track in the menu to hear your highscores for that track.
  • Added the Top Speed 3 Configuration Tool. This is an updated version of the classic Server Selector. Besides specifying a server name or IP-address for use in multi-player mode you can now also enable and disable tracing. It is highly recommended that you leave tracing disabled unless you're asked to provide a trace log containing debug information.
  • The game now only updates most sounds when necessary.
  • Updated Ogg Vorbis decoder.
  • Program startup time should now be a little shorter.
  • Various optimizations and performance improvements have been made.

You can find the new version on our download page. Please note: Top Speed 3 is the final version of Top Speed. All development is discontinued.