Important: With Tuxeditor you can edit all courses for Tuxracer 1.1, your own courses as well as the standard courses like "forest2" etc. But Tuxeditor isn't able to handle the animated objects yet (e.g. the "rolling stones" in mountain or the moving cars in swiss). If you open a standard course, these objects will not be read by Tuxeditor and of course cannot be stored back. If you have backupped the standard courses, this will not be very fatal. Note that some standard courses (beginner, arctic and glacier) don't use animated objects.

The best way to learn Tuxeditor is to do it by trial and error. Here are only some hints:

1. The course you want to edit must be properly installed und configured for Tuxracer. You can use Tuxmanager, which allows to install additional courses and to create new, blank courses.

2. Open a course by opening the main config file "course.tcl".

3. First you should control and adjust the common course parameters (page "course"). In most cases the default adjustments will be ok. Especially the course angle and the elev scale should be set b e f o r e you are going to edit the course.

4. Editing the elevation structure is similar to painting a greyscale bitmap. Remember that the highest point on the course is white, the deepest point is black. So you have 256 gradations to build your mountains and valleys.

5. Covering the terrain with textures is quite easy. Choose the most convenient transparancy level to see the textures as well as the elevation.

6. To place the objects on the course go to the page "objects". To justify an object click on the object dot in the arrow mode. Now you can adjust the scale, rotation etc. Some objects like trees allow to vary the scale and rotation at random. You can click a lot of these objects on the course, and each of them will differ from the others.

7. You can make the outlines of houses, arches, bridges etc. permanent visible, but this needs a lot of performance.

8. Before you can test your course by running Tuxracer you have to store it. Simply click on the button "save". You do not need to close Tuxeditor, and after testing the course you do not need do close Tuxracer. Keep both programs open and go on editing. But notice: By clicking on the save-button all changed files will be stored without request.

9. In the elevation mode and the terrain mode you can overlay the bitmap with the objects, too (click on the blue herring). In some cases this option may be helpful, but it works very temporal. The objects will be overwritten by your paintings. Doesn't matter - you can refresh the objects by clicking on the button again.

10. There are 10 steps of undo in the elevation mode and 3 steps in the terrain mode.

All said? I hope so. Good luck and many interesting courses.