Handbrake on A
Oh yea totally missed that, though I don't see it included in the tutorial. Trying drifting out, it's a bit difficult but manageable after a time. Doing several races at the hard turns wasn't enough to get nitro that way, I guess I need to do micro drifts too? I wonder since I did get nitro a few times by accident in the first session.
when you restart it puts you in first gear, you have to give it gas when you let out the clutch or else the engine stalls and shuts off
I get that, but it restarts without a countdown so if you aren't holding the gas as you restart you instantly shut off. I guess this track is a bit different though since you can keep lapping without fanfare?
the medals are all loaded in parallel on-demand [to reduce menu load time]
This seems unneeded to me? You could keep the menu loaded at all times so there's no loading to it at all(I do this for all my menus). If that's the case, then you only need to read from file once on startup, then you do a progressive update for the track you just beat, which since the new times are in ram from just completing the course it's not a file transfer. Maybe I'm not seeing the bigger picture, where there's 10,000 tracks and an online course viewer or something that would make this not make sense.
Thanks the explanation of stuff, was bothered that I couldn't figure how to drift all that time.