Development Blog

Add and Conquer

2011-12-30T11:11:00.008+01:00

No, not divide and conquer. Because this post will deal with add-ons in particular. :)

Why are add-ons important? It lets you as a user decide what content you find good enough for the game. Every time the project leaders have to decide on what track or kart they should remove to make place for new ones, they know that they will get complaints. It's just how it is; you can't make everybody happy. But now we actually can, to some degree. Add-ons can be created or uploaded by anyone, so if something gets removed, users can quickly add it to the growing repository of additional content. The only requirements are regarding licensing, which should be one or more Free, preferably DFSG-approved licenses, and the content should not be offensive and suite people of all ages. In other words, content recently removed from the main game should slide right in. Quality or difficulty doesn't matter for an add-on; as long as it works and licensing etc. is okay, it gets approved by the moderators of the stkaddons website.

Stephen (nicknamed sj04736) has steadily improved the website, and it should now have most of the basic features. People can also vote on add-ons there as long as they have an activated account. Why not try some of the additional karts, tracks and arenas available to install from within the game (requires version 0.7.2 or higher)? Or check out the website itself. It's a great piece of work, and Stephen doesn't get as much praise as he deserves, so be sure to send some kind thoughts to him when it all works so smoothly (and when it doesn't, please don't berate him, but file a bug report). ;)

Two yummy pie charts:

As you can see, there's a definite interest in add-ons. If you manage to create a particularly good one, it may even go on to conquer the game! Or, in other words, become part of the default set of karts, tracks or arenas.

Finally, if you like what we are doing, and got some more money to spend this year, why not make a donation? We'd be happy to take some of it off your back in order to further the game. ;)
In addition (or instead), you might want to donate to the awesome TuxFamily site, which hosts all the add-ons plus many other Free projects for no monetary compensation. Ain't that worth a few dollars if you've got some to spare? :)

Will 2012 be the year of SuperTuxKart on the desktop? Let's wait and see. ;)

Plans for milestone 0.8 and later

2011-11-25T15:32:00.004+01:00

Here's a list of planned features for SuperTuxKart version 0.8 and beyond (0.8.1, 0.8.2). This may not be a complete list (it's based on the milestones page), and plans might change later on, but these are some of the main goals:

Improve physics (skidding, pushing other karts aside)
Career mode and/or different difficulties for challenges
Eye candy (light effects, light maps, normal maps)
Game replay
Ghost races
Reverse tracks
Online highscore lists

Only some of this will be ready for 0.8, while others will come in subsequent "minor" releases. Also, a release might be done even if not all the features are met, while other times features might come in earlier than anticipated. So these are the main goals, but they are not 100% set in stone: other things might be added, or some of this might get postponed.

Some of this are already in the works. Improved physics is the most important feature for 0.8, and hiker has already started on it. Meanwhile, Auria has added normal map support, so for track makers this is a feature to consider.

We do not know when we will be ready for a release, but as a rough, unfounded guesstimate, maybe we'll see the 0.8 release 6-12 months from now on, give or take a few decades. ;)

What we do know, is that we'd love to see more people join in on this project in any area they are interested in. So if you want to help out with your skills, please get in touch and we'll try to get you started. :)

SuperTuxKart 0.7.3 released

2011-11-14T02:35:00.003+01:00

4 months after SuperTuxKart 0.7.2, 128 tickets later and a truckload of changes, we are proud to present the latest and greatest version, SuperTuxKart 0.7.3. The big surprise is the very late-minute inclusion of the very beautiful Minigolf track by Mac, thanks for the contribution! (Don't let its childish look trick you however as it is a very challenging track :)

The biggest changes since 0.7.2 include :

New Minigolf track
New Zen Garden track
New Subsea track
New Island battle arena
New Suzanne kart
New graphical effects
New weapons 'Swatter' and 'Rubber Ball'
Added Thunderbird as race referee
3 Strikes Battles now displays lives as spare tires
Improved bubble gum
See progression during Grand Prix
Improve physics for tall karts (e.g. Adiumy)
Lots of bug fixes
Improved kart control at high speeds
Better placement of rescued karts
Transition track-making to blender 2.5/2.6

So now head to our downloads page, enjoy and give us a lot of feedback on the forum!

Joerg and Auria

SuperTuxKart 0.7.3 Release Candidate 1 is now out!

2011-11-02T02:55:00.001+01:00

Hi everyone,

I you many of you were very impatient for 0.7.3 to come out, and it's true that it took longer than expected, but it's now here... or at least a release candidate :)

Compared to STK 0.7.2, this new version brings the following improvements :

New Zen Garden and Subsea tracks
New Island battle arena
New Suzanne kart
New graphical effects
New weapons 'Swatter' and 'Rubber Ball'
Added Thunderbird as race referee
3 Strikes Battles now displays lives as spare tires
Improved bubble gum
See progression during Grand Prix
Improve physics for tall karts (e.g. Adiumy)
Lots of bug fixes
Improved kart control at high speeds
Better placement of rescued karts
Transition track-making to blender 2.5/2.6

Get your copy from https://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/files/SuperTuxKart/0.7.3-rc1/ . OSX, Windows and source packages will appear there in the coming minutes, and more may come.

Please test and report any problem you find! However please note that it is recommended to use the forum and not blog comments to report bugs.

Delays, delays, nothing but delays

2011-10-08T09:57:00.007+02:00

No, I am absolutely not impatient. No siree. But I don't blame our dear developers even though 0.7.3 ain't ready yet. There are reasons for that, and the game continues improving anyway, but there aren't any good reasons for me to let a whole month and more pass by before writing any news here. So you can verbally slap me with trouts and other sea creatures as much as you like. But the less aquatic of you are probably impatiently waiting for the news, so let's get on with the showcase.

Subzeanne

Big content news: we've got a new kart, 'Suzanne', in the game. The female monkey from Blender replaces 'Gooey', and it was about time we got our modeling tool of choice represented in the game. Thanks a lot to Céa for a very good-looking kart. :)
Speaking about sea creatures: the above is a new track. A new spin on an old track, one might say, as it's aptly named 'Subsea'. However, it's completely made from scratch by Rudy, with several possible routes featuring ships, sea monsters and other things that makes your mouth water. The landsharks will be happy to know that you're inside tubes, so for the most part, you won't get your proverbial feet wet.

Thunderbird with traffic light(n)ing

Thunderbird debuts as a start referee, with the heavy burden of a traffic light (normally, he deals with mail, I believe). Remember, red means "Hold it", yellow means "Start the race already" and green means "Step on it!", no matter if it's pedals or your keyboard. Thunderbird plays the traffic warden with style, and gracefully rescues you as well in case of "accidents". Thanks to Kinsu for the model and animaton, and fraag for its texture.

Littering the paradise

The Three Strikes Battle mode got a new arena, 'Battle Island' by qubodup. It's his first track, and a good one too, so if you want to try modeling for STK, why not try making a battle arena? :)
You may wonder what the tires are there for. Well, they show your current amount of lives, and if you lose a life, you lose a tire. The last life is represented by your normal tires, so when you (or preferably your foe) are eliminated, you lose your 4 regular wheels! Awesome, innit? :D Thanks a lot to both Auria and new contributor khonkortisan for making this possible.

In item news, the bouncer should now work mostly as intended, but we're looking for another model for it which captures the idea of bouncing better. So if you want to give it a shot we'd be happy to hear your suggestions and see your work.
The bubble gum behaviour has changed a little, so instead of stopping in an instant, you get slowed down rapidly and leave a pink trail after you, while losing some control of your kart.
Also, the bomb gives now an audible tick-tock sound, so you can hear if someone with a bomb approaches from behind, and take the necessary steps to avoid it. But don't hit the bomb kart with a swatter, since that will trigger the bomb and both will explode.

Misc: A better rescue system is now in place, but so far it's been largely untested. It should be much better in some situations now, which will hopefully help remove some player frustration.
The physics has been tweaked to work better with tall karts, and it should be quite notable on certain karts (e.g. Adiumy).
You can now see how far you've progressed in a Grand Prix, thanks to new contributor Termina1.
Conflicts in keyboard configurations are now marked in blue thanks to new contributor redskull.
The exporters for Blender 2.59+ has gotten considerably faster and also better in terms of documentation in the STK Blender panels.

As you might have noticed, there are a few new contributors submitting patches for various parts of SuperTuxKart, and this is highly valued as such contributions often provide the extra little feel of professionalism to a game. If you're a budding programmer, why don't you take a look in our bug tracker and see if there's anything you can help out with? Any help on closing the dozens of bug reports that are in circulation is much welcomed. Or, if you want to work on something else, that's awesome as well, but please drop us a line and tell us what you're working on, in order to prevent duplication of efforts.

Oh, you probably want to know when 0.7.3 will be out. "Soon" is the best answer I can give. ;)

To arms!

2011-08-15T14:29:00.007+02:00

Good and easily understandable weapons for STK has always been hard to come up with. Some of them have been revised over the years, and we've gotten a few new and original ones as well, mainly the plunger and the item swap weapon which are quite unique to SuperTuxKart if I am not mistaken. With the change from 0.6 to 0.7, a lot of the core of the game was rewritten, and thus there were fewer major gameplay changes. Now that's mostly out of the way, including major bugs (right?), so more focus can be shifted towards refining the game and adding more elements to it.

Recently, we've gotten two new weapons to play with in the game. The first one I've touched upon in an earlier blogpost, but now that funto has more or less finalized it, it's time for a screenshot.

New swatter weapon

Earlier I said that it would swat incoming weapons as well as other karts. This is no longer the case, since defending as well as attacking would make it too powerful. So for now it's mostly an offensive weapon, with the added benefit that it will remove any parachutes or bombs on your back. It's a very nice weapon, so thank funto for that. :)

We're also getting a rubber ball weapon from hiker, which will eventually replace the anchor weapon. The rubber ball bounces along the track, aiming for the leading kart, with the added nasty of squashing karts along the way, which will slow them down temporarily. Hopefully it should be easier to understand than an anchor popping up from nowhere, as the rubber ball will bounce more rapidly as it's reaching its goal. We could use some nice sound effects, both for this weapon and the swatter, so contributions are welcome. ;) The appearance of the ball might still change, so I'm not posting a screenshot of it this time.

Speaking of sound effects, qubodup has started a "STK Sound Liberation" project, which aims to replace dubiously licensed sound effects with DFSG-compatible samples. Also, there are other sound effects that could be improved, though as far as software freedom goes, the dubious ones should ideally be replaced quickest. But SFX quality should be mostly up to par or better than the current effects, since we don't want to sacrifice quality unless it's really necessary. Anyone wishing to join this good effort can head over to these forum threads: STK Sound Effect (SFX) Liberation and Unhappy with Sound Effects?

Flames and motion blur when using a zipper. Doesn't that sound awesome? Well, we've got it now!

That Blur game can go home and cry ;P

Apologies for the frame refresh spoiling the screenshot a bit, but you get the general idea. The motion blur is the work of funto, and the flame effect is by Auria. Combined the effect is really nice, and adds an extra sense of speed while you're zipping merrily along the track.

So that wraps up this... oh wait! There's one more thing!™
Isn't that...? Oh yes, it is. A new nice, juicy track by samuncle. Isn't it beautiful?

Zen Garden

It will most likely replace Secret Garden for the upcoming 0.7.3 release. The old garden will be put in addons, readily available to expand the track selection if you so wish.

0.7.3 will hopefully be the last version in the 0.7 series. It's been fun, but we need to move on to more great changes for the 0.8 milestone. :D
No, I do not know when 0.7.3 will be ready. But with all these changes, it can't be too far away. ;)

That wraps up this blogpost, and I'm getting myself outta here™ before I get hurt by the masses running to the site like real, dedicated fans. ;)

SuperTuxKart 0.7.2 final released

2011-07-15T14:59:00.005+02:00

Hi all,

we have just released SuperTuxKart 0.7.2:

New features:
* Added in-game addon manager
* Fixed major memory leaks
* New Snow Peak track by Samuncle
* Improved star track UFO by Rudy
* New Beastie kart.
* Show when you get a highscore
* Improve gamepad configuration under Windows (add ability to tell gamepads apart)
* Various other tweaks done and glitches fixed

The files can be downloaded from our download page.

We hope you will enjoy this release! Feedback as always is welcome (best in our forum).

SuperTuxKart 0.7.2 RC2 has been released

2011-07-07T02:13:00.001+02:00

Hi all,

we have just release a second release candidate for 0.7.2.  Compared to 
the first release candidate the following issues have been fixed or been 
improved:

* New beastie kart
* Crash on linux when using the addon manager.
* Fixed crash when stk couldn't save downloaded addons.
* Potential crash when removing addons.
* Properly detect system language on Windows.
* Incorrect rescue (e.g. on city track)
* End of race music was fixed.
* Updated translations, minor improvements to some models

You may found packages at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/files/SuperTuxKart/0.7.2/

Please test and provide feedback!

PS: For people still on 0.7.1, here the important changes in 0.7.2 again:
* Added in-game addon manager ( see http://stkaddons.net/ )
* Fixed major memory leaks (STK will no longer saturate your memory after half a dozen races)
* New Snow Peak track by Samuncle
* Improved star track UFO by Rudy
* Show when you get a highscore
* Improve gamepad configuration under Windows (add ability to tell gamepads apart)
* Various other tweaks done and glitches fixed

Addondum

2011-06-28T19:54:00.003+02:00

Let's see if I can survive even when using such a blatantly silly pun in the title. ;P

This month we saw the first release candidate of the upcoming 0.7.2 release, the main news being the integrated add-on manager. But unfortunately, there were a bug causing the game to fail in creating the necessary folders, creating some headaches and confusions as to what the problem were since not everyone had this problem. One could say that it's not good to release a version with a new feature when the new feature didn't work, but that's why it's called RC, right? We can probably expect a new RC in not too long, which will include the fix.

We've got a new kart in STK; meet Beastie, the mascot of FreeBSD. Thanks to funto for providing the kart and icon.

The big news, however, is the work on a new weapon for STK. That's right, we get even more fun gadgets to use on our opponents. The details and the model for the weapon is still a work in progress, and thus I'll only give a brief description. The hammer/swatter is a close-range weapon which you can mount on the kart by firing it. It will then stay for a set amount of time, or until it finds a target to hit. The target can either be a close-running kart, or a weapon on its way to hit you. If it's a kart, the hammer/swatter will hit it making the kart look squashed, and its top speed is halved for the amount of time it is squashed. If it's a weapon, it acts like a shield and defends against it ( but it only stops explosive weapons thus far). Hard to take a screenshot of how a weapon works, and the current model is only a placeholder, so I guess you'll just have to try it for yourself when the time comes.

There has been a lot of progress in the track and kart exporters for Blender 2.5x, such that most tracks and some karts have been converted to 2.5 in order to fix potential issues with the exporters and for setting up the .blend files to use the new integrated STK properties panel. This doesn't mean it's 100% safe for widespread use, but it's getting there.

Add in the usual bunch of misc fixes, and I think you get the picture: SuperTuxKart only gets better and better. ;)

SuperTuxKart 0.7.2 RC1 has been released

2011-06-14T03:45:00.001+02:00

SuperTuxKart 0.7.2 RC1, the first release candidate towards version 0.7.2, has been released.
This version features the following main improvements :

Added in-game addon manager ( see http://stkaddons.net/ )
Fixed major memory leaks (STK will no longer saturate your memory after half a dozen races)
New Snow Peak track by Samuncle
Improved star track UFO by Rudy
Show when you get a highscore
Improve gamepad configuration under Windows (add ability to tell gamepads apart)
Various other tweaks done and glitches fixed

You may found packages at https://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/files/SuperTuxKart/0.7.2/

Please test abundantly and report any problem you may have found :)

(In)visible improvements and addons

2011-05-10T21:00:00.012+02:00

So, what happens for the time being in the exciting world of SuperTuxKart? Well, we're on our way to a 0.7.2 release, and while we can't give any dates for when it will be released, things look good. The previous releases had a few nasty bugs, mainly related to memory usage, so if you've found yourself short on memory after playing for a while there's reasons for that. Those should hopefully be fixed for 0.7.2.

The porting of the Blender scripts to be compatible with the Blender 2.5 API has also been prioritized, as well as misc fixes such as a recent audio code cleanup and an improved GUI layout algorithm. So while there's been less visible changes to the game lately, activity has continued in other areas. One pet peeve of mine related to the "Random track" button has been fixed - before you could often get the same track twice in a row, whereas now you'll always get a different one. And icons in the GUI, such as the zipper icon, will appear much smoother across various resolutions in the next release.

While I stated that less visible changes has occurred, there hasn't been a complete abundance either. Check out this funky new flying saucer in Star Track:

And this new version of Snow Peak, courtesy of samuncle:

As far as I understand it, samuncle intends to do some more work on the new Snow Peak. Thanks a lot for your continued effort on refreshing our tracks, samuncle. :)
While this is a very good improvement for a number of reasons, I still like the old track, so I will be sad when the old one gets thrown out. But I don't despair, stkaddons is here! sj04736, or Stephen for short, and hiker has been working a lot to ensure a better experience for addon makers and consumers.

So, what is this stkaddons anyway? stkaddons.net will be the site where addon makers can upload their creations (or others, if the licensing is correct), making them available for install from inside the game itself. The integration between stkaddons and the game will hopefully make it easier for artists to show off their work, and users will be able to install additional content without any kind of manual interaction. The addons will be moderated and checked for content and licensing before they become available in-game, so you will be able to let your kids play STK without fear of nasty surprises in the form of explicit addons. There is still no guarantee that stkaddons will be 100% safe (for example from malware), but we will do our best to ensure a good experience.

Will stkaddons allow for any license whatsoever? No - since we get free hosting from the awesome TuxFamily network, and they only do this for free software projects, we require all addons (including every texture and object in an addon) to be under a free license. To stay on the safe side, we recommend to use DFSG-compliant licenses. You are still free to share your "he told me it was okay to use it" type of addons, but not on the addons site we're supporting, and thus it will not be available to install without leaving the game. So please, consider licensing before you start on an addon.

Does STK "phone home" to stkaddons? Not yet. We might introduce some additional features such as ratings of addons, requiring some data to be sent from your computer. This would however remain completely anonymous. And for the time being, this is not an issue since it hasn't been implemented.

Is the site ready for uploads yet? Technically yes, but we would like you to wait with that since it isn't 100% ready. It will most likely be ready for 0.7.2, so when that is out, please share your (properly licensed) creations there.

Lastly I will mention that the domain supertuxkart.net points to the supertuxkart.sourceforge.net domain, while stkblog.net points to this blog. Hopefully a bit easier to remember and more convenient. :)

SuperTuxKart 0.7.1b Released

2011-04-21T16:35:00.001+02:00

Somehow a major bug managed to creep into the 0.7.1 release, preventing you from completing challenges. Therefore we have just released SuperTuxKart 0.7.1b, which fixes challenges - please head over to our downloads page and sorry for the inconvenience!

Joerg and Auria (April 21, 2011)

0.7.1 for Windows Hotfix

2011-04-16T17:08:00.000+02:00

Hi everyone,

unfortunately there was a major problem with the first Windows installer posted on our website : it included a version of STK that did not include all of the 0.7.1 commits. So if you are on Windows and you downloaded 0.7.1, please download again - the new package is called 0.7.1a.

Sorry for the inconvenience

SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 Released

2011-04-15T17:14:00.002+02:00

This release features the following improvements over version 0.7 :

Particle (smoke, splash, fire) and weather effects
New Fort Magma by Samuncle, new Shiny Suburbs track by Horace
New Beagle kart by wolter, new Emule kart by Kinsu
Added internet news
Support for live language switch
Added optional minimal race UI
Temporary invincibility after being hit
Added support for full-screen anti-aliasing
Clearer multiplayer setup
Renamed many tracks to nicer names
Basic level-of-detail (LOD) support
Debug features for track makers
Update to bullet 2.77
Replace more sounds to be DFSG-compliant
Fixed character names that contain non-ASCII characters
Full RTL (right to left) support
Various other tweaks done and glitches fixed

Thanks to everyone who made this release possible! Please head over to our forums for feedback
Joerg and Auria (April 15, 2011)

Hotfix for 0.7.1rc1 released

2011-04-06T22:51:00.003+02:00

After a few bug reports it was revealed that there was an error in the Windows installer of SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 Release Candidate 1. A new installer has been uploaded to deal with the problem. Other operating systems should not be affected.

SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 Release Candidate 1

2011-04-04T16:57:00.001+02:00

SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download at https://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/files/SuperTuxKart/0.7.1/

This release features the following improvements over version 0.7 :

Particle (smoke, splash, fire) and weather effects
New Fort Magma by Samuncle, new Shiny Suburbs track by Horace
Renamed many tracks to nicer names
Added internet news
Added optional minimal race UI
Added support for full-screen anti-aliasing
Support for live language switch
Clearer multiplayer setup
Basic level-of-detail (LOD) support
Debug features for track makers
Temporary invincibility after being hit
Replace more sounds to be DFSG-compliant
New Beagle kart by wolterh
Fixed character names that contain non-ASCII characters
Full RTL (right to left) support
Various other tweaks done and glitches fixed

Note that all translators should now head over to Launchpad and make sure all translations are as complete as possible!

Thanks to everyone who made this release possible!

Joerg and Auria

[April's Fools Joke] SuperTuxKart terminal version announced

2011-04-01T10:04:00.006+02:00

With the upcoming 0.7.1 release so near comes a huge and unexpected surprise: SuperTuxKart will soon be ported to work entirely in non-graphics mode, allowing it to be run without any graphical environment. The reasons our project leader hiker gave, are:

...it will allow SuperTuxKart to run even on the weakest of computers, tablets and other mobile devices, and make testing even easier. In the future, we may consider porting it to a web interface, but that will most likely be after ver. 1.0 (patches welcome ;) ).

Here's a work-in-progress screenshot of the non-graphics port, aptly codenamed "ASCII Kart".

As you might (or might not) have noticed, this is a screenshot of Tux in 'Tux Tollway' with 19 AI opponents. I suffered no graphics slowdowns, even with all effects enabled, and this goes to prove how efficient ASCII Kart is. There are still some issues; namely rank, lap, time and map displays needs to be shown more clearly, but as the port progresses these problems will be addressed.

Can't wait to test it on my cheapo netbook! :D

Graphical goodness

2011-03-23T19:03:00.002+01:00

Time for another update, and since I didn't mention all the details last time, I can tout a few of them as new this time. Clever, don't you think? ;)

Track updates

There's a new water splash effect, so instead of bouncing on water you sink a bit through, see a nice particle effect and hear a splash sound. In XR591, there's a special acid splash instead. :)
Thunder and lightning has been added to 'Around the Lighthouse', and Fort Magma has new music made by Kalsan. Thanks!

A bunch of the tracks have gotten new names. 'Farm' is now called 'Bovine Barnyard', 'City' was renamed to 'Shiny Suburbs', 'Canyon' = 'Coyote Canyon', and 'Snow Mountain' is now 'Northern Resort' - easier to differentiate from 'Snow Peak'. Love them, loathe them, or do you have other suggestions? You're welcome to share your thoughts.
Also, the screenshots for the tracks have been updated, with a more over-view style instead of racing perspective.

Graphics changes

The tabs in 'Options' screen have been changed to an "accordion" layout, making space for the new UI tab where you can change theme and toggle "Show FPS" on or off.
And the graphics option have a nice tooltip showing what you do when changing the level in the effect slider. New stuff also include anti-aliasing and vsync (vertical sync) support.

Blender 2.5 is said to come out soon, so work has started on making the export scripts for STK work in 2.5. This is not a trivial move, and it might take some time, but it's being worked on now, which is good. LOD support has been added to SuperTuxKart, so track makers should take that into consideration since it will allow the game to run better on lower-end hardware, e.g. netbooks. LOD (level of detail) is already in use for karts, so only karts being close to you is animated, which should save some graphics power.
Furthermore, debug features for artists will also be featured in release builds from now on, so you won't have to get the latest SVN version in order to debug your track. However, it's not enabled by default, so you'll have to edit your STK config file in order to use the features.

Gameplay changes
If you've ever been hit three, four or even five times in a row, you might be glad to hear that after a hit, while the stars are swirling around your head cakes won't aim at you, nor will bowling balls explode on you anymore. You're still not invincible from area effect, so if you are close to another kart you might be affected by it being shot.

The minimal race GUI, which I touted last blog post, seems to be more likely not to become the default, at least not for 0.7.1. Which is a shame in my opinion, since the current GUI is way crowded, and minimal race GUI contains just the info you need. People reacted quite strongly against it, which was a bit surprising considering they hadn't even tried it yet. It has received larger map icons and player highlighting, which makes the map easier to use:
Disclaimer: this view is solely my own and does not represent the STK team in any way.
But for now, your beloved bloat is safe. ;)

Some inspiration from this was taken for multiplayer view, so there are no action messages in multiplayer anymore. They simply take up too much space and distracts the view. Imagine playing 3- or 4-player split-screen with all those messages coming in all the time.

Engine sounds and a few other sounds now takes kart amount into play, which makes multiplayer more enjoyable since the engine noise isn't doubled as before. The engine sounds themselves have also been replaced with better licensed ones, and this applies to a few other sounds as well. We're still hunting for a bowling roll and bowling hit sound with better licensing, so we some day can become fully DFSG-compliant.

Other misc changes lately include the move to Trac for bug reports, conversion of a bunch of textures to jpeg to save space, and the move from gettext to tinygettext.

And that's that. If I have forgotten anything noteworthy, well, drop me a note. ;)

Confidence in the contents

2011-02-28T23:35:00.008+01:00

My usual belated blog post is here, and since so much has been happening since 0.7, I'll just have to summarize a bit and possibly spread the news over a couple of posts instead of just throw them all in this one. But I'm pretty confident you'll be happy with the contents. :)

First we'll cover the big news: 'City' is back, better than ever before, 'Fort Magma ' has been totally remade, and oh! Did I mention they look gorgeous?

New 'City' and 'Fort Magma'

Courtesy of horace

Courtesy of samuncle

Woah, slow down a bit! What's all this? New nitro bar and zipper icon? And more spicy looking nitro? And what's that kart in 'Fort Magma'? Is it new?
To all of that I have to answer: yes, yes and yes! The kart is called 'Beagle', and it's a brand new one made by wolterh.
Now you might want to ask where the kart rank display, speedometer and action messages went. They went the way of the dodo. Or, to put it more elegantly: in an effort to minimize UI clutter and better the racing experience, these elements were removed. As of now, it's still not the default look, but it is quite likely to become so in the near future. We would love some feedback on this, as it's always risky to remove stuff people are accustomed to, and this might very well become at least somewhat configurable. But we will listen to any praise/criticism and try to balance this well for the upcoming 0.7.1 release.

So, is there any more graphical goodness to come in 0.7.1? Well, take a look:

And if you're afraid that your computer can't handle the extra load, you will find a new slider in the graphics options that'll hopefully make STK still run perfectly well. You can now even have kart animations only for the human players, thus removing the overhead of animating all the AI karts in sight.

Separate entry for multiplayer in the menu

That's right; after having numerous people asking for help in regards to setting up multiplayer, Auria went back to the drawing board and put forward a more clear and easy comprehensible solution. And maybe this menu entry could be used for more in the future? ;)

You may have noticed the new bottom 'panel'. As of now, you can change language in-game at runtime. Pretty handy, especially when taking screenshots. ;)
Also, the loading notice has a connection to the new feature of installing addons in-game. While hiker has been working quite a lot with this, and certainly deserves more than a few lines, I'll keep it short and simple for this time and cover it more later. The thing is; we need your help.

We are looking for a server side programmer capable of PHP, generic web design and compilation of STK (we'll provide help with this if needed). The game side of things is mostly in place, but the server side will need a bit of work, so if you have the aforementioned qualities we would really like to hear from you. You'll have to cooperate either through the mailing list (preferred), and/or IRC. Installing addons in-game might be delayed until 0.7.2 or later, depending on how quickly we can get someone with the necessary skills and time to help.

That's it for this time - there have been more changes, but I'll try to fit them in another post instead of making this one a mile long. Take care, and let us hear from you regarding the latest changes - using the forums is a great way to do it as we can keep the discussions organized.

STK 0.7 release - reception

2011-01-31T23:51:00.003+01:00

With the major release of SuperTuxKart 0.7, which had been worked on for about a year and a half with lots of rewrites, refactoring and new features, we all got quite excited to see how it would be received by the public. Here's a few user responses on this blog:

Chon said...

Great work! It looks amazing and my kids are playing it non-stop.

Anonymous said...

I've just installed STK on Ubuntu. You did an awesome job. The game has improved a lot - especially the graphics. Now there's a game to show off on Linux. The challenges are great - not easy to solve, but not too tricky to get annoyed. I've been following the blog for about a year. Now I received a wonderful Chrismas present. You guys rock!

Charlie said...

It's incredible how far SuperTuxKart has come since being the Game of the Month project. Keep up the good work and thanks for all the effort you guys put into it!

Anonymous said...

Frickin' amazing! I was initially thinking "meh, Linux games are nothing to shake a stick at, and this has only semi-decent graphics judging by the intro screen." Then I started to play it, and I realized that it has some /really/ fun gameplay. As of 0.6.13, I'm impressed by the physics, the not-too-serious gameplay, the creativity of question mark boxes and kart interactions, intelligence and semi-realism of the computer-AI, and (sad as it is that I have to say) the stability. Great game!

Thank you *so* much for putting some clearly quality effort into this sucker.

Okay, I admit it; I took some of the most positive replies I could find, but apart from some bugs, the release was very well recieved, especially by recurring STK players.

The release was also covered by many other news sources, including our friends over at the FreeGamer blog. Linux Gamecast quickly made a review of RC1, while the bulk of traffic we got was from increasingly well-known OMG! Ubuntu blog and its sister site, Ubuntugamer.
I can't remember all the various sites spreading the word, but to all of you: thanks a lot! :)

Despite some gamepad issues, some bugs and some well-deserved critic, I think we can call SuperTuxKart 0.7 a success. But there's still lots to do, so if you want and are able to help us make this game better, please contact us. We don't bite. ;)

SuperTuxKart 0.7 released

2010-12-21T16:11:00.003+01:00

After over a year of work, dozens upon dozens of new and fixed bugs, over 3000 commits, a lot of work from artists, restless testing from our faithful followers, and translations from contributors all over the world, we are thrilled to offer you SuperTuxKart 0.7 just in time for Christmas!

This release is using irrlicht for graphics, and features:

new GUI
kart and track animations
new and improved tracks, karts, and items
shortcut/alternative way support for tracks
Asian fonts
many many bugfixes.

Enjoy! Joerg and Auria

P.S: A gameplay video is in the making, and should hopefully be available soonish.

SuperTuxKart 0.7 release candidate 2 released

2010-12-15T18:46:00.002+01:00

We have just uploaded a second release candidate. Major changes include :

Asian fonts are now included in the package.
Several memory leaks have been fixed (which had caused problems with music and sound effects)
Some tracks were improved to disable unintentional shortcuts and incorrect rescues.
Some minor bug fixes.

We also updated the translations, but not all translations are complete yet. We encourage all translators to complete their translations, as the strings are now frozen.
Testing and feedback welcome!
Cheers, Joerg and Auria

Well you know what to do: test it and comment on it like if it was the real deal - 0.7 is coming really soon now, possibly within the next week or so! And we need your help to find the odd little bits here and there that needs to be fixed. Please report your findings in STK´s bug tracker, and mark them as high priority if it´s a crash or similar show-stoppers. This way, our dear developers will ensure that it gets prioritized and hopefully fixed before 0.7. Keep in mind that they need as many details as possible, so please include in your report system info, where it happened, if it´s reproducible, and backtrace if you have one.

Let´s help make 0.7 rock solid! :)

SuperTuxKart 0.7 release candidate 1 released

2010-12-01T19:58:00.003+01:00

As many of the most avid STK followers already know by now, SuperTuxKart RC1 has just been released:

After a burst of changes and fixes in the last few days we have finally released a first release candidate for 0.7: http://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/files/SuperTuxKart/0.7/
The changes compared to 0.6.2a are too numerous to list, main points would be:

New graphics engine
New GUI
Kart and track animations
New and improved tracks, karts, and items
Shortcut/alternative way support for tracks

Compared to 0.7alpha3 challenges, unlocking etc. should all work now (though there is still a debug icon in the menu, which will be removed before the final release :oops: ).
The one thing missing are translations - since we added strings even in the last week, the translations are not up-to-date yet. If you want to help out with translations have a look at our wiki page: we are basically using launchpad, details are at http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Translating_STK.
Feedback as always is welcome - be it here, or bugs in our tracker
Cheers,
Joerg, December 1, 2010

So if you haven't already, grab it, test and leave your feedback. :)

Toward new heights

2010-11-29T20:04:00.001+01:00

It's been over a month already since last blog post? How time flies! And you can too! Proof:

Remember, this is "strictly" (sure, sure Auria) for debugging purposes only, and as such it will not be possible in release mode. I will not say anything if you do other things with it though, but you will need to build SuperTuxKart in debug mode to get this feature. I will leave it to you to find the keys. ;)

There has been lots of other misc. changes, such as updated textures, new music, lots and lots of bugfixes, minor features for track and karts exporters, small track improvements, etc.
Steep slopes are now impossible to drive on due to a new "height-aware" threshold on friction.
Also, the speed values for difficulties have been tweaked slightly, so overall the gameplay should feel a bit faster now.
Furthermore, it's now possible to disable animated karts, and/or animated effects and scenery. This will ensure that 0.7 won't raise the hardware requirements over 0.6 (it will be enabled by default though).

But the big news is the new 'Scotland' track made by Canis Lupus. Thanks a lot for the effort. :)

Behold! :D

Track makers should be aware that you are currently strongly recommended to use the latest SVN versions of the tracks, b3d exporter and track exporter scripts when making changes or a new track. Same goes for kart makers, if you replace "track exporter" with "kart exporter". This is because the current SVN version is incompatible with alpha3 exporters.
asciimonster has made a new browser for track-wide properties and materials, which will probably be the best way to keep track (no pun intended) of all the different properties you can apply. You are welcome to test and give feedback in the relevant thread.

The Grands Prix and challenges have been reworked in order to comply better with STK's current state. We hope you will find them fun, and all constructive feedback is welcome. The developers plan to get a Release Candidate out "very soon", which you can test as if it was the final release, since it will be pretty close to that. So prepare for some quality time with your favorite FOSS racer. :)

Shifting Tracks

2010-10-22T15:20:00.007+02:00

[Insert clever and witty intro which lasts longer than it would have taken you to finish 99 laps in 'The Beach' track with 'mr. Iceblock']
Now that's out of the way, and we can concentrate on the changes since last time. ;)

New track

Interesting things are happening in the track department. Old 'Beach' has been thrown out in favour of a new track: 'Hacienda' by Jean-Manuel Clemencon (samuncle). Big thanks for making such a good track. :D

SuperTuxKart: it's all the rage

Fort Magma has been converted and has undergone some changes in the tunnel part - it should be much less of an eye sore, but it's harder to drive through without getting very badly disfigured (okay, not that bad). Hot lava is hot!

Oliver's Math Class has been converted by rudy85; thanks to you for that as well.
Secret Garden got some subtle, but important changes as well, including a larger bridge with added fence, and a widening of the track to make it easier to drive (still hard enough to be fun, don't you worry). These changes are courtesy of no other than conso, which we have dearly missed for many months now - welcome back! :D

The Island has been widened quite a lot, which means it is now a much easier track (I'm keeping the old one - narrow means battling for rank). Some other less significant changes has been made as well.
Some cosmetic changes for Shifting Sands also sneaked through the back door.

Regarding gameplay, times are a'changing here as well.
The bonus item handling has been changed so if you for example have a cake and then pick a bowling ball, you'll end up with the bowling ball and not keep the cake. Whereas if you have a cake and pick up a new one, you will of course get an extra as before. You can also get more than one item in a box now if you're lucky. That means you can pick one box, get 3 cakes, and get rid of three opponents at once! (Right now, this last feature doesn't work properly, but a patch should soon be underway.) The behaviour of these features can be changed in the configuration file if someone wants to play around.

'Follow the Leader' mode has now a formula which picks time interval between each elimination based on how many karts you choose, so if you choose e.g. 15 karts the first elimination will happen later than if you choose 5. Also configurable in the config file. Please help test to find good values if you are in the mood for it. :)

Adjustment of speed settings and reintroduction of terrain slowdown have caused some unwanted gameplay effects; whereas some are fixed the rest will hopefully be fixed soon. Help with tuning the values is welcome.
Race interface has been changed a little to use less space, which is important for splitscreen racing, but also to reduce clutter. No radical changes, but they help. :)

We have got several new kart animations by rudy85 too; thanks a heap for helping with this.
And now for the sad news.
'mr. Iceblock' has been booted from the game (by utilization of a winter shoe). Actually, we drove him into the lava in Fort Magma, just to be sure. Don't cry; there are more ice blocks in the sea.

The STK categories at freegamedev.net, have at time of writing 200 topics and 2300 posts combined. Yay for round numbers, and if you haven't contributed to those numbers, we would be glad to see you over there. ;)

I'll just finish off this post by saying that I know what you will say: tl;dr

SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 3

2010-09-24T14:46:00.002+02:00

In a bit of a rush, we finally managed to get a third alpha release of the upcoming 0.7 release out. You can download binary packages for Windows and Mac from the usual location at http://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/files/

f you are compiling stk yourself note that it is recommended to use the current "1.7 stable" irrlicht branch, see http://irrlicht.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/irrlicht/branches/releases/1.7 (which will become the next 1.7.2 release). While STK mostly still works with irrlicht 1.7.1, bugs in this irrlicht version can result in some texts not being displayed, and even in crashes (mostly in menus though).

This version shows very much work in progress, but we are getting closer to a release candidate. Hopefully this will motivate some artists to help us port/create a few more tracks, while we are busy fixing bugs and tuning some settings.

Particularly, behold the new track I (Auria) have been working on lately : the farm track

Known bugs or issues are:

Many challenges and GPs will be unavailable due to not-yet-converted tracks.
The 'networking' menu is used to test the win/lose GP and unlocking animations. There is no networking support in 0.7 alpha 3 (nor will there be any in 0.7).
Not all tracks have collectibles.
AI needs tweaks, it does too good a job with slipstreaming, and on the other hand doesn't handle multiple items good enough.
Disabling or enabling sound effects may require to restart STK for the change to apply correctly.
Switching to windowed mode from fullscreen may fail on linux.
If you build with irrlicht 1.7.1, you may get an empty race paused screen and/or a broken "feature unlocked" screen.
If you do not exactly cross the lap line your lap may not be counted.
If you add too many AI karts, the race may not start properly.
In the kart selection screen, large karts might get clipped on sides.
Kart animations not complete.
The game may not allow you to configure bindings for gamepads other than the first one.
The "slipstream" (follow behind a kart for a while with the slipstream effect showing, and you will get a zipper-like boost) and quick-start feature (press start very quickly _after_ 'GO') need tweaks.

We are looking forward to feedback, bug reports (please check with our bug tracker at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=202302&atid=981038 first), suggestions (though we are pretty much feature frozen for 0.7), and some contributions :)

Enjoy!

Joerg and Auria

Zipping along

2010-09-13T18:36:00.003+02:00

Well, better write before the backlog becomes too big; things have been moving fast lately. :D

First off is the new race results screen, which should be easier to follow and additionally has a nice animation when playing Grand Prix. First, it shows the usual race time table, just as after a quick race. But afterwards it switches to a new table where it shows how many GP points you have, plus how many points you just earned, and increases the GP points accordingly. Then it moves all GP participants to their new positions. And if you don't want to wait for the animations, you can press the fire key to continue. Apart from me forgetting to sync to VBlank, and some erroneus points, everything looks great.

Crescent Crossing, Skyline and The Island has been converted, but except for The Island they are without collectibles for now. Thanks to sj04736 for The Island conversion. :)

Also, some music has been removed, and some has been added/updated. I'm not going through that now, since things may change more later, but as for the updated song, Krobonil should get our thanks for his update on the music for 'Snow Mountain'.

EvilTux was simply too evil to include in STK, so in order to get a more child friendly game, he was thrown out, beak first. Only kidding! The real reason was that we got a better replacement, so while EvilTux himself was thrown out, another driver got his kart. Meet Konqi, the cheerful KDE dragon. :)

Yet another gameplay detail has been added recently, namely slipstreaming. When a kart drives behind another one for a while, and then moves out of the slipstream, it recieves a speed boost and can then overtake the kart in front.

Furthermore, we've got a new code contributor, jmimu, who made the kart rank icons on the left show attachments, and animate when a kart overtakes another, or when it explodes. Rank is also added as text, in case you use more karts and there isn't enough space to show all kart icons. Also, the human player icons got a nice rounded outline, similar to what the 0.6 branch had. But this one is animated!

Clipping of text, especially for some languages which might have used more space than the English counterpart, used to be an issue in the 'Help' screens. Well, no more! Take a look at this:

Essentially, the widget resizes when being in focus, while the rest of the widgets gets hidden under it. That's splendid when space is too small, and translators need the extra line in order to translate the widget text in a good way. As you probably have noticed by now, I'm using another theme instead of the default 'Glass' theme; this one is both lighter and easier on the eye, and I happen to like yellow/'Peach'. ;)

And, lots of bug fixes and general niceness increase has happened as well. One of the minor nice things I'd like to mention, is that STK now shows a loading screen as fast as possible when starting the game, before loading the rest of the game. So now you won't get angsty because the GUI doesn't show up in the first few seconds.

Well, that's about it for this time, if I haven't forgotten anything important. Remember: you too can get involved in the game and in the community. :)

Nifty details

2010-08-19T15:29:00.004+02:00

So, after the usual excuses for not updating the blog, I get on to the actual news (me being late is not news), which makes some of this rather old news, but since you may not have heard it, I'll take the chance.

More tracks have been converted to be 0.7-compatible, one of them Snow Tux Peak, thanks to Varivar. It has been somewhat updated as well, with a cool sound effect when driving on the bridges somewhat before the finish line, which showcases a new feature for track designers: terrain spesific SFX. Also, XR591 is now compatible (not sure who I should credit), with a couple animations in as well. On a related note, the Hexley kart has been converted, and more kart animations have been added.

I should really turn on "Sync to VBlank" when I take screenshots to avoid these jagged texture-update edges. Will try to remember it for next time.

There are now intro, last lap and outro music jingles in the game, created by Dundersylt. Thanks!

A new track ending camera is now for testing in The Lighthouse track, where the camera no longer just follows the kart, but is at a fixed position from a distance and changes angle and position continuosly to follow the kart. Pretty neat!

Furthermore, another gameplay detail has been added. The first two karts to press the accelerate button after "Ready, Set, Go!" will get a little boost as a reward. Fear not; the computer controlled karts have been tuned in order to make this feasible for us mere humans as well. ;)

Throw in a good amount of code cleanup and bugfixes, and we should hopefully, according to the Grand Master Joerg, be a little closer to a beta/RC release. Expect that to take some weeks, though.

I'll try to bring more news in not too long, in particular about the addon manager the always awesome xapantu has had in the works for some time, and also a new race result screen the aforementioned GMJ is doing. So prepare yourself to be awe-struck. ;D

Contribute - it keeps getting easier

2010-07-06T22:20:00.004+02:00

First of all: sorry for the lack of updates recently, but since development time has been scarce for the developers, and interesting news have been somewhat lacking I haven't had much to write about. Not to say there hasn't been things going on; it certainly has. But some of it might fit better later, and other things aren't significant enough, so I put several of those together in one post instead of making many small posts. Also, Auria has sometimes beat me to it - thanks for keeping the community informed that you and hiker are still working to improve this awesome game. :)

With this, and perhaps later postings, I hope to encourage those of you who might want to contribute to STK, but don't know what to help with, don't have any special skills, or just don't feel you got enough time to do so.

What needs to be done?
Simple answer: a lot. This thread at the FreeGameDev forums shows a small overview of things you can do, and some guidelines on how to do that.

It is no secret art is the most wanted contribution. Especially track improvements, and totally new tracks are very welcome. Better music is also a recurring discussion topic on the forums, and while sound effects and icons are mostly covered there's certainly room for improvements (better licensed sound effects in some cases).
This seems rather big and demanding by first glance, but in reality, there are lots of small things you might be able to improve on. Converting the rest of the remaining tracks is an important task, which the developers hopes the community will help with, thus reducing workload for them. While you're at it, why not replace a model or find a better texture/improve the texture tiling somewhere? It's the small things and annoyances that often count in the user experience.

I am not an artist, programmer or whatever. I can't contribute.
WRONG! There's plenty of things you can do nevertheless, if you keep looking for them. Translating STK is one of them. A rather new translation method introduced recently by xapantu is utilizing Launchpad to translate SuperTuxKart from English to whatever language(s) you are using. It's a simple process which almost anybody can do, how little or how much they want.
Providing feedback and/or ideas are also ways to contribute. The forums are a great place to do so; however, in the case of negative feedback, try to have a positive tone overall. Your post have better chances to be seen as the friendly advice it really is, and the developers will probably consider it more seriously. (In most cases, the reason for why things are as they are, is the lack of man- and womanpower.)

Another thing STK could have in the future, is a storyline with animated scenes. While creating a good storyline isn't easy, it should be possible with dedicated people teaming up and collaborating in order to make SuperTuxKart a more story-driven, coherent game. Other long-term ideas can be found at this wiki page. If you are up for leading a task, let the devs know, and they will certainly help to get something rolling. But be aware that they have other, more critical aspects of the game they want to spend their time on as well.

Last, but not least: let people know about STK, and let them know we want their contributions! ;D

Summer Penguin

2010-06-08T02:38:00.010+02:00

Summer is drawing on, so what's going on with STK?
Not as much as we'd wish, I'm afraid; for one, I'm now working full-time for an internship; Joerg was on a trip so didn't have time to do much work. Still, work has continued! You can first and foremost see that new tracks have been converted to the 0.7 format :
(also notice the improved translucent speedometer and new character icons by yeKcim. Thanks yeKcim!)

An animation scene has been added for when a player loses a Grand Prix :

The GUI has been extended so that it is now possible to select a skin. As an example, here is the peach skin by Dakal. This way everyone will have a look to their liking :)

Furthermore, the key bindings screen has been substantially improved. It is now possible to define keys specifically for menu navigation, this means you no more have to use "accelerate" to go up and "brake" to go down!

And, finally, support for RTL languages like Hebrew has also been added through the use of fribidi (the linux and windows build systems are not yet updated for it, however).

SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 2 released

2010-04-29T17:45:00.003+02:00

Hi all,

we have just released a 2nd alpha release of SuperTuxKart 0.7. This version has a lot of improvements and bug fixes, more tracks, some new icons and animations. It is still pretty much work in progress, and we would love to get some feedback - e.g. does it work for you, performance, do you like the new icon style or prefer the old one, bug reports etc. Note that due to the missing tracks GPs and challenges will not work, and you will get a lot of warnings/error messages printed - so please don't report issues related to challenges or GP not working ;)

We would also hope that people could help us to port more tracks - it's not that much work, and would help us to get SuperTuxKart back to where it was, especially getting the challenges and GPs back. Also more icons would be nice - and of course always more tracks.

Enjoy!

Downloads can be found at sourceforge : https://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/

Applying bugfixes and makeup

2010-03-30T23:01:00.010+02:00

Hi again folks; long time no see! Don't worry, neither I or the project are dead. In fact, I got myself a new computer, and SuperTuxKart marches on towards alpha 2. But as I guess you aren't here to read endless intros (and this post is a big one), I'll just get on with the good stuff. ;)

SuperTuxKart has passed the 5000th commit mark, and quite a lot of the ones after have been bugfixes. Auria joked that they broke everything and then fixed it again, and that's essentially much of what's been going on. This proves that refactoring and rewriting code is absolutely not trivial, so while we non-programmers might think 0.7 should have been out already, that is not reasonable with only 2 main programmers, which are already devoting quite a lot of their spare time to this project. You may see what I'm getting at: the STK team would like to have more members. Please have a look at this page on the STK wiki and see if you can help out with anything; we'd be happy to get you on board! :)

But there's more news than just bugfixes! Take a look at the new "makeup"!

Distance fog

Gloomy, isn't it? Tracks can now have skyboxes and fog with the appropriate color for each one.
Also, you have one example of some new in-game messages which indicates when a weapon has been used successfully. It's particularly useful for the new swapper weapon, so you don't miss out if you don't have sound effects enabled.

New parachute

Well, the title says it all really, except for the maker's nick: MiniBjorn. Thanks!

Cave preview

This screenshot is shown for four reasons. First of all, it shows that 3 Strikes Battle is added back in. Second reason is that karts now have power on all four wheels, so-called 4WD, as opposed to before when only the back wheels mattered. Besides allowing me to climb extreme heights, it helps stabilizing the kart with the physics, hopefully making the physics less troublesome in certain circumstances.
Third reason is that the cave has been retouched by MiniBjorn, adding some plants and shadows using a texture over the vertex.
Last reason is for telling that anisotropic and trilinear filtering have been added to STK. These are techniques to make textures look better at different angles, if I understood Wikipedia right. I don't know whether it matters in this screenshot or not, and I'm too lazy to disable it, drive up there again and take another one just for comparison. Go to Wikipedia if you're interested in that. :P

Talking about physics, it's been tweaked a bit to make driving (and jumping) better. The suspension has been hardened, so it should no longer feel like you are rocking around on a boat. Furthermore, flying in mid-air is better now as well; I won't go into detail as you aren't doing that much with the current tracks.

The coordinate system has been changed so y=up and z=forwards, and without getting technical about it, it means some tracks have to be re-exported. Hiker said the track exporter will most probably not change that dramatically again, so people wanting to export tracks should be good to go now. But make sure you are using the latest track exporter, and not the one shipped with STK 0.7 alpha 1 - it's terribly outdated. Having said that, you should keep an eye on this page if you're interested in helping out, and update it if you start to port/improve a track.

Last thing I'm going to mention (not that there hasn't been more changes, but if all details were covered the post would probably be a mile long) is the adding of a guest account, which will make occasional multiplaying a bit easier since you don't have to add a new player when you just want a quick race against a friend coming for a visit. Furthermore, the most used profile should be picked automatically when you are choosing a kart, so you don't have to be that careful getting the wrong profile.

Hopefully SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 2 will be just around the corner - until then, take care and play some STK if you get the time.

Towards alpha 2

2010-02-24T18:04:00.013+01:00

As you may have noticed, I'm not Magne (Arthur_D) ;) This is because he had hardware failure, and was thus unable to publish a blogpost in reasonable time, therefore I offered him to make one. So here we go!

I can now officially confirm it to everyone, we are planning to release an Alpha 2 of SuperTuxKart "soonish"! The main reason is that many bugs/limitations were found in the track format used in alpha 1; therefore, we will release Alpha 2 so that artists can keep up to date with the changes.

So what's new since last post?

First of all, support for Grand Prix is now back in STK 0.7.

This is not visible on this still, but the image shown for each grand prix is actually cycling images of the tracks within the grand prix.
When you click on one GP, you get a further description of it, just like for tracks :

EDIT: Oh, the screenshot above features a track name "Nolok's castle", but don't get too excited, it's a small test track I did to get familiar with the track exporter, I'm not much of a 3D artist myself ;)

Now, along with GP, I wanted a nicer ending than what we had in 0.6. Here is what it looks like now (not that it can't change) :

Apart from Grand Prix playback, the "3 Strikes" battle mode is also back, with a new battle arena by Thomas Oppl and Wayne Dennis (Pixel_2ACF3) : The Stadium

Furthermore, Joerg started adding support for end-race animations.

It is not yet sure what form this will take in the release; but for now, in the latest development version, you can see the elephant wave his arms and trunk in the as he wins the race

Finally, one minor thing, I added a 'loading' screen, so that the game does not seem unresponsive when loading a big track (which was especially annoying in GPs, when you clicked 'next' and it seemed like nothing happened)

To conclude, there were other misc changes :
* Fixed compilation issues caused by spaces in the font's name
* Conversion of files from LISP to XML format, including Grand Prix files and music files
* The track format has another change : removed support for 'description', added 'designer' instead
* Many fixes to Follow-the-Leader game mode
* Added back the infamous plunger-in-face attack from 0.6
* Added support for camera-far value to be exported. This was used in the mines track, to get a few more FPS by not rendering far away geometry
* Added back bullet debug view. Debug view can now be switch on and off during a race (ctl-F11). This debug mode will be useful to debug physics.
* irrlicht 1.7.1 was released, which fixed potential performance issues (though nothing huge was measured in STK so far)
* Many translations were updated
* And of course much code cleanup and bug fixes!

Feature chest, track exporter, new weapon ++

2010-02-05T13:39:00.005+01:00

Okay, very much happening lately, so sorry if I forgot anything. I will try to summarize without leaving out important details - just notify me if you think I missed something.

New 'feature unlocked' animation

Looking for the treasure everywhere, even in the darkness of outer space, you finally got what you were looking for. The Beach track! :)

The track exporter has been updated again with most notably this feature (quoting the commit log message):

The lap counting line is now automatically taken from the first line of the main driveline.
This avoids problems of the kart order being inconsistent (if the driveline edge and
new lap line were not identical).

This means the current tracks probably got two lap counting lines now, and that would need to be fixed at least before the stable release.

The translation "mother-file" has been updated as well, to include a few strings that were missing. Furthermore, translations for Ukrainian and Simplified Chinese has been committed to SVN.

What's this?

Well, I can tell you. It's an improved version of the Lighthouse track, with actual light coming from the lighthouse! :D
But it's not only that. Presenting a new weapon (drum roll): the item swapper!
It works in this way: when using it, all good items (bonus boxes, nitro bottles) are turned into bananas, and all bananas are turned into bonus boxes for a limited amount of time. It makes the tracks more unpredictable, something I personally like. Use it before your opponents collects bonuses, and they will find themselves eating bananas like monkeys. But be careful: it affects you as well!

Last, but not least, Irrlicht 1.7 has been released. It fixes a couple of graphical issues present with STK + Irrlicht 1.6. Many thanks to the Irrlicht developers for always cooperating well with the STK developers.

Converted tracks, new fonts and translations

2010-01-25T18:55:00.007+01:00

Surfing the wave of recent activity, I got to share some of the great news with you all. First off, I want to show you the new 'Old Mine' track. There are so many changes that it doesn't resemble much of the previous version, with the exception of environment.

The 'Old Mine'

This track, made by Varivar, includes a few animations as well, but I won't spoil it all for you. ;)
Another track, 'Snow Mountain' was converted by sj04736, with a few smaller changes, including animating the balloon. To all track converters: look at this wiki page and be sure to update it if you're working on converting/improving a track in the main package. Replicating work should be avoided. Also, the forums is a good place to gather information and ask questions.

Furthermore, we got ourselves a couple new fonts and a couple less (removed old ones), and new translations.

New Latin character font

Don't bother trying to read this, unless you're Norwegian or speak another similar language. ;)
The font had quite a few characters missing, so they were added afterwards, and hopefully they look okay for the ones using them (none of them in the screenshot). We also added another font which supports Russian, Greek and Simplified Chinese. If needed, more fonts can be added.

Regarding translations: we got all the mentioned languages covered (some is work-in-progress) already except for Greek. Feel free to ask any question you might have, about translating, track making/converting, or anything else at the forums. We look forward to further contributions and activity. :)

STK 0.6.2a vs. STK 0.7 alpha 1: a brief comparison

2010-01-19T22:30:00.016+01:00

With the fresh release of SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 1, and several people wanting a comparison with the current stable version (0.6.2a), I had no choice but just do that. :)
I'm using 0.6.2 without the 'a' at the end, since I'm not running in an environment affected by the bug in 0.6.2 that made the 0.6.2a release necessary.

SuperTuxKart 0.6.2

Karts (11): Tux, Wilber, Gnu, Elephpant, Eviltux, Gooey, Hexley, Mozilla, mr. iceblock, Nolok, Puffy.

Tracks (18): Amazonian Journey, Around the Lighthouse, The old mine, Oliver's Math Class, Racetrack, Shifting Sands, Skyline, Snow Mountain, SnowTux Peak, Star Track, Tux Tollway, XR591, On the Beach, Canyon, City, Crescent Crossing, Fort Magma, The Island.

Single Player game modes (6):
Single Race (3) \
--------------------{ Quick Race, Time Trial, Follow the Leader.
Grand Prix (3) /

Multiplayer game modes (7):
Splitscreen with 2-4 players; same modes as in Single Player, with the addition of 3 Strikes Battle under Single Race.

Dependencies:
PLIB, SDL, OpenAL, OpenGL, LibOgg, LibVorbis.

SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 1

Karts (13): Tux, Wilber, Gnu, Elephpant, Eviltux, Gooey, Hexley, Mozilla (updated), mr. iceblock, Nolok (updated), Puffy, Adiumy (new), Pidgin (new).

Tracks (3): On the Beach, Around the Lighthouse (updated), Amazonian Journey.

Single Player game modes (3): Normal Race, Time Trial, Follow the Leader.

Multiplayer game modes (0): none.

Dependencies: Irrlicht, OpenAL, OpenGL, LibOgg, LibVorbis.

The above is of course subject to change, but this is basically what you get when you download the alpha version. Not quite exact though, as you get heaps of other improvements in the alpha. I will list a few of them here (sorry if I forgot something important):

Completely rewritten GUI with support for user-made skins.
Rewritten control system with support for several keyboard/gamepad configurations and easy "press 'fire' to join"-approach in kart selection menu.
New driveline system using quads with support for multiple paths.
Improved camera adjusting to kart speed.
New kart and track format and exporter with support for animations (IPOs and skeletal animation).
New visual goodies (see previous postings for screenshots and details).
Changed driving behavior: "reversed" slipstreaming (follow another kart closely after gaining some speed, and then drive to one of the sides to get a speed boost); skidding penalty (you lose some engine power when skidding; AI don't get this at difficulties 'Intermediate' and 'Expert'), and karts turn more sharply without using the 'sharp turn' key.

Now, that wasn't so bad after all, was it? Regarding content isn't the alpha version appealing, but regarding possibilities is it a real beauty! That is why the alpha version isn't recommended for people wanting to have a fun time playing (well, besides the bugs and features missing); the content will come if we, the players, helps creating it! The old tracks also needs to get exported to the new format, and the STK team would really like some help in that regard as well. And while you're at it with opening the track in Blender - why don't you see if you can improve it a teeny bit? Let's make the 0.7 version of SuperTuxKart rock!

PS: Sorry for the excessive use of the '!' sign, but I got a little carried away. Who wouldn't? ;)

SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 1 is out

2010-01-15T18:45:00.002+01:00

SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 1 released

After some long work porting SuperTuxKart to a new graphics engine, irrLicht, as a replacement for the old and outdated plib, we are proud to announce the first alpha release of the SuperTuxKart 0.7 development branch.

Important
This version of SuperTuxKart is an Alpha release, and as such is not stable nor complete, and is meant solely for artists to port tracks over to the new format. This binary can be used by the curious to take a look at where STK is headed, but is not meant to be used to play.

Bugs

Before reporting any bug, make sure to check the list of known TODOs at the following wiki page : [1]

For more information, take a look at the forum thread

--Auria 17:11, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha soon to be released

2010-01-14T01:14:00.006+01:00

I'm using a slightly over-used citation now: "Good news everyone!", but it fits just too well!
SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha will soon be released. We have no date, as always, but it should be really close; just a few days away hopefully.

Now, for the disclaimers and "terms of use". ;)
First off, the alpha version will be nowhere near completion. There is still much missing, and you should expect lots of "rough edges", so to speak. The release is meant for artists so they can be able to convert their and other's tracks into the new .b3d format, and start making use of the new features available for track designers; take a look at these two articles for details:
New drivelines and Track exporter.

But, you might not be an artist and you still want to try the new version. Go ahead; we won't stop you. Furthermore, you can help out with translating SuperTuxKart; we're happy for every language we can get.

Unfortunately, there are no support for 32-bit length characters used in many Asian languages. This is being worked on, but the alpha version will not include this feature.
The regular font includes many special characters used in other languages, but the orange header font does not have many of those, as it's a custom created font. Please use this forum thread for special character requests; they will be added gradually when Auria get the time for it.

If you want to give bug reports, you'll have to do it using the bug tracker. And before reporting any bug, check that it's not listed already in the bug tracker or in the ToDo. The alpha version will probably have quite some bugs, but many are known already and posting duplicates will just give the devs more to answer and less time focusing on getting them fixed. Also, please include as much details as possibly needed (OS, if it's reproducible etc).

Now, the alpha is not released yet, but I'm writing this as a preparation.
As you see I've skipped the usual "STK w/Irrlicht:" in the post title, since the STK w/ Irrlicht branch has been moved to trunk. There will be no possibility for confusions from now on.
So, what has happened in trunk lately?

Not much to look at, as translation and other matters are in focus at the time. But, one significant change has been made. We've got a changed version of 'The Lighthouse' track.

New version of 'The Lighthouse'

Exciting, isn't it? Many thanks to Stephen Dunn.
You'll also notice that the speedometer is now displayed properly, and while it's been in the SVN version for quite some time, I want to thank Yekcim for the new speedometer icon.

Well, I could probably go on and on about SuperTuxKart, but you'll soon see what I mean anyway. And remember; if you can help with anything - code, 2D art, 3D art, SFX, music, translating - don't hesitate, just do it! ;)

"STK w/Irrlicht": Blow up, or be blown up!

2009-12-29T22:33:00.008+01:00

The community is waiting intently for SuperTuxKart version 0.7, but there's still much to do before the team will make a stable release. Fortunately, there will be an alpha release out quite soon (no exact date, but a week or two has been mentioned as an estimate). Do not expect the alpha release to be ready for regular players, as most content and some important features will not be there. The alpha release will be for artists who can help out with converting old karts and tracks to the new format with Blender, and perhaps start creating their own stuff with the new features included.

While we wait for the alpha version, it's time for some special effects!

New explosion effect

Just a quick demonstration of it against the wall. Pretty hefty explosion I'd say, so I'll be more careful next time I go bowling.

Recently hit star effect

No, we're not talking about a pop star with a recent hit, but just an effect indicating when a kart was recently hit by an exploding weapon or banana item. One could say it's pretty useless, but it's eye candy; eat it! :P

Furthermore, time trial now works as usual. We also got a final lap message patch from Stephan Hillebrand; thanks.

The Irrlicht branch has been moved to trunk, so the current location is https://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/supertuxkart/main/trunk. Please wait for the stable version of STK 0.7 if you do not intend to contribute. The team is not giving general support for the svn version.

There's been a lot of bugfixes and undercover changes recently as well thanks to the STK development team. Why don't you register yourself at the new forum and tell them how great of a job you think they do? And if you've got some contributions to make as well, it would be even better. ;)

"STK w/Irrlicht": Icons, fonts and more

2009-12-06T22:00:00.012+01:00

About time for another update, isn't it? I know many of you have eagerly awaited some news, but there simply hasn't been much to write about in the last weeks. Right now there's only two developers on the main game, and they could really use some help. If you want to help out, register yourself at the mailing-list(s) or get in touch in another way, though the list is the preferred place for development talk.

On to the news.

New fonts and improved animation

At the top you can see a brand new font, in style with the new STK logos, and on the bottom button the font has also been improved. Much better. Now the animated box also contains something, in this case the Gnu "kart".

New icons

There are more new icons than just the tab icons in this screenshot, but they are spread across several screens, and you'll see them later anyway. Just wanted to give you a little feeling of what they look like. There are still font issues, but they're probably not top priority right now.

In other news, a few more turning animations made by Rudy85 and exported by xapantu have been included. And a binary for STK 0.6.2a for Solaris-SPARC has been made by Ten Little Indyans. You can find it at the SuperTuxKart download page, as usual.

The forum admins at FreeGameDev, where our subforums is located, has decided to use different forum software and leave the old forum read-only. The old posts were unfortunately unrecoverable. The old forum is still in use, but expect this to change soon. If you want, you can register at the new forum, though there aren't many users there yet. (Please note, that http://freegamedev.net and http://www.freegamedev.net are not the same. Stick to one of them if you want auto-login to work as expected.)

Whew! I hope I didn't forget anything. If I did, leave a comment, and I'll include it in the next update if it concerns the main game.

---------------

Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.2a) of SuperTuxKart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Some news

2009-11-07T23:40:00.005+01:00

Sorry for the lack of news lately; this was caused by several matters, including my own laziness. ;) But I got some news for you. While the developers have been busy fixing bugs and doing other, more important things not related to STK, there is some stuff I haven't presented yet.

Pause dialog

All the buttons works like intended, and it's possible to go back to this pause dialog after changing the options or looking through 'Help'.

After race menu

As you've probably figured by now, it's possible to complete a race and get the results. While the results for the computer controlled players isn't shown, everything else seems to work.

The SuperTuxKart forums is now located at http://ghoulsblade.schattenkind.net/freegamedev/forum/. The posts that were written before the forum crash is not recovered yet, but work is still going on as far as I know.

I mentioned a few blog posts earlier that we were looking for menu icons. We have someone who are dealing with that for the moment, so if you want to partake with that you'll have to be quick and join the developer's mailing-list and get in touch. There'll be an alpha release of STK ready later on for artists to test and improve on.

---------------

Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.2a) of SuperTuxKart.

Hotfix for 0.6.2 released

2009-10-19T14:54:00.004+02:00

A hotfix for 0.6.2 named 0.6.2a has been released. This hotfix is for Windows Vista/7 only, and makes it unnecessary to run the game as administrator anymore. If you don't want to download everything once more, just replace the 'supertuxkart.exe' in your STK 0.6.2 folder with supertuxkart-0.6.2a-win-executable-only.exe , and then rename it to 'supertuxkart.exe'.

To repeat; if you're not using Windows Vista or Windows 7, you don't need to do anything at all. If you are, and have to run it as administrator every time, this little fix will do the trick.

Edit:

Note that you will lose your settings and highscores (on Windows). If you want to keep your 0.6.2 data: start the new binary and quit. Then copy the files supertuxkart.cfg (for settings and key bindings) and/or highscore.data to $APPDATA/supertuxkart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Fancy stuff

2009-10-12T18:20:00.013+02:00

SuperTuxKart has changed much the last few weeks; sorry for not supplying you with the news sooner. Anyway, here we go.

Ambient lighting test

This test changes the ambient color to light red, and furthermore, it is activated and deactivated by crossing driveline quads! This can be awesome for track designers wanting to spice up their tunnels with different lighting.

Character animation test

If you look closely, you'll see that the character on this screenshot leans towards left while turning left. Compare it to the screenshot above, and you'll see that it leans the other way when turning right. The road for simple animations on the characters, like this one, is clear. Thanks to Rudy85 for the animated model.

Animated cutscene test

Sorry for the somewhat fuzzy screenshot, but the refresh rate made the chest look uglier than it really is. This little animation shows a key for the "Feature Chest" being inserted. I guess it's not finished yet, but it shows what we can expect for STK 0.7. Furthermore, the background texture is also animated.

As you can see, there's more than enough to play with for artists of any kind: sound effect makers, 3D modelers, animators et cetera et cetera. We need your help in order to make 0.7 a milestone in the SuperTuxKart history.

In other news, the development version is mostly ported to work with the new version of Irrlicht (version 1.6).
Also, a SuperTuxKart 0.6.2 binary for Solaris and a binary for Linux-PPC has been made by xeno74. They can be found at the SourceForge download page.

The forum is down due to a hard disk crash, and it has been so for a week. The FreeGameDev staff are trying to save all the posts on the FGD board; take a look at the FreeGamer blog for details and news regarding this issue.

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Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.2) of SuperTuxKart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": New icons!

2009-09-22T22:11:00.008+02:00

Hi everyone! After the great new logo we got, we've just got a set of main menu icons. Many thanks to yekcim for making those. :)
They blend very nicely in with the new logo, don't you think?

There's still a lot more icons needed. If you are interested in helping with this, you can contact the STK crew beforehand to get some advice on what we're looking for, and avoid duplicating work. Eventually, if you're comfortable with it, you can get the latest SVN version of SuperTuxKart and find one/several icons you want to improve. Most icons, excluding the new main menu ones, are only placeholders until we get something better.
We are looking forward to your contribution; icons or otherwise. ;)

---------------

Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.2) of SuperTuxKart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": New logo!

2009-09-12T12:17:00.004+02:00

Hi everyone, just a quick update: SuperTuxKart 0.7 will feature a brand new logo, designed by rastapax. Thank you very much for this. :)

In action

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Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.2) of SuperTuxKart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Track preview updated

2009-09-06T21:39:00.005+02:00

As time goes, the GUI gets better and better.
I've posted a screenshot of the track preview before, but it didn't do it much justice. Now it looks quite good, except for some minor details that will be solved later.

Track preview

In other news, a static binary of 0.6.2 has been created for Linux by Stephen, and a package for OpenSUSE by Dominique. They can be found at our download page.
Edit: A binary for FreeBSD has been made by xeno74, and it can be found at the SourceForge download page.
Thank you all very much. :)

---------------

Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.2) of SuperTuxKart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Player joining

2009-08-30T20:03:00.004+02:00

Welcome to another development update.
A lot of changes has happened under the hood, and as this blog is mainly for the players, I won't go into detail on it. But I want to thank all you developers, and especially our newest crew members for doing such a great job. :)

This time around, I will show how several players can join a game locally.

Two players in the same screen

As the descriptive text at the top says, other players can join simply by pressing 'fire' on their device. In this example, Player 1 had the gamepad assigned, and Player 2 joined thereafter by pressing 'fire' (in this example, the Ctrl key on the keyboard).
The green square shows what kart Player 1 have selected, and the cyan square is for Player 2.
Neat, is it not?

Now, I joined myself, and I'm not that good at multi-tasking that I'll be able to drive two karts at the same time, but anyway we got to wait for the split-screen interface to be recreated.
In the meantime, have fun playing SuperTuxKart 0.6.2, and please report any bugs you might find.

---------------

Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.2) of SuperTuxKart.

SuperTuxKart 0.6.2 released

2009-08-20T13:21:00.002+02:00

SuperTuxKart version 0.6.2 has just been released. This is a bugfix release, meaning that there is no additional or removed content, only improved stability and quality.
Download SuperTuxKart 0.6.2.

Changelog:

SuperTuxKart 0.6.2 (August 2009)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bugfix: The game could crash in rare circumstances.
Bugfix: Restarting a GP (with the in-race menu ESC) would not subtract already allocated points.
Bugfix: A race could be finished with an invalid shortcut.
Bugfix: Playing a challenge after a splitscreen game would play the challenge in split screen.
Bugfix: Items explode over void.
Bugfix: Grass in castle arena slowed down the kart.
Bugfix: GP result showed kart identifier instead of name.
Improvement: there is now 1 sec. wait period for the race result screen, avoiding the problem that someone presses space/enter at the end of a race, immediately quitting the menu before it can be read.

10 000 pageviews!

2009-08-05T13:49:00.003+02:00

Yes, you read that right. This blog have gotten over 10 000 pageviews and over 6300 visits from 83 countries. "Now, who cares?" you might ask. Well, it proves to me that there are actually interest in regular updates about the SuperTuxKart development. But we would never have come this far without all you faithful readers; thank you for following us. :)

Furthermore I would like to thank our project leader hiker for leading the development; without him I don't think STK would have existed in the shape it's in now. And a special thanks goes to Auria, for helping with the blog layout, giving extra information here and there and proofreading my posts.

Now, if there's anything you readers want changed in the blog, you got the chance to tell now. Perhaps the regularity of postings, what topics we cover and so on (yeah, I know, correct information will help a lot; see my previous post for a bad example ;)). I can't promise to please everybody, but we'll try to do our best.

Bugfix release 0.6.2 planned [UPDATED!]

2009-07-28T01:30:00.007+02:00

EDIT: Sorry everyone, I was concluding too quickly. After writing to our project leader hiker, I got this answer:

If we get confirmation that the 'sudden crash' bug is fixed, and Auria and myself have time, we'll do a .2 release.

Thus, don't count on it, and I am very sorry for this incident. I did not intend to create hopes for something that might not happen. Next time around, I will make sure if a new branch means a new release.
Let's hope 0.7 will come soon to replace your disappointment with joy.

ORIGINAL MESSAGE:

Because of some minor bugs, one of them regarding the plunger item, a new bugfix release has been suggested by the SuperTuxKart team. One of the reasons behind this decision is the upcoming version of the popular Linux distribution 'Ubuntu'. 0.6.2 will probably become the last version of the SuperTuxKart 0.6 series.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Race details

2009-07-21T22:56:00.009+02:00

Okay, I'll admit that the previous blog post wasn't that informative, so this time I'll try to give more info, and less blah blah.

In-race GUI

As you can see, the timer, kart positions, minimap and lap counter have been added, as well as FPS reporting and countdown at start, and so forth.

Another thing is the boxy and ugly look of the track. This is because karts/tracks/objects now need to be exported with normals included in order to get proper smoothing, which most stuff doesn't have at the moment. So for all modelers wanting to create for 0.7 and beyond: export everything with the normals included in your b3d file - if you have questions about this, please look at the wiki pages or ask at the forums.

Also, xapantu has made a kart exporter for the Irrlicht version of SuperTuxKart, which can be found in this forum thread, together with details on how it works.

Lastly, but not leastly, we have got some help with the plunger and cake by david, making them easier to use with success in the game.

Now it might seem that SuperTuxKart got more than enough contributors, but that just isn't the case - there are only two main contributors at the moment (maybe more in some time), so we are always looking for more programmers, modelers, musicians, donators or simply useful feedback.

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Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.1a) of SuperTuxKart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Player math

2009-07-20T00:40:00.005+02:00

Welcome to the first update this month. There have been so many changes since last time that I'll give you some of the news now, and the rest of it later, so stay tuned. :)
You may wonder what "Player math" was supposed to mean. It doesn't have with "Oliver's Math Class" to do, but good guess.

"Players" screen

Here we do the math: adding and subtracting and multipl(a)ying... erm, at least the first two. It impacts the kart/profile selection screen now as well.
Not only that, it's now possible for another controller to join the game as another player, though work has just been started on the complicated matters of offline multiplayer. Online multiplayer is, as you might know, not scheduled for SuperTuxKart 0.7.

In other news, there's been a lot of code cleanups, work on the new driveline system and animation support, optimizations in the menus and so on. Most of this is quite a work in progress, but as I said, there's more news to come.

---------------

Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.1a) of SuperTuxKart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Previews in the menu

2009-06-28T21:07:00.009+02:00

Hi fellow SuperTuxKart fans, time for another update on the current development version. Don't get too excited yet; the developers are working on some cool new features, but most of the features of earlier versions needs to be rewritten as well.
And I'm not covering everything that happens on the development side.
But I'm starting off with one well-known feature.

Kart preview

Tux is spinning around in a smooth animation, showing off his great kart, like in 0.6 and earlier. The other karts aren't ready for this yet, but it looks promising. BTW, the black rectangle behind the kart isn't supposed to be there; just a bug showing up on my computer only as far as I know.
As you can see here as well, the old background picture (the checkerboard background) is now replaced by the one made by elisee.

Track preview

This pops up when selecting a track, showing a proof of concept. "High Scores & Track Info" will obviously be replaced with... guess what: high scores and track info.
"Track 1" will be replaced with the actual name of the track.

I was asked to mention that "there is now support for deciding which edges are smooth and which are not, allowing for better shading". Not completely sure what that means, but modelers wanting to create for 0.7 should bear this in mind when they are making models.

Most places in the world have mid-summer now, and vacation, so that might impact somewhat on the speed of STK development. Whether it'll be in a positive way or not, time will tell, but it might turn both ways. Personally, I'll be away for a couple of weeks now, but as I'm not a developer, just a "reporter", it'll only mean that you might not see another update here in a while.

"Sun is shining,
weather is sweet.
Makes you wanna move
your dancing feet."

Happy summer to everyone! :D

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Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.1a) of SuperTuxKart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Racing

2009-06-12T23:41:00.005+02:00

Hi, and welcome to another update on the Irrlicht branch of SuperTuxKart.
While screenshots of the menu is interesting, most of the time you'll probably be racing in STK 0.7. So this time I'll show you a couple of in-race screenshots.

Racing at the beach

As you can see, AI karts have been reimplemented, and work has been started on the new driveline system as well. The screenshot above is unfortunately quite skewed due to lagging; the computer I'm using isn't the best. But you get the general idea. ;)
Btw, the kart I'm driving (the closest one) is the improved version of Nolok.

"Street" burning by the lighthouse

Work is underway for different particles for different terrain. Here, the sand/grass texture shows smoke when skidding on it. It's just a proof of concept; in the end skidding here will most likely show sand or grass particles, while the smoke will be used when skidding on the road. Splash effect when driving into water is among the goodies this feature will bring.
Btw, the kart I'm driving here, is Pidgin, the replacement for Penny. Penny will probably end up as an add-on.

Another thing I want to mention, is that compiling the Irrlicht version is somewhat tricky, and driving around is currently very unstable. So if you don't plan to contribute and/or you're not comfortable with compiling on your system, it's strongly recommended to wait until things have settled more down. One of the developers compared the current development version with a building site, where the materials are slowly being put together, forming a larger and better building than the previous. Continuing the analogy: if you are going into the building site, expect some falling objects and unsafe areas. But if you have some knowledge, it can work as a safety helmet, protecting you from the worst disasters. And... um... what was I talking about again? Better get some sleep....

Another update on "STK w/Irrlicht"

2009-05-27T22:38:00.008+02:00

Some days have passed, and it's about time to let you know we're still alive.
New, visible features are of course most exciting, so that's what I'll cover this time as well - sorry devs, we all know you have to do lots of boring work too, but it's not that easy to take screenshots of solved bugs. ;)

The kart selection screen

What "works":
Everything as far as I've seen. Some of the karts have been revamped, for example Nolok. It looks a lot better; he got a cooler looking kart more in style with his nature. :)

'About'/'Credits' screen

I was thinking of writing 'What "works:"' here as well when I realized there isn't much to do in here.
Nonetheless, you can lean back and enjoy a nice animation showing if not all, then most of the contributors to STK. The animation is simple but smooth; I've proposed adding an option to stop and/or change back and forth the different "pages". It's on an internal ToDo list, but obviously it's not top priority - if you want to help out with this or anything else, you are very welcome to do so. Just be sure to contact the developers first - preferrably via the mailing list - in order to avoid duplicating work and to get some coordination.

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Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.1a) of SuperTuxKart.

Quick update review on "STK w/Irrlicht" branch

2009-05-08T21:44:00.008+02:00

Well, time for another review. Don't expect a world of a difference yet, since the devs have been really busy with other matters for a while. Fortunately, things are still improving, slowly but steady.
Okay, let's peek into a couple of screens.

The 'Options' screen

What "works":
Turning volume on/off, and up/down. Support for changing this with gamepad is lacking should work at the moment.
The video settings needs more work.

The 'Race Setup' screen

What "works":
Only normal race mode. As far as I know, changing the difficulty has the same impact on speed as in 0.6.1a, though it's not that easy to notice since there's no competing karts yet.
You wonder what's up with the font? Well, font handling is under development, and it's harder than expected, so for now it's rather messy. Don't worry, it won't stay like this forever. ;)

Different camera handling is being worked on as well, but exactly how it's going to behave in the end is not decided yet.
And, SDL is not in use anymore. It's no longer necessary, since Irrlicht and libOgg+libVorbis are going to take care of the SDL jobs for SuperTuxKart 0.7.

---------------

To sum up, there's still much work to do, and to all possible contributors - come on, join in, we need you! ;)
Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.1a) of SuperTuxKart.

Did you know? 10 facts and claims about STK

2009-04-25T22:55:00.010+02:00

Did you know that

STK is ranked as 219 in "Games" at SourceForge, and the amount of SourceForge downloads is 503 802?
a search at Google for "supertuxkart" results in around 106 000 pages?
the SuperTuxKart forum has in total 3644 messages inside 308 topics?
this blog has over 2500 pageviews?
version 0.6(.1a) is considered to be the first fun version of SuperTuxKart by its project leader?
the developers wants to blur the "MarioKart" and "TuxKart" stamps, making STK a game more on its own?
there's even a Facebook group named "SuperTuxKart Addicts"?
SDL will be dropped for 0.7?
the 0.7 version will feature at least one new track?
YOU can make a difference either by contributing to STK, or by giving a donation?

[No Joking!] Work on the irrLicht port

2009-04-15T22:58:00.011+02:00

I'll now post my long-awaited review of "STK irrLicht" progress, with a few screenshots.

First, let's take a look at the main menu screen.

What "works":
'Race', 'Options', 'Help' and 'Quit'.

Visually the green hover circle animation (yes, it's a small animation) is too glossy, and the STK developers would like some ideas/contribs on hover. Most of the icons will probably be replaced too, so contributions are highly welcome.

The 'Help' screen

What "works":
Everything, but some graphical change is still needed.
Notice the "Back to main menu" button - I think it got a neat look. :)

The track selection screen

What "works":
Almost nothing. Every track icon you click on leads to the same level. (Addition by Auria: the reason behind this lack of functionality is simply that at this time, we have only 2 tracks converted to the new format! watch the forums, once we believe the track setup is stable enough we might ask for help with converting all tracks and karts to the new format :) )

But as a show-off it's certainly interesting, as it shows how track selection might be in 0.7. Notice the small arrows which will later lead to more tracks, as well as the different tabs at the bottom. The kart selection screen also got tabs to deal with different kart groups.

Racing in revision 3386

What "works":
Driving around, items, nitro and playing with gamepad.

Not too much to see yet - I guess some of you may be disappointed by the looks, but remember changing from PLib to irrLicht isn't done in a day. The developers know how much is missing, and they are working at their own pace to make STK 0.7 better than - not worse than - SuperTuxKart 0.6.1a.
Small addition by Auria : Also, consider this is almost a total rewrite in the graphics area, therefore we are starting from nothing, so we first need to get to the plib level before going beyond ;)

Regarding the "burning trees", it's only a bug caused by trying to implement explosions - quite a rare sight! One of the funniest looking bugs at the moment.

And by the way; "works" means that it kind of works, though it's not in a finished state.

A few additions by Auria :)
* The font used in the menu is going to be replaced with a better one
* Icons are currently scaled down with very poor quality; irrLicht developers were informed of this limitation, and they promised it would improve in next version of irrLicht
* The current background image can't stay in for license reasons; we'll need to get someone to make another one. This might be a good thing anyway, because the current placeholder has dark and light areas, which makes it hard to find a font color readable everywhere
* Lots of work also happened in the input module; someone who'd never been able to play STK using his gamepad reported that all worked fine in the new branch. Also, input configurations will no longer be tied to a specific player, which means you can play sometimes with gamepad, sometimes with keyboard, and don't have to reconfigure everytime like in 0.6. Last but not all, 0.7 will be able to tell which gamepad model you're using, which means you can use a different configuration for different gamepad models.

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To sum up, there's still much work to do, and to all possible contributors - come on, join in, we need you! ;)
Note: As the irrLicht branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the last stable version (0.6.1a) of SuperTuxKart.

New skin for the web site

2009-04-06T23:46:00.005+02:00

Tom Jenkins from icecubewebdesign.co.uk has designed a new skin for the SuperTuxKart homepage. If you have any concerns, don't hesitate to give feedback; the website is still to evolve =)
The blog will also adapt the new design, hopefully soon.

The GUI for 0.7 might as well take inspiration from it, though this isn't decided yet.

Happy wiki surfing! ;)

EDIT: Blog style now updated accordingly :)

[April's Fools Joke] Work on the irrLicht port

2009-04-01T20:11:00.004+02:00

For the first time, we are giving you screenshots of the current state of SuperTuxKart, as being ported to irrLicht! The game features real-time shadows and lighting, moving clouds and advanced particles effects. It also features soft body dynamics simulation for plants, and liquid physics for water. We are also integrating a hologram library, which will eventually allow SuperTuxKart to come out of your screen in real 3D.

It is also expected that next version will be able to run on Nintendo Wii, Xbox360, iPhone and Nintendo DS (and maybe iPods, not sure yet)

With no further ado, here is a screenshot :

12.03.09-24.03.09 commit summary

2009-03-25T22:25:00.004+01:00

The location of trunk was changed to https://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/supertuxkart/main/trunk.

SuperTuxKart "Irrlicht version" is now the main focus, hence the short list of changes.
But don't worry, the following is a short summary of the changes regarding the Irrlicht version.

One kart (Tux) and two tracks (Beach and Lighthouse) was implemented, together with items and a preliminary graphical user interface.

Doesn't sound like much has happened? Well, remember this is only a short summary, and there's really a lot of work behind those few lines in this blog post. First, the developers needs to rewrite the old code to have a good foundation for more features later on. So it will obviously take some time before the Irrlicht version will be playable in the right meaning of the word.
Also, I'm not writing from a programmer's view, hence the somewhat dull summary. ;P

Anyway, as the time goes by, I'll give some peeks of the development and the new features that'll come.
And remember, if you want to help out with SuperTuxKart you're most certainly welcome.

PS: Regarding the screenshots of STK "Irrlicht version" my main computer just broke down, so it might take a while before my promise will be a reality.

01.03.09-11.03.09 commit summary

2009-03-12T13:16:00.007+01:00

An improvement for the 'Mozilla' kart was added
Catalan translation was added
New track 'Secret Garden' was added, to make sure it won't be forgotten for 0.7
Configuration and highscore files in Windows are now stored in $APPDATA/supertuxkart (instead of .). This avoids problems with losing configuration and highscores when uninstalling the game (e.g. while installing a newer version)

Lots of work on the Irrlicht part has been done lately. Actually, it's so much I won't write any of it here, but I'll rather make a more informative post once I've got some questions cleared out with the developers (things are changing quite rapidly now).

20.02.09-28.02.09 commit summary

2009-03-01T22:20:00.004+01:00

The music for 'Snow Mountain' was updated
Lots of texture replacements due to unwanted licenses were made
Better explosion handling was implemented

The Irrlicht implementation is still progressing nicely. Height computation, items that rotates and can be collected, and improved XML handling/support is among the work done in the last days.

Plans for STK 0.7

2009-02-25T16:36:00.004+01:00

Here's a list of planned features for SuperTuxKart version 0.7. This may not be a complete list, and plans might change later on, but these are some of the main goals:

Move from PLIB to the Irrlicht Engine. This includes a total rewrite of the GUI.
Support animations for kart drivers, and for track features.
Replace drivelines with a more flexbile graph-based data structure.
Support moving (environmental) objects on the track better.
Replace shortcut detection with check lines, so track builders have more control over possible shortcuts.

As you see, there's lots of exciting stuff the developers want to achieve, and some of this is already under development. But there's always room for more programmers and artists (2D, 3D, music, sound), so if you want to help out, see the FAQ for more detailed information.
Any help would be highly appreciated.

Hotfix for 0.6.1 released

2009-02-19T13:58:00.008+01:00

Due to a bug related to groups in battle mode, new binaries under the name of SuperTuxKart 0.6.1a have been uploaded. For those who have 0.6.1 already installed, patches for Windows and MacOS are available, containing nothing but the bugfix. So, no need to download the whole game again if you have STK 0.6.1 installed.

Go to the downloads page

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

SuperTuxKart 0.6.1 released

2009-02-18T16:15:00.024+01:00

SuperTuxKart version 0.6.1. fixes some minor bugs of the 0.6 release, adds a new kart, a new battle map, and better support for add-on packages. We also release a first add-on package, which contains 7 additional karts and 6 tracks. Some of the tracks and karts in this package are new, some are models that were removed from the main distribution. Note: you need SuperTuxKart 0.6.1 to use the add-on package. Both can be found on our download page.
More extensive changelog is below.

SuperTuxKart 0.6.1 (February 2009)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Added new kart ("Puffy"), new battle map ("Cave"), and new music for Snow Mountain.
Fixed bug in track selection screen that could cause a crash when track groups were used.
Fixed crash in character selection that could happen if an old user config file existed.
Fixed incorrect rescues in Fort Magma.
Improved track selection screen to not display empty track groups.
A plunger in the face is now removed when restarting.
Added slow-down for karts driving backwards.
Somewhat reduced 'shaking' of AI driven karts.

13.02.09-17.02.09 commit summary

2009-02-18T15:57:00.003+01:00

Slowdown removed when being off-track in 'Canyon' (since karts would not be able to drive at all on the uphill section)
Czech translation was added
AI steering made less shaky, and as a side effect AI is easier to push away
Some texture improvements, and licenses are now more in terms with Debian standards

06.02.09 - 12.02.09 commit summary

2009-02-13T15:25:00.014+01:00

New kart named Puffy was added

Mr. Iceblock was updated
Track- and kart-specific textures are now automatically used instead of textures in data/textures (in cases where there are two files with the same name)

0.7 work is progressing; tracks and kart models are now loaded, with physics and some visuals.
Note: the SVN version isn't using Irrlicht yet, in order to be fully playable.

25.01.09 - 05.02.09 commit summary

2009-02-06T18:18:00.008+01:00

Compilation fixes were made, among them GCC 4.4 fix
New music for 'Snow Mountain' track
'Fort Magma' driveline tweaking
Several track and character selection issues fixed
A fullscreen to window mode bug was fixed
The camera "jump" at race start was fixed
'Wilber' & 'Hexley' were made bigger
Terrain dependent slowdown when reversing added
Old config file bug was fixed
Improved run script for Linux added
'Cave X' battle arena added
A few texture improvements were made
Various other bug fixes and code cleanup were accomplished

The developers have reported that they are making good progress with the switch from PLIB to Irrlicht, but currently there are no visible changes in trunk.

STK 0.6.1 work is mostly finished, but some work is still needed for the release; let's see what the next days can bring in this regard.

Bugfix release for 0.6 planned

2009-01-27T23:39:00.017+01:00

Because of some minor, but possibly troublesome bugs for the players involved, a bugfix release has been suggested by the SuperTuxKart developers. When STK 0.6.1 will be ready depends on the workload and time the devs have, but please submit any bug you encounter if it isn't already in the bug tracker, in order to make 0.6.1 the most stable version ever created at that time.

P.S. As jpenguin kindly stated in his comment, there will most likely be a MacOS 10.4 binary for this version.

SuperTuxKart 0.6 released

2009-01-22T21:40:00.009+01:00

We have finally released SuperTuxKart 0.6. Binaries are on our download page. Changelog is below.

Here's a video of the actual game play:

SuperTuxKart 0.6 (January 2009)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New improved physics and kart handling
Added sharp turns and nitro speed boost (replacing wheelies and jump)
Totally rewrote powerups (plunger, bowling ball, cake, bubblegum) and new look for bananas
New and improved tracks : skyline, snow mountain, race track, space track, old mine, XR591
New game mode : 3-Strikes Battle
Major improvements to AI
New/improved karts (and removed some old ones) : wilber, eviltux, hexley
Improved user interface
Karts now have a visible suspension effect
Fully positional audio with OpenAL
New music and sound effects (including engine, braking and skidding sounds)
Better support for mods and add-ons (kart and track groups)
New/updated translations (ga fi de nl sl fr it es ro sv)
Allowed 'Grand Prix's of Time Trial, Follow the Leader, or any other mode
Challenges are now specified in config files, and are thus easy to create by users
Improved build system to better detect missing dependencies
Improved shortcut-detection
Initial work towards networking (disabled and hidden by default)
Bug fixes and code refactor/cleanup/documentation
Fixed 'joystick locks' (kart would turn even if the joystick is in neutral), thanks to Samjam for the patch.

Welcome to the SuperTuxKart blog!

2009-01-21T14:32:00.003+01:00

Welcome to the development blog of the kart racing game
SuperTuxKart!

This blog will feature frequent updates about STK’s development, with screenshots and comments.

Stay tuned!

P.S. Thanks to Hofi for handing over the domain name.