December 6, 2009

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

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.

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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 (0.6.2a) of SuperTuxKart.

7 comments:

  1. It would be nice if in the next update you can give an overview of what has thus far been re-implemented in Irrlicht and what is left to do before the game can be considered playable - and perhaps note any additional items to be done before you will release. A quick run through of the roadmap and status.

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  2. Hi Charlie, thanks for the good suggestions. I will certainly do this when the alpha version is released, which hopefully happens only a few weeks away.

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  3. Things are starting to look good. STK is my favourite game recently, takes me back to the days of whacky wheels and Super Mario Karts. A lot of recent kart games have gone the way of increasing the complexity of user choices before driving, rather than making playing more fun.

    What skills beyond programming are required to work on STK . Can a programmer be useful with out any prior game programming experience? Are there any suitable tasks that need doing?

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  4. Thank you for the update. Looking forward to the first alpha powered by the Irrlicht engine.

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  5. Anonymous: if you wish to contribute code to SupertuxKart I sure recommend joining the mailing list, there are plenty of things to do!

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  6. A new cover:

    http://www.maczocker.de/xeno/supertuxkart-cover.png

    A PDF version of SuperTuxKart Cover:

    http://www.maczocker.de/xeno/supertuxkart-cover.pdf

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  7. Hi anonymous,

    I've updated the todo list and milestone page, but I agree that many of the things listed there are more mid-term view. There are pleny of smaller things that need to be done (mostly bug fixes). For those you would need some programming experience (C++, perhaps even just C), but no special game programming experience.

    Just contact us on the forum or the email list if you want to help out.

    We hope to get an alpha version of the irrlicht port ready for artists to convert/improve tracks soonish (I'd say a week, but that's Xmas, so not sure - stay tuned).

    Cheers,
    Joerg

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