September 2, 2012

Nightlies, Videos, Robots oh my!

Well here we are again, marvelling at the newest in SuperTuxKart development. And do we have anything exciting to show you? Oh yes!

Consider for a moment if you could download the newest version of SuperTuxKart, practically every day. Wouldn't that be cool? Well, sometimes life imitates art, or in this case the imagination. That's right, 3D artist extraordinaire samuncle has shown he has a technical side as well by creating an automatic build service which currently provides nightly builds of the development version for 32 and 64-bit Linux systems. Other operating systems are not available yet, but later the service may be expanded with some manually created builds for Windows.

Some caveats do apply to the nightly builds. They are in-development versions, and thus may have many unfinished features, bugs and other quirks. We do not provide support for the builds, but if you are reasonably sure you've found an unreported bug which is not related to your special mix of hardware and software (excepting STK of course), feel free to report it on our bug tracker. And, if you want to wait and not spoil any surprises it's probably best to leave it alone. But then what are you doing here? Shoo! Be gone!
Only (s)kidding. ;)

One useful feature that Auria created last time to help me with my blogging is the ability to take screen captures from within STK. Right Alt + Prt Screen will now save a screenshot in your system's temp folder, and from my experience it gives much less artifacts than using a general screenshot application. But now, we have just moved into the 2000's by embracing a new, exciting form of media: videos! (Worth to note is that this is not an option within the game; I am using external software to do this.) And to start off I'd like to show you a lap and a half of the new skidding AI driving on the Hacienda track.

Skidding AI in Hacienda
Remember, this is not me driving, but an AI, or robot, if you will. It may not look entirely human, but it's faster than we've ever seen the AI before and it's already quite hard to beat on some tracks. Next up is to get the AI to aim at items and nitro bottles, and avoid bananas. Some work has already started on this but it is not quite ready yet for showcasing.

Gnu in Nolok's dungeon
Gnu is sitting there all miserable and forever alone, when suddenly, he hears a sound! What may happen next? That's currently a secret, but maybe with some pressure from our readers I will get permission to release full videos of the various cutscenes in a later blog post. ;)

Well I think that about wraps it up for this time. Stay patient; we are probably still a couple months away from release, but hopefully this will ease the wait. :)