SuperTuxKart 0.9.2 is out and say hello to our new website

After several months of hard work we are happy to finally release SuperTuxKart 0.9.2.

This release includes a lot of work from Benau, a new developer. Thanks to him, we are now supporting TTF fonts, which is a lot easier for us to maintain and should ensure that all characters from all main languages are now available. He also finished recording races and ghost replays (where you can try to beat a recorded race), which were started as Google Summer of Code projects, but never completely integrated. Additionally he finished and significantly improved work on computer opponents in battle mode, and even added the ability to play in teams with and against the computer in soccer mode. Binaries and source code can as always be found on our download page.

Copa Antarctica

SuperTuxKart 0.9.2 Poster

To celebrate the new AI support for soccer mode, we created a poster for "Copa Antarctica" Antarctica Cup, a set of 3 arenas. The first one made by Benau and Samuncle is a new soccer field called "Icy Soccer Field", which is included in the release:

Similar to what we have done in the past, we are offering the remaining others as gift package for people donating to SuperTuxKart. This package includes a new arena and soccer stadium "Las Dunas", in a daytime version and a separate nighttime version for soccer competition.

Additionally the gift package will also include the latest version of "Candela City", which was previously included in the gift package. The gift package can be downloaded after donating to SuperTuxKart. We use this money to pay for addon and web server for now, and will be using more for network development.

But we have even more new tracks. Included is now also "Antediluvian Abyss" track by Samuncle, which replaces the old subsea track. An early-access version of this track was part of our previous gift package for donators, but as promised it is now released as part of the standard release.

We also included a new track by first time contributor Ponzino - a new 'Volcan Isand" track:

Ozone0ne and Krobonil have also contributed a new original song for the farm track; and Flakebi implemented a new kart characteristic system, which makes it much easier to modify the kart physics and have karts with different behaviour.

As mentioned in the previous post, networked multiplayer is unfortunately not available yet as there is more work needed to make it work well. We have done some serious work, and a lot of improvements to show, but feel that it is not yet good enough for a special LAN-only mode. More work is needed to make LAN mode work good enough for an enjoyable game experience, and we decided to spent more time and have a good release instead of one that would potentially suffer from stuttering. But stay tuned for more news on networking, it is our top priority.

Say hello to SuperTuxKart.net

TuxKart was released more than 10 years ago and at this time web standards where pretty basic. The most curious of you can see how it looked here. When the project was renamed SuperTuxKart a new website was done and while the pages where basic it provided everything the project needed.

In April 2010, Tom Jenkins, a web designer, developed a new custom skin for our website and at the time we did a blog article explaining the update. This version has remained in use until a few days ago. While the design was cool a few years ago it started to look a bit outdated, but also, most importantly, the smartphone revolution changed the way we browse internet. We were also using a SourceForge.net as the main domain of the project which left us helpless during the SourceForge crash and unable to communicate or redirect players to a mirror.

This is why a new modern, responsive website was designed and implemented by Jean-Manuel Clémençon and Konstin. This new website is hosted on our own server, which should hopefully be more reliable and flexible than sourceforge's hosting.

From now on we will use exclusively the domain supertuxkart.net. and sourceforge will be one of the mirrors to download the game. The new website works on all screen sizes (you can resize your browser window to see it in action) and can embed our videos and images more easily. Each character now has their own little story in the discover page.

A few things are still missing and we are working to improve the documentation, especially for artists who want to create karts, tracks and objects for SuperTuxKart. We hope you will enjoy the new website.