SuperTuxKart Networking - Looking for Testers

Nearly one year after the 0.9.3 release we are getting ready for the next release. And as many might know, we have actually been very busy working on the network implementation to allow online races. As expected, this has taken a lot of time, but we have finally reached a stage that we need more testing. For now we call this an alpha test, since there are still some known bugs and some polishing is required as well, but nothing that should affect the actual network race at this stage. De facto, we have been doing alpha tests with visitors on our IRC channel for some weeks now, so we actually do not expect any major bugs anymore.

In networked races the name of the player is shown on top of the karts

We are looking for people who can compile SuperTuxKart following our instructions themselves. You don't need to be able to program in C++ or anything. The main reason for asking you to compile yourself is that if a bug should occur, we can work with you to help us finding the bug. We are at the same time busy on working on a beta release (or even release candidate??), for which we will obviously provide binaries/installers for all common platforms. We actually don't expect this to be too far away ... fingers crossed.

SuperTuxKart Game Servers

We have over 20 servers running by volunteers (in Hongkong, Chicago, Netherlands, and some other locations) for the various game modes that we support, which includes normal race, time trial, battle mode, soccer and the new capture-the-flag and free-for-all modes.

Server Selection Screen

So, if you are able and willing to compile SuperTuxKart from git, follow the instructions but switch to the stable branch 'network' first. Also make sure to compile in release mode, debug mode is often too slow for the networking. Create an online account in STK, head for the online section and search for a server with a reasonable distance to you. If you connect to the server, the ping to that server will be shown - we would recommend to stay with servers that have a ping of under 100 ms. You can try servers with higher latency, and it should still work, but you might notice more often that karts stutter or are 'teleported' around.

 

Server Creation

Or create your own server and ask some friend to join, or head to our IRC channel #supertuxkart on the FreeNode network to ask for some people to join.

Server Setup Screen

We are also interested in getting some people to run some additional servers around the world, to offer a better ping for users. An STK server can even run on a Raspberry Pi 3. You can find instructions on network configuration in the file NETWORK.md (latest version here), but feel free to contact us if you have questions.

 

Testing

We would appreciate your feedback - especially how responsive and satisfying the race was, and what ping you had to the server you were using. Please provide feedback either in our forum, on our IRC channel, and file bug reports in our issue tracker.

Network Lobby

While this is happening, we will work on the important outstanding issues, and prepare a beta release which will of course include pre-compiled binaries and installer. Our main focus will be the interface, some physics issues, and other bug fixes. We are also interested to support playing with higher latency - but realistically there is only so much you can do if you will only know that a kart turned 600 ms after it happened (if both you and the other person have to wait 300 ms for a message to or from the server). In 600 ms a kart at high speed will have traveled over 13 meters. But we still have a few things to try out and improve on.