Add and Conquer

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

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

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!

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ;)