SuperTuxKart 0.9.1 is released !

French translation available here

After countless hours of bug fixing, tweaking and improvements we are proud to announce the release of SuperTuxKart 0.9.1.

The gift package for donators has also been updated: it contains the new Candela City track, which is heavily featured in our new trailer. It's the first next generation track in a city inspired by various real places.

Candela City during the world fair

But the gift package contains more: Samuncle has updated Antediluvian Abyss, which was included as a sneak peak in the previous gift package. The underwater landscape has been improved and you can spot fishes swimming and underwater ruins.

While these tracks will most likely receive some more tweaks and minor improvements, they are otherwise finished. Both tracks from the gift package will of course be released as part of the core game in a future version of SuperTuxKart.

An ancient city at the bottom of the sea

If you want to support SuperTuxKart, we encourage you to go to our donation page, where you will be able to donate some money to this project, after which you will get the URL for the gift package. If you have donated US$5 or more in the past, please contact us, and you will get this new package without a new donation.

The track 'Carnaval del cacao' that was included in our previous gift package is now available for everyone as promised released under CC-BY 3.0 on our addons webpage.

Carnaval del cocoa The famous Val Verdian carnival

The core game wasn't forgotten either, and we are happy to show that the oldest track in SuperTuxKart - Oliver's Math Class - has finally received some love and attention:

Now we know the classroom number !

Other tracks were also updated to take advantage of the newer engine. Here some more screenshots:

Enjoying the Sun at Gran Paradiso

Extraterrestrial racing on a strange red planet

The spaceship just got a new data center

But we also did work on the core game and fixed and improved several bugs and issues. We have now the ability to change the direction of arrows (indicating in which direction to drive) when a track is driven in reverse, and we already utilize this in STK Enterprise. Some tweaking of the physics has taken place, hopefully resulting in more stable beahviour of karts, and we significantly improved audio handling. A very important and time consuming change was the introduction of scripting: this will allow track designers to include little scripts which are executed by STK to make tracks more dynamic. This allowed us to remove the tutorial implementation in C++, which is now done in AngelScript instead, and as a first example Cocoa Temple now includes barrels that can be destroyed. Hopefully this will result in more interesting and dynamic tracks in the future: you want monkeys to throw coconuts when the karts are coming closer, now you can do this. Finally, many challenges were tweaked to be more balanced.

As a quick look into the future: we are expecting to further improve the look of STK by replacing the current bitmap-based font system with a TTF renderer, which will hopefully make STK look better in various languages. More work on scripting is also planned, so if you are a 3d modeller and want to implement certain features in your track, let us know what functionality you need. And we have already started on the network implementation. And while this is nothing that will be finished in a month or two, we are working towards a release first with LAN-only support, followed by WAN support later.

As always the new version can be downloaded from http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Downloads. We look forward to your feedback and comments (and contributions?). Also please be aware that this blog is not the right forum for support requests and bug reports - please use either our forum, or our bug tracker.

We hope you enjoy the 0.9.1 release!