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.

SuperTuxKart 0.9.2-RC1 released

It's already been several months since the last release of SuperTuxKart, but we have not been idle! The next release, 0.9.2 is coming soon and we are today releasing the first release candidate. Please help us test this new release to make sure that everything works correctly!

This release includes work from Benau, a developer who recently started contributing to SuperTuxKart. Thanks to him, STK now supports recording races and ghost replays (where you can try to beat a recorded race) as well as an AI for the 3 strikes battle and soccer modes, enabling them to be played in single player for the first time (or in multiplayer with more karts). He also rewrote our font handling system to now use TTF fonts, which is a lot easier to maintain for us and should ensure that all characters from all main languages are now available. We thank him for his dedication!

This new release also marks the introduction of a few new tracks :

• New "Antediluvian Abyss" track by samuncle
• New "Volcan Island" track by Ponzino
• New icy soccer field by samuncle and Benau

0zone0ne and Krobonil have also contributed a new original song for the farm track.

Now for the disappointing bit: our most popular feature request is for networked multiplayer, unfortunately this is not ready yet. We have already invested a significant amount of time on this feature, and made some good progress on the LAN implementation:

• we can already connect LAN clients without requiring an online account
• we can create a server from the GUI
• we even can compile a no-graphics standalone server

We have actually already played some LAN games (and even tried a WAN game once) - admittedly with some restricted features (no items), but the overall result was that the simplified approach for LAN does not work good enough. In some environments we had a satisfactory playing experience (typically using wired connections), but in others (especially when using wireless networking) the game just stuttered and shook too much to be fun. So we decided to not publish a LAN-only version as originally planned, but still go ahead with a release now, since Benau has added a lot of nice features to the game which we think our players will appreciate to have.
 
We expect LAN will work much better in less ideal environments (and that includes using wifi) with the upcoming WAN code (for the more technical inclined: using client-side prediction and rollback to hide latency). We are aware that this is a disappointing for the majority of our fans out there, but we really did not want to publish an overall rather disappointing networked multiplayer version.

The release candidate can be downloaded here : https://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/files/SuperTuxKart/0.9.2/

As usual, please remember that blog comments are not a good way to get support for issues or ask questions, the forum and mailing list are more appropriate for this.

SuperTuxKart will be present at Japan Impact 2016

Hi everyone!
Version française de l'article disponible ici 
 
It has been a long time since the previous blog post. A lot of things happened on the backstage, but before going into the details, we have exciting news for all European players.

We will be present at Japan Impact 2016 Convention at the Swiss Gaming Federation stand. You will be able to play unreleased tracks, meet Sam, our lead artist, and CyberPangolin, a dedicated french speaking youtuber who has made many videos about our beloved racing game.

We are also happy to announce we have two new contributors.

• Eldermé who is refactoring the 3D renderer and correcting bugs on Intel HD GPU
• Benau who implemented a new font rendering engine based on TTF fonts. He also finished the battle AI, which means you will be able soon to play "3 Strikes Battle" against the computer. We might also eventually use this to extend story mode with a few battles! A "Soccer Mode" AI and finishing ghost replay feature in "Time Trial" mode are also features he has been working on.

Playing against bots in arena mode

We are also making progress toward online multiplayer. One of the current major tasks are polishing the UI to make it easy to launch a server, create a new race, etc. However another minor release this year before getting the online features ready is to be expected.