"STK w/Irrlicht": Player joining

Welcome to another development update.
A lot of changes has happened under the hood, and as this blog is mainly for the players, I won't go into detail on it. But I want to thank all you developers, and especially our newest crew members for doing such a great job. :)

This time around, I will show how several players can join a game locally.

Two players in the same screen

As the descriptive text at the top says, other players can join simply by pressing 'fire' on their device. In this example, Player 1 had the gamepad assigned, and Player 2 joined thereafter by pressing 'fire' (in this example, the Ctrl key on the keyboard).
The green square shows what kart Player 1 have selected, and the cyan square is for Player 2.
Neat, is it not?

Now, I joined myself, and I'm not that good at multi-tasking that I'll be able to drive two karts at the same time, but anyway we got to wait for the split-screen interface to be recreated.
In the meantime, have fun playing SuperTuxKart 0.6.2, and please report any bugs you might find.

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Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.2) of SuperTuxKart.

SuperTuxKart 0.6.2 released

SuperTuxKart version 0.6.2 has just been released. This is a bugfix release, meaning that there is no additional or removed content, only improved stability and quality.
Download SuperTuxKart 0.6.2.

Changelog:

SuperTuxKart 0.6.2 (August 2009)
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• Bugfix: The game could crash in rare circumstances.
• Bugfix: Restarting a GP (with the in-race menu ESC) would not subtract already allocated points.
• Bugfix: A race could be finished with an invalid shortcut.
• Bugfix: Playing a challenge after a splitscreen game would play the challenge in split screen.
• Bugfix: Items explode over void.
• Bugfix: Grass in castle arena slowed down the kart.
• Bugfix: GP result showed kart identifier instead of name.
• Improvement: there is now 1 sec. wait period for the race result screen, avoiding the problem that someone presses space/enter at the end of a race, immediately quitting the menu before it can be read.

10 000 pageviews!

Yes, you read that right. This blog have gotten over 10 000 pageviews and over 6300 visits from 83 countries. "Now, who cares?" you might ask. Well, it proves to me that there are actually interest in regular updates about the SuperTuxKart development. But we would never have come this far without all you faithful readers; thank you for following us. :)

Furthermore I would like to thank our project leader hiker for leading the development; without him I don't think STK would have existed in the shape it's in now. And a special thanks goes to Auria, for helping with the blog layout, giving extra information here and there and proofreading my posts.

Now, if there's anything you readers want changed in the blog, you got the chance to tell now. Perhaps the regularity of postings, what topics we cover and so on (yeah, I know, correct information will help a lot; see my previous post for a bad example ;)). I can't promise to please everybody, but we'll try to do our best.

Bugfix release 0.6.2 planned [UPDATED!]

EDIT: Sorry everyone, I was concluding too quickly. After writing to our project leader hiker, I got this answer:

If we get confirmation that the 'sudden crash' bug is fixed, and Auria and myself have time, we'll do a .2 release.

Thus, don't count on it, and I am very sorry for this incident. I did not intend to create hopes for something that might not happen. Next time around, I will make sure if a new branch means a new release.
Let's hope 0.7 will come soon to replace your disappointment with joy.

ORIGINAL MESSAGE:

Because of some minor bugs, one of them regarding the plunger item, a new bugfix release has been suggested by the SuperTuxKart team. One of the reasons behind this decision is the upcoming version of the popular Linux distribution 'Ubuntu'. 0.6.2 will probably become the last version of the SuperTuxKart 0.6 series.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Race details

Okay, I'll admit that the previous blog post wasn't that informative, so this time I'll try to give more info, and less blah blah.

In-race GUI

As you can see, the timer, kart positions, minimap and lap counter have been added, as well as FPS reporting and countdown at start, and so forth.

Another thing is the boxy and ugly look of the track. This is because karts/tracks/objects now need to be exported with normals included in order to get proper smoothing, which most stuff doesn't have at the moment. So for all modelers wanting to create for 0.7 and beyond: export everything with the normals included in your b3d file - if you have questions about this, please look at the wiki pages or ask at the forums.

Also, xapantu has made a kart exporter for the Irrlicht version of SuperTuxKart, which can be found in this forum thread, together with details on how it works.

Lastly, but not leastly, we have got some help with the plunger and cake by david, making them easier to use with success in the game.

Now it might seem that SuperTuxKart got more than enough contributors, but that just isn't the case - there are only two main contributors at the moment (maybe more in some time), so we are always looking for more programmers, modelers, musicians, donators or simply useful feedback.

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Note: As the "STK w/Irrlicht" branch is still in a very unstable state, the general public is recommended to use the latest stable version (0.6.1a) of SuperTuxKart.