"STK w/Irrlicht": Blow up, or be blown up!

The community is waiting intently for SuperTuxKart version 0.7, but there's still much to do before the team will make a stable release. Fortunately, there will be an alpha release out quite soon (no exact date, but a week or two has been mentioned as an estimate). Do not expect the alpha release to be ready for regular players, as most content and some important features will not be there. The alpha release will be for artists who can help out with converting old karts and tracks to the new format with Blender, and perhaps start creating their own stuff with the new features included.

While we wait for the alpha version, it's time for some special effects!

New explosion effect

Just a quick demonstration of it against the wall. Pretty hefty explosion I'd say, so I'll be more careful next time I go bowling.

Recently hit star effect

No, we're not talking about a pop star with a recent hit, but just an effect indicating when a kart was recently hit by an exploding weapon or banana item. One could say it's pretty useless, but it's eye candy; eat it! :P

Furthermore, time trial now works as usual. We also got a final lap message patch from Stephan Hillebrand; thanks.

The Irrlicht branch has been moved to trunk, so the current location is https://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/supertuxkart/main/trunk. Please wait for the stable version of STK 0.7 if you do not intend to contribute. The team is not giving general support for the svn version.

There's been a lot of bugfixes and undercover changes recently as well thanks to the STK development team. Why don't you register yourself at the new forum and tell them how great of a job you think they do? And if you've got some contributions to make as well, it would be even better. ;)

"STK w/Irrlicht": Icons, fonts and more

About time for another update, isn't it? I know many of you have eagerly awaited some news, but there simply hasn't been much to write about in the last weeks. Right now there's only two developers on the main game, and they could really use some help. If you want to help out, register yourself at the mailing-list(s) or get in touch in another way, though the list is the preferred place for development talk.

On to the news.

New fonts and improved animation

At the top you can see a brand new font, in style with the new STK logos, and on the bottom button the font has also been improved. Much better. Now the animated box also contains something, in this case the Gnu "kart".

New icons

There are more new icons than just the tab icons in this screenshot, but they are spread across several screens, and you'll see them later anyway. Just wanted to give you a little feeling of what they look like. There are still font issues, but they're probably not top priority right now.

In other news, a few more turning animations made by Rudy85 and exported by xapantu have been included. And a binary for STK 0.6.2a for Solaris-SPARC has been made by Ten Little Indyans. You can find it at the SuperTuxKart download page, as usual.

The forum admins at FreeGameDev, where our subforums is located, has decided to use different forum software and leave the old forum read-only. The old posts were unfortunately unrecoverable. The old forum is still in use, but expect this to change soon. If you want, you can register at the new forum, though there aren't many users there yet. (Please note, that http://freegamedev.net and http://www.freegamedev.net are not the same. Stick to one of them if you want auto-login to work as expected.)

Whew! I hope I didn't forget anything. If I did, leave a comment, and I'll include it in the next update if it concerns the main game.

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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 (0.6.2a) of SuperTuxKart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Some news

Sorry for the lack of news lately; this was caused by several matters, including my own laziness. ;) But I got some news for you. While the developers have been busy fixing bugs and doing other, more important things not related to STK, there is some stuff I haven't presented yet.

Pause dialog

All the buttons works like intended, and it's possible to go back to this pause dialog after changing the options or looking through 'Help'.

After race menu

As you've probably figured by now, it's possible to complete a race and get the results. While the results for the computer controlled players isn't shown, everything else seems to work.

The SuperTuxKart forums is now located at http://ghoulsblade.schattenkind.net/freegamedev/forum/. The posts that were written before the forum crash is not recovered yet, but work is still going on as far as I know.

I mentioned a few blog posts earlier that we were looking for menu icons. We have someone who are dealing with that for the moment, so if you want to partake with that you'll have to be quick and join the developer's mailing-list and get in touch. There'll be an alpha release of STK ready later on for artists to test and improve on.

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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 (0.6.2a) of SuperTuxKart.

Hotfix for 0.6.2 released

A hotfix for 0.6.2 named 0.6.2a has been released. This hotfix is for Windows Vista/7 only, and makes it unnecessary to run the game as administrator anymore. If you don't want to download everything once more, just replace the 'supertuxkart.exe' in your STK 0.6.2 folder with supertuxkart-0.6.2a-win-executable-only.exe, and then rename it to 'supertuxkart.exe'.

To repeat; if you're not using Windows Vista or Windows 7, you don't need to do anything at all. If you are, and have to run it as administrator every time, this little fix will do the trick.

Edit:

Note that you will lose your settings and highscores (on Windows). If you want to keep your 0.6.2 data: start the new binary and quit. Then copy the files supertuxkart.cfg (for settings and key bindings) and/or highscore.data to $APPDATA/supertuxkart.

"STK w/Irrlicht": Fancy stuff

SuperTuxKart has changed much the last few weeks; sorry for not supplying you with the news sooner. Anyway, here we go.

Ambient lighting test

This test changes the ambient color to light red, and furthermore, it is activated and deactivated by crossing driveline quads! This can be awesome for track designers wanting to spice up their tunnels with different lighting.

Character animation test

If you look closely, you'll see that the character on this screenshot leans towards left while turning left. Compare it to the screenshot above, and you'll see that it leans the other way when turning right. The road for simple animations on the characters, like this one, is clear. Thanks to Rudy85 for the animated model.

Animated cutscene test

Sorry for the somewhat fuzzy screenshot, but the refresh rate made the chest look uglier than it really is. This little animation shows a key for the "Feature Chest" being inserted. I guess it's not finished yet, but it shows what we can expect for STK 0.7. Furthermore, the background texture is also animated.

As you can see, there's more than enough to play with for artists of any kind: sound effect makers, 3D modelers, animators et cetera et cetera. We need your help in order to make 0.7 a milestone in the SuperTuxKart history.

In other news, the development version is mostly ported to work with the new version of Irrlicht (version 1.6).
Also, a SuperTuxKart 0.6.2 binary for Solaris and a binary for Linux-PPC has been made by xeno74. They can be found at the SourceForge download page.

The forum is down due to a hard disk crash, and it has been so for a week. The FreeGameDev staff are trying to save all the posts on the FGD board; take a look at the FreeGamer blog for details and news regarding this issue.

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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.