Nifty details

So, after the usual excuses for not updating the blog, I get on to the actual news (me being late is not news), which makes some of this rather old news, but since you may not have heard it, I'll take the chance.

More tracks have been converted to be 0.7-compatible, one of them Snow Tux Peak, thanks to Varivar. It has been somewhat updated as well, with a cool sound effect when driving on the bridges somewhat before the finish line, which showcases a new feature for track designers: terrain spesific SFX. Also, XR591 is now compatible (not sure who I should credit), with a couple animations in as well. On a related note, the Hexley kart has been converted, and more kart animations have been added.

I should really turn on "Sync to VBlank" when I take screenshots to avoid these jagged texture-update edges. Will try to remember it for next time.

There are now intro, last lap and outro music jingles in the game, created by Dundersylt. Thanks!

A new track ending camera is now for testing in The Lighthouse track, where the camera no longer just follows the kart, but is at a fixed position from a distance and changes angle and position continuosly to follow the kart. Pretty neat!

Furthermore, another gameplay detail has been added. The first two karts to press the accelerate button after "Ready, Set, Go!" will get a little boost as a reward. Fear not; the computer controlled karts have been tuned in order to make this feasible for us mere humans as well. ;)

Throw in a good amount of code cleanup and bugfixes, and we should hopefully, according to the Grand Master Joerg, be a little closer to a beta/RC release. Expect that to take some weeks, though.

I'll try to bring more news in not too long, in particular about the addon manager the always awesome xapantu has had in the works for some time, and also a new race result screen the aforementioned GMJ is doing. So prepare yourself to be awe-struck. ;D

Contribute - it keeps getting easier

First of all: sorry for the lack of updates recently, but since development time has been scarce for the developers, and interesting news have been somewhat lacking I haven't had much to write about. Not to say there hasn't been things going on; it certainly has. But some of it might fit better later, and other things aren't significant enough, so I put several of those together in one post instead of making many small posts. Also, Auria has sometimes beat me to it - thanks for keeping the community informed that you and hiker are still working to improve this awesome game. :)

With this, and perhaps later postings, I hope to encourage those of you who might want to contribute to STK, but don't know what to help with, don't have any special skills, or just don't feel you got enough time to do so.

What needs to be done?
Simple answer: a lot. This thread at the FreeGameDev forums shows a small overview of things you can do, and some guidelines on how to do that.

It is no secret art is the most wanted contribution. Especially track improvements, and totally new tracks are very welcome. Better music is also a recurring discussion topic on the forums, and while sound effects and icons are mostly covered there's certainly room for improvements (better licensed sound effects in some cases).
This seems rather big and demanding by first glance, but in reality, there are lots of small things you might be able to improve on. Converting the rest of the remaining tracks is an important task, which the developers hopes the community will help with, thus reducing workload for them. While you're at it, why not replace a model or find a better texture/improve the texture tiling somewhere? It's the small things and annoyances that often count in the user experience.

I am not an artist, programmer or whatever. I can't contribute.
WRONG! There's plenty of things you can do nevertheless, if you keep looking for them. Translating STK is one of them. A rather new translation method introduced recently by xapantu is utilizing Launchpad to translate SuperTuxKart from English to whatever language(s) you are using. It's a simple process which almost anybody can do, how little or how much they want.
Providing feedback and/or ideas are also ways to contribute. The forums are a great place to do so; however, in the case of negative feedback, try to have a positive tone overall. Your post have better chances to be seen as the friendly advice it really is, and the developers will probably consider it more seriously. (In most cases, the reason for why things are as they are, is the lack of man- and womanpower.)

Another thing STK could have in the future, is a storyline with animated scenes. While creating a good storyline isn't easy, it should be possible with dedicated people teaming up and collaborating in order to make SuperTuxKart a more story-driven, coherent game. Other long-term ideas can be found at this wiki page. If you are up for leading a task, let the devs know, and they will certainly help to get something rolling. But be aware that they have other, more critical aspects of the game they want to spend their time on as well.

Last, but not least: let people know about STK, and let them know we want their contributions! ;D

Summer Penguin

Summer is drawing on, so what's going on with STK?
Not as much as we'd wish, I'm afraid; for one, I'm now working full-time for an internship; Joerg was on a trip so didn't have time to do much work. Still, work has continued! You can first and foremost see that new tracks have been converted to the 0.7 format :
(also notice the improved translucent speedometer and new character icons by yeKcim. Thanks yeKcim!)

An animation scene has been added for when a player loses a Grand Prix :

The GUI has been extended so that it is now possible to select a skin. As an example, here is the peach skin by Dakal. This way everyone will have a look to their liking :)


Furthermore, the key bindings screen has been substantially improved. It is now possible to define keys specifically for menu navigation, this means you no more have to use "accelerate" to go up and "brake" to go down!



And, finally, support for RTL languages like Hebrew has also been added through the use of fribidi (the linux and windows build systems are not yet updated for it, however).

SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 2 released

Hi all,

we have just released a 2nd alpha release of SuperTuxKart 0.7. This version has a lot of improvements and bug fixes, more tracks, some new icons and animations. It is still pretty much work in progress, and we would love to get some feedback - e.g. does it work for you, performance, do you like the new icon style or prefer the old one, bug reports etc. Note that due to the missing tracks GPs and challenges will not work, and you will get a lot of warnings/error messages printed - so please don't report issues related to challenges or GP not working ;)

We would also hope that people could help us to port more tracks - it's not that much work, and would help us to get SuperTuxKart back to where it was, especially getting the challenges and GPs back. Also more icons would be nice - and of course always more tracks.

Enjoy!

Downloads can be found at sourceforge : https://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/

Applying bugfixes and makeup

Hi again folks; long time no see! Don't worry, neither I or the project are dead. In fact, I got myself a new computer, and SuperTuxKart marches on towards alpha 2. But as I guess you aren't here to read endless intros (and this post is a big one), I'll just get on with the good stuff. ;)

SuperTuxKart has passed the 5000th commit mark, and quite a lot of the ones after have been bugfixes. Auria joked that they broke everything and then fixed it again, and that's essentially much of what's been going on. This proves that refactoring and rewriting code is absolutely not trivial, so while we non-programmers might think 0.7 should have been out already, that is not reasonable with only 2 main programmers, which are already devoting quite a lot of their spare time to this project. You may see what I'm getting at: the STK team would like to have more members. Please have a look at this page on the STK wiki and see if you can help out with anything; we'd be happy to get you on board! :)

But there's more news than just bugfixes! Take a look at the new "makeup"!

Distance fog

Gloomy, isn't it? Tracks can now have skyboxes and fog with the appropriate color for each one.
Also, you have one example of some new in-game messages which indicates when a weapon has been used successfully. It's particularly useful for the new swapper weapon, so you don't miss out if you don't have sound effects enabled.

New parachute

Well, the title says it all really, except for the maker's nick: MiniBjorn. Thanks!

Cave preview

This screenshot is shown for four reasons. First of all, it shows that 3 Strikes Battle is added back in. Second reason is that karts now have power on all four wheels, so-called 4WD, as opposed to before when only the back wheels mattered. Besides allowing me to climb extreme heights, it helps stabilizing the kart with the physics, hopefully making the physics less troublesome in certain circumstances.
Third reason is that the cave has been retouched by MiniBjorn, adding some plants and shadows using a texture over the vertex.
Last reason is for telling that anisotropic and trilinear filtering have been added to STK. These are techniques to make textures look better at different angles, if I understood Wikipedia right. I don't know whether it matters in this screenshot or not, and I'm too lazy to disable it, drive up there again and take another one just for comparison. Go to Wikipedia if you're interested in that. :P

Talking about physics, it's been tweaked a bit to make driving (and jumping) better. The suspension has been hardened, so it should no longer feel like you are rocking around on a boat. Furthermore, flying in mid-air is better now as well; I won't go into detail as you aren't doing that much with the current tracks.

The coordinate system has been changed so y=up and z=forwards, and without getting technical about it, it means some tracks have to be re-exported. Hiker said the track exporter will most probably not change that dramatically again, so people wanting to export tracks should be good to go now. But make sure you are using the latest track exporter, and not the one shipped with STK 0.7 alpha 1 - it's terribly outdated. Having said that, you should keep an eye on this page if you're interested in helping out, and update it if you start to port/improve a track.

Last thing I'm going to mention (not that there hasn't been more changes, but if all details were covered the post would probably be a mile long) is the adding of a guest account, which will make occasional multiplaying a bit easier since you don't have to add a new player when you just want a quick race against a friend coming for a visit. Furthermore, the most used profile should be picked automatically when you are choosing a kart, so you don't have to be that careful getting the wrong profile.

Hopefully SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 2 will be just around the corner - until then, take care and play some STK if you get the time.