Delays, delays, nothing but delays

No, I am absolutely not impatient. No siree. But I don't blame our dear developers even though 0.7.3 ain't ready yet. There are reasons for that, and the game continues improving anyway, but there aren't any good reasons for me to let a whole month and more pass by before writing any news here. So you can verbally slap me with trouts and other sea creatures as much as you like. But the less aquatic of you are probably impatiently waiting for the news, so let's get on with the showcase.

Subzeanne

Big content news: we've got a new kart, 'Suzanne', in the game. The female monkey from Blender replaces 'Gooey', and it was about time we got our modeling tool of choice represented in the game. Thanks a lot to Céa for a very good-looking kart. :)
Speaking about sea creatures: the above is a new track. A new spin on an old track, one might say, as it's aptly named 'Subsea'. However, it's completely made from scratch by Rudy, with several possible routes featuring ships, sea monsters and other things that makes your mouth water. The landsharks will be happy to know that you're inside tubes, so for the most part, you won't get your proverbial feet wet.

Thunderbird with traffic light(n)ing

Thunderbird debuts as a start referee, with the heavy burden of a traffic light (normally, he deals with mail, I believe). Remember, red means "Hold it", yellow means "Start the race already" and green means "Step on it!", no matter if it's pedals or your keyboard. Thunderbird plays the traffic warden with style, and gracefully rescues you as well in case of "accidents". Thanks to Kinsu for the model and animaton, and fraag for its texture.

Littering the paradise

The Three Strikes Battle mode got a new arena, 'Battle Island' by qubodup. It's his first track, and a good one too, so if you want to try modeling for STK, why not try making a battle arena? :)
You may wonder what the tires are there for. Well, they show your current amount of lives, and if you lose a life, you lose a tire. The last life is represented by your normal tires, so when you (or preferably your foe) are eliminated, you lose your 4 regular wheels! Awesome, innit? :D Thanks a lot to both Auria and new contributor khonkortisan for making this possible.

In item news, the bouncer should now work mostly as intended, but we're looking for another model for it which captures the idea of bouncing better. So if you want to give it a shot we'd be happy to hear your suggestions and see your work.
The bubble gum behaviour has changed a little, so instead of stopping in an instant, you get slowed down rapidly and leave a pink trail after you, while losing some control of your kart.
Also, the bomb gives now an audible tick-tock sound, so you can hear if someone with a bomb approaches from behind, and take the necessary steps to avoid it. But don't hit the bomb kart with a swatter, since that will trigger the bomb and both will explode.

Misc: A better rescue system is now in place, but so far it's been largely untested. It should be much better in some situations now, which will hopefully help remove some player frustration.
The physics has been tweaked to work better with tall karts, and it should be quite notable on certain karts (e.g. Adiumy).
You can now see how far you've progressed in a Grand Prix, thanks to new contributor Termina1.
Conflicts in keyboard configurations are now marked in blue thanks to new contributor redskull.
The exporters for Blender 2.59+ has gotten considerably faster and also better in terms of documentation in the STK Blender panels.

As you might have noticed, there are a few new contributors submitting patches for various parts of SuperTuxKart, and this is highly valued as such contributions often provide the extra little feel of professionalism to a game. If you're a budding programmer, why don't you take a look in our bug tracker and see if there's anything you can help out with? Any help on closing the dozens of bug reports that are in circulation is much welcomed. Or, if you want to work on something else, that's awesome as well, but please drop us a line and tell us what you're working on, in order to prevent duplication of efforts.

Oh, you probably want to know when 0.7.3 will be out. "Soon" is the best answer I can give. ;)

To arms!

Good and easily understandable weapons for STK has always been hard to come up with. Some of them have been revised over the years, and we've gotten a few new and original ones as well, mainly the plunger and the item swap weapon which are quite unique to SuperTuxKart if I am not mistaken. With the change from 0.6 to 0.7, a lot of the core of the game was rewritten, and thus there were fewer major gameplay changes. Now that's mostly out of the way, including major bugs (right?), so more focus can be shifted towards refining the game and adding more elements to it.

Recently, we've gotten two new weapons to play with in the game. The first one I've touched upon in an earlier blogpost, but now that funto has more or less finalized it, it's time for a screenshot.

New swatter weapon

Earlier I said that it would swat incoming weapons as well as other karts. This is no longer the case, since defending as well as attacking would make it too powerful. So for now it's mostly an offensive weapon, with the added benefit that it will remove any parachutes or bombs on your back. It's a very nice weapon, so thank funto for that. :)

We're also getting a rubber ball weapon from hiker, which will eventually replace the anchor weapon. The rubber ball bounces along the track, aiming for the leading kart, with the added nasty of squashing karts along the way, which will slow them down temporarily. Hopefully it should be easier to understand than an anchor popping up from nowhere, as the rubber ball will bounce more rapidly as it's reaching its goal. We could use some nice sound effects, both for this weapon and the swatter, so contributions are welcome. ;) The appearance of the ball might still change, so I'm not posting a screenshot of it this time.

Speaking of sound effects, qubodup has started a "STK Sound Liberation" project, which aims to replace dubiously licensed sound effects with DFSG-compatible samples. Also, there are other sound effects that could be improved, though as far as software freedom goes, the dubious ones should ideally be replaced quickest. But SFX quality should be mostly up to par or better than the current effects, since we don't want to sacrifice quality unless it's really necessary. Anyone wishing to join this good effort can head over to these forum threads: STK Sound Effect (SFX) Liberation and Unhappy with Sound Effects?

Flames and motion blur when using a zipper. Doesn't that sound awesome? Well, we've got it now!

That Blur game can go home and cry ;P

Apologies for the frame refresh spoiling the screenshot a bit, but you get the general idea. The motion blur is the work of funto, and the flame effect is by Auria. Combined the effect is really nice, and adds an extra sense of speed while you're zipping merrily along the track.

So that wraps up this... oh wait! There's one more thing!™
Isn't that...? Oh yes, it is. A new nice, juicy track by samuncle. Isn't it beautiful?

Zen Garden

It will most likely replace Secret Garden for the upcoming 0.7.3 release. The old garden will be put in addons, readily available to expand the track selection if you so wish.

0.7.3 will hopefully be the last version in the 0.7 series. It's been fun, but we need to move on to more great changes for the 0.8 milestone. :D
No, I do not know when 0.7.3 will be ready. But with all these changes, it can't be too far away. ;)

That wraps up this blogpost, and I'm getting myself outta here™ before I get hurt by the masses running to the site like real, dedicated fans. ;)

SuperTuxKart 0.7.2 final released

Hi all,

we have just released SuperTuxKart 0.7.2:

New features:
* Added in-game addon manager
* Fixed major memory leaks
* New Snow Peak track by Samuncle
* Improved star track UFO by Rudy
* New Beastie kart.
* Show when you get a highscore
* Improve gamepad configuration under Windows (add ability to tell gamepads apart)
* Various other tweaks done and glitches fixed

The files can be downloaded from our download page.

We hope you will enjoy this release! Feedback as always is welcome (best in our forum).

SuperTuxKart 0.7.2 RC2 has been released

Hi all,

we have just release a second release candidate for 0.7.2.  Compared to 
the first release candidate the following issues have been fixed or been 
improved: 

* New beastie kart
* Crash on linux when using the addon manager.
* Fixed crash when stk couldn't save downloaded addons.
* Potential crash when removing addons.
* Properly detect system language on Windows.
* Incorrect rescue (e.g. on city track)
* End of race music was fixed.
* Updated translations, minor improvements to some models

You may found packages at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/files/SuperTuxKart/0.7.2/

Please test and provide feedback! 

PS: For people still on 0.7.1, here the important changes in 0.7.2 again:
* Added in-game addon manager ( see http://stkaddons.net/ )
* Fixed major memory leaks (STK will no longer saturate your memory after half a dozen races)
* New Snow Peak track by Samuncle
* Improved star track UFO by Rudy
* Show when you get a highscore
* Improve gamepad configuration under Windows (add ability to tell gamepads apart)
* Various other tweaks done and glitches fixed
 

Addondum

Let's see if I can survive even when using such a blatantly silly pun in the title. ;P

This month we saw the first release candidate of the upcoming 0.7.2 release, the main news being the integrated add-on manager. But unfortunately, there were a bug causing the game to fail in creating the necessary folders, creating some headaches and confusions as to what the problem were since not everyone had this problem. One could say that it's not good to release a version with a new feature when the new feature didn't work, but that's why it's called RC, right? We can probably expect a new RC in not too long, which will include the fix.


We've got a new kart in STK; meet Beastie, the mascot of FreeBSD. Thanks to funto for providing the kart and icon.

The big news, however, is the work on a new weapon for STK. That's right, we get even more fun gadgets to use on our opponents. The details and the model for the weapon is still a work in progress, and thus I'll only give a brief description. The hammer/swatter is a close-range weapon which you can mount on the kart by firing it. It will then stay for a set amount of time, or until it finds a target to hit. The target can either be a close-running kart, or a weapon on its way to hit you. If it's a kart, the hammer/swatter will hit it making the kart look squashed, and its top speed is halved for the amount of time it is squashed. If it's a weapon, it acts like a shield and defends against it ( but it only stops explosive weapons thus far). Hard to take a screenshot of how a weapon works, and the current model is only a placeholder, so I guess you'll just have to try it for yourself when the time comes.

There has been a lot of progress in the track and kart exporters for Blender 2.5x, such that most tracks and some karts have been converted to 2.5 in order to fix potential issues with the exporters and for setting up the .blend files to use the new integrated STK properties panel. This doesn't mean it's 100% safe for widespread use, but it's getting there.

Add in the usual bunch of misc fixes, and I think you get the picture: SuperTuxKart only gets better and better. ;)