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.

Towards alpha 2

As you may have noticed, I'm not Magne (Arthur_D) ;) This is because he had hardware failure, and was thus unable to publish a blogpost in reasonable time, therefore I offered him to make one. So here we go!

I can now officially confirm it to everyone, we are planning to release an Alpha 2 of SuperTuxKart "soonish"! The main reason is that many bugs/limitations were found in the track format used in alpha 1; therefore, we will release Alpha 2 so that artists can keep up to date with the changes.

So what's new since last post?

First of all, support for Grand Prix is now back in STK 0.7.

This is not visible on this still, but the image shown for each grand prix is actually cycling images of the tracks within the grand prix.
When you click on one GP, you get a further description of it, just like for tracks :





EDIT: Oh, the screenshot above features a track name "Nolok's castle", but don't get too excited, it's a small test track I did to get familiar with the track exporter, I'm not much of a 3D artist myself ;)

Now, along with GP, I wanted a nicer ending than what we had in 0.6. Here is what it looks like now (not that it can't change) :




Apart from Grand Prix playback, the "3 Strikes" battle mode is also back, with a new battle arena by Thomas Oppl and Wayne Dennis (Pixel_2ACF3) : The Stadium



Furthermore, Joerg started adding support for end-race animations.


It is not yet sure what form this will take in the release; but for now, in the latest development version, you can see the elephant wave his arms and trunk in the as he wins the race

Finally, one minor thing, I added a 'loading' screen, so that the game does not seem unresponsive when loading a big track (which was especially annoying in GPs, when you clicked 'next' and it seemed like nothing happened)




To conclude, there were other misc changes :
* Fixed compilation issues caused by spaces in the font's name
* Conversion of files from LISP to XML format, including Grand Prix files and music files
* The track format has another change : removed support for 'description', added 'designer' instead
* Many fixes to Follow-the-Leader game mode
* Added back the infamous plunger-in-face attack from 0.6
* Added support for camera-far value to be exported. This was used in the mines track, to get a few more FPS by not rendering far away geometry
* Added back bullet debug view. Debug view can now be switch on and off during a race (ctl-F11). This debug mode will be useful to debug physics.
* irrlicht 1.7.1 was released, which fixed potential performance issues (though nothing huge was measured in STK so far)
* Many translations were updated
* And of course much code cleanup and bug fixes!

Feature chest, track exporter, new weapon ++

Okay, very much happening lately, so sorry if I forgot anything. I will try to summarize without leaving out important details - just notify me if you think I missed something.

New 'feature unlocked' animation

Looking for the treasure everywhere, even in the darkness of outer space, you finally got what you were looking for. The Beach track! :)

The track exporter has been updated again with most notably this feature (quoting the commit log message):

The lap counting line is now automatically taken from the first line of the main driveline.
This avoids problems of the kart order being inconsistent (if the driveline edge and
new lap line were not identical).

This means the current tracks probably got two lap counting lines now, and that would need to be fixed at least before the stable release.

The translation "mother-file" has been updated as well, to include a few strings that were missing. Furthermore, translations for Ukrainian and Simplified Chinese has been committed to SVN.

What's this?

Well, I can tell you. It's an improved version of the Lighthouse track, with actual light coming from the lighthouse! :D
But it's not only that. Presenting a new weapon (drum roll): the item swapper!
It works in this way: when using it, all good items (bonus boxes, nitro bottles) are turned into bananas, and all bananas are turned into bonus boxes for a limited amount of time. It makes the tracks more unpredictable, something I personally like. Use it before your opponents collects bonuses, and they will find themselves eating bananas like monkeys. But be careful: it affects you as well!

Last, but not least, Irrlicht 1.7 has been released. It fixes a couple of graphical issues present with STK + Irrlicht 1.6. Many thanks to the Irrlicht developers for always cooperating well with the STK developers.

Converted tracks, new fonts and translations

Surfing the wave of recent activity, I got to share some of the great news with you all. First off, I want to show you the new 'Old Mine' track. There are so many changes that it doesn't resemble much of the previous version, with the exception of environment.

The 'Old Mine'

This track, made by Varivar, includes a few animations as well, but I won't spoil it all for you. ;)
Another track, 'Snow Mountain' was converted by sj04736, with a few smaller changes, including animating the balloon. To all track converters: look at this wiki page and be sure to update it if you're working on converting/improving a track in the main package. Replicating work should be avoided. Also, the forums is a good place to gather information and ask questions.

Furthermore, we got ourselves a couple new fonts and a couple less (removed old ones), and new translations.

New Latin character font

Don't bother trying to read this, unless you're Norwegian or speak another similar language. ;)
The font had quite a few characters missing, so they were added afterwards, and hopefully they look okay for the ones using them (none of them in the screenshot). We also added another font which supports Russian, Greek and Simplified Chinese. If needed, more fonts can be added.

Regarding translations: we got all the mentioned languages covered (some is work-in-progress) already except for Greek. Feel free to ask any question you might have, about translating, track making/converting, or anything else at the forums. We look forward to further contributions and activity. :)

STK 0.6.2a vs. STK 0.7 alpha 1: a brief comparison

With the fresh release of SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 1, and several people wanting a comparison with the current stable version (0.6.2a), I had no choice but just do that. :)
I'm using 0.6.2 without the 'a' at the end, since I'm not running in an environment affected by the bug in 0.6.2 that made the 0.6.2a release necessary.

SuperTuxKart 0.6.2

Karts (11): Tux, Wilber, Gnu, Elephpant, Eviltux, Gooey, Hexley, Mozilla, mr. iceblock, Nolok, Puffy.

Tracks (18): Amazonian Journey, Around the Lighthouse, The old mine, Oliver's Math Class, Racetrack, Shifting Sands, Skyline, Snow Mountain, SnowTux Peak, Star Track, Tux Tollway, XR591, On the Beach, Canyon, City, Crescent Crossing, Fort Magma, The Island.

Single Player game modes (6):
Single Race (3) \
--------------------{ Quick Race, Time Trial, Follow the Leader.
Grand Prix (3) /

Multiplayer game modes (7):
Splitscreen with 2-4 players; same modes as in Single Player, with the addition of 3 Strikes Battle under Single Race.

Dependencies:
PLIB, SDL, OpenAL, OpenGL, LibOgg, LibVorbis.


SuperTuxKart 0.7 alpha 1

Karts (13): Tux, Wilber, Gnu, Elephpant, Eviltux, Gooey, Hexley, Mozilla (updated), mr. iceblock, Nolok (updated), Puffy, Adiumy (new), Pidgin (new).

Tracks (3): On the Beach, Around the Lighthouse (updated), Amazonian Journey.

Single Player game modes (3): Normal Race, Time Trial, Follow the Leader.

Multiplayer game modes (0): none.

Dependencies: Irrlicht, OpenAL, OpenGL, LibOgg, LibVorbis.

The above is of course subject to change, but this is basically what you get when you download the alpha version. Not quite exact though, as you get heaps of other improvements in the alpha. I will list a few of them here (sorry if I forgot something important):

• Completely rewritten GUI with support for user-made skins.
• Rewritten control system with support for several keyboard/gamepad configurations and easy "press 'fire' to join"-approach in kart selection menu.
• New driveline system using quads with support for multiple paths.
• Improved camera adjusting to kart speed.
• New kart and track format and exporter with support for animations (IPOs and skeletal animation).
• New visual goodies (see previous postings for screenshots and details).
• Changed driving behavior: "reversed" slipstreaming (follow another kart closely after gaining some speed, and then drive to one of the sides to get a speed boost); skidding penalty (you lose some engine power when skidding; AI don't get this at difficulties 'Intermediate' and 'Expert'), and karts turn more sharply without using the 'sharp turn' key.

Now, that wasn't so bad after all, was it? Regarding content isn't the alpha version appealing, but regarding possibilities is it a real beauty! That is why the alpha version isn't recommended for people wanting to have a fun time playing (well, besides the bugs and features missing); the content will come if we, the players, helps creating it! The old tracks also needs to get exported to the new format, and the STK team would really like some help in that regard as well. And while you're at it with opening the track in Blender - why don't you see if you can improve it a teeny bit? Let's make the 0.7 version of SuperTuxKart rock!

PS: Sorry for the excessive use of the '!' sign, but I got a little carried away. Who wouldn't? ;)