SuperTuxKart 0.8 alpha released

We are pleased to announce the first pre-release version of the upcoming 0.8 release, namely SuperTuxKart 0.8 alpha.

Please note the following:

This is not the final version of 0.8 and thus contains more bugs, unfinished translations and is meant for testing and feedback. If you want a stable and polished SuperTuxKart experience, please download 0.7.3 from our website.
If you have installed SuperTuxKart previously, you will lose your previous highscores and challenge progress. Do not install this version in the same folder as any previous installations, and do not install a previous version in the same folder as this version.
When reporting bugs, please check if it has already been reported and remember to add the necessary details to your report (whether you can reproduce it, under what circumstances you can reproduce it, operating system and hardware details, whether you were sober or not, and so on and so forth).


The most important changes from 0.7.3 are:

• Story mode and new challenge set
• Improved AI
• Skidding and better collision physics
• Reverse mode
• New Green Valley track and Blackhill Mansion track (thanks to their authors Wolf and samuncle)
• Updated tracks XR591, Fort Magma and Amazonian Journey (thanks to Auria and samuncle)
• Updated main menu

Besides general feedback we are especially interested in the following areas:

• New skidding: Note that the skidding works completely different from the old 'sharp turn' key, and that it will take time to get used to it. Please try a while before you form your opinion, you might have to "unlearn" the sharp key handling! In certain curves it is now necessary to brake in order to take them. If you skid for a while you will get a boost when you stop skidding, so this has to be taken into account.
• AI levels: The AI is significantly stronger now, so much that we actually had to make it easier, since we were struggling to beat the AI on Expert. We particularly have problems with judging the Novice and Intermediate AI, but are very interested in every level. Expert level is expected to be quite a challenge, whereas Intermediate should be challenging but not frustrating for the average player and Novice should be suitable for new and younger players.
• Challenges: The challenges are now integrated in the story mode, and support three difficulties for each challenge. Again it's very difficult for us to see which challenges are adequate, and which aren't. So we are highly interested in people doing a complete play-through of all challenges at a certain level, and provide feedback on which ones you think are too difficult, too easy, or if they feel right.

We expect 0.8 to be final in 1 to 3 months, depending on how much bugfixing/tweaking is necessary. Meanwhile, you can help with testing (especially, feedback is welcome on challenges at all difficulty levels) and help complete translations. For feedback and discussion, please use our forum or mailing list (comments on the blog may be read but not necessarily answered).

Download SuperTuxKart 0.8 alpha for Windows (XP and newer), Linux, and MacOSX (10.5 and newer).
French translation available here
 
Happy testing! :)
Your STK team

Supervillain Superpowers : It's Hammertime!

What would a cartoon game be without a villain? Not much! But fortunately we have Tux's nemesis, the evil Nolok, and the next version will feature an epic race against Nolok. He won't release the poor Gnu that easily, of course : you will need to make him do so. And as any respectable bad guy, he gets his own powers. See for yourself :

 

Nolok's special weapons

Avoiding taking a hit of that hammer on the head will save you some headaches for sure! And Nolok is too evil to use pink bubblegums, really : he prefers spiky green slime, it would seem.

On other topics there has been work on improving the intro and end cutscenes, with many sound effects and now even some voice acting! The synchronisation of animations has also been improved. Don't worry though, the story is short and can be skipped.

More work has gone on skidding. It is now easier to control than before. For people that have tried SVN versions or nightly builds, an important source of frustration is that the AI is now almost impossible to beat. Indeed there have been many improvements : not only does it skid quite well, it also now tries to avoid bananas and bubblegums, and collects gift boxes. Do not worry, while we are making the AI good first, the next step after that will be the tweaking to make it not so frustrating to fight against :)

The overworld where story mode takes place and the challenge set have both been worked on and are starting to provide a complete set of challenges for story mode (including back Grand Prix challenges).

 

Suzanne approaching a challenge

Thanks to OzoneOne for providing the music for the overworld and the work-in-progress BlackHill Mansion track that will replace Crescent Crossing, and also thanks to Bollen, another musician, who has work in progress songs for a few tracks.

Meanwhile Samuncle has been continuing his work on the new XR591, as well as a better castle for Nolok in Fort Magma

 

So, the next question is, when the 0.8 release? We are not quite ready yet, however we still hope to provide betas late October or (probably more likely) early- to mid-November.

Nightlies, Videos, Robots oh my!

Well here we are again, marvelling at the newest in SuperTuxKart development. And do we have anything exciting to show you? Oh yes!

Consider for a moment if you could download the newest version of SuperTuxKart, practically every day. Wouldn't that be cool? Well, sometimes life imitates art, or in this case the imagination. That's right, 3D artist extraordinaire samuncle has shown he has a technical side as well by creating an automatic build service which currently provides nightly builds of the development version for 32 and 64-bit Linux systems. Other operating systems are not available yet, but later the service may be expanded with some manually created builds for Windows.

Some caveats do apply to the nightly builds. They are in-development versions, and thus may have many unfinished features, bugs and other quirks. We do not provide support for the builds, but if you are reasonably sure you've found an unreported bug which is not related to your special mix of hardware and software (excepting STK of course), feel free to report it on our bug tracker. And, if you want to wait and not spoil any surprises it's probably best to leave it alone. But then what are you doing here? Shoo! Be gone!
Only (s)kidding. ;)

One useful feature that Auria created last time to help me with my blogging is the ability to take screen captures from within STK. Right Alt + Prt Screen will now save a screenshot in your system's temp folder, and from my experience it gives much less artifacts than using a general screenshot application. But now, we have just moved into the 2000's by embracing a new, exciting form of media: videos! (Worth to note is that this is not an option within the game; I am using external software to do this.) And to start off I'd like to show you a lap and a half of the new skidding AI driving on the Hacienda track.

Skidding AI in Hacienda

 Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfDrKjGT2h4

Remember, this is not me driving, but an AI, or robot, if you will. It may not look entirely human, but it's faster than we've ever seen the AI before and it's already quite hard to beat on some tracks. Next up is to get the AI to aim at items and nitro bottles, and avoid bananas. Some work has already started on this but it is not quite ready yet for showcasing.

Gnu in Nolok's dungeon

Gnu is sitting there all miserable and forever alone, when suddenly, he hears a sound! What may happen next? That's currently a secret, but maybe with some pressure from our readers I will get permission to release full videos of the various cutscenes in a later blog post. ;)

Well I think that about wraps it up for this time. Stay patient; we are probably still a couple months away from release, but hopefully this will ease the wait. :)

You've got to be skidding

Well here we are again to look at some of the latest progress in SuperTuxKart development. Without further ado, let's get on with the news.

Nolok doing a Gnunapping

Some more work on the first story cutscene has been made, especially fixing problems related to the camera and adding Nolok's spaceship, abducting Gnu. Also added is the capacity to show subtitles in cutscenes, and animated sound effects and particle emissions. Still to be done is getting a couple vocal effects and tweaking a couple things related to the animation.

Stephen has done a few nice changes to stkaddons.net, most of which are not immediately obvious to users. But among other things: direct URLs to individual addons now looks nicer, and a management panel for moderators and admins has been added. Older revisions will now be automatically deleted after a while with the exception of the newest one (obviously), or if it is the last supported one for a specific STK version, so it will never delete critical revisions of an add-on.

Debug view of skidding AI

In other news, the AI (artificial intelligence, or otherwise known as "computer player" in some games) has been improved to determine if it can use skidding or if it needs to brake during a turn in order to follow the drivelines. Pretty nifty, and makes it look quite a bit smarter (with the exception of some tracks, where it has problems due to losing ground contact due to elevation). It still needs a few tweaks, and is therefore not enabled by default yet. So whenever the AI gets the ability to seek out nitro and item boxes by themselves, I predict people may have to get better at driving smart and use the new skidding bonus to keep up. Of course, AI will be AI and most likely will have a few weaknesses still, and will also depend on the difficulty chosen, so I doubt we'll get an AI which is nearly impossible for humans to follow. So any improvement to the AI is a good improvement, and this is most certainly a good start.

Another nice addition to the game is the ability for it to save the current window position, so if you restart the game and it's in windowed mode it will start where you left its window last. This sounds superfluous, but for multi-monitor setups this means you can have it always start in one screen while you have other stuff on the other screen, without having to move it there manually every time.

We also received a few patches from nathanm32292394 (phew) fixing a few memory leaks and improving support for graphics drivers that don't support non-square and/or texture sizes which aren't power-of-two.

I think that's about it; if you think I've missed anything just yell, and also if there's other things I could do in order to make the blog better. See you next time, and until then: goodnight out there, WHATever you are!

STK Can Haz Community?

Hi y'all! Short time no see. I just thought it would be nice to bring attention to our forums and IRC channel, where a lot of the discussions about SuperTuxKart are going on. The forums now have over 10 000 posts spread across over 700 topics, which goes to show they are fairly active. The developers take an active part in discussions, so if you want to become involved or just come with constructive suggestions the forums are perfect for this. Recently one of our community members started a leaderboard topic where people can post their Time Trial times along with screenshot or video proof. So if you want to have some competition, that would be a nice way to do it while we wait for networking support to come within a few SuperTuxKart releases.

Okay, you may think, there are developers on that forum whom I don't identify with due to not being a programmer myself, and there are the other users who probably just fool around with leaderboards (they can do so much more than that! True story). What if I don't care for highscores, and I can't program or do 3D modeling and thus contribute to the game and by extension the community? Whatever should I join the forum for? I'm glad you asked.

There are actually quite a few things most people could give a shot and contribute to STK in a meaningful way. The new story mode will feature voice acting for its cutscenes, and possibly all standard karts in races may get some cheers and boo samples, depending on the amount of contributions. Now beware: voice acting is not as easy as some may believe, and is primarily about acting, so keep in mind that we want the end result to be good. Bad voice acting could potentially make the game seem less polished, and we don't want that and as such we can't accept everything. But this could be an interesting way for people to contribute, especially for actors, comedians, singers, or anybody with some degree of live performance experience. You don't have to have such experience or come with any sort of resume though; just try recording some lines/noises with the best available microphone you have at your disposal and upload it to the forum. Maybe this sounds intimidating, but just give it a try! Remember: even though you might not be the next Mel Blanc or June Foray, your contributions could very well be good enough for this game.

Maybe the above isn't your thing, but you still want to help out. The story mode will also feature an overworld where you can complete challenges in the difficulty of your choice. Perhaps one challenge is too hard for you, and you really don't want to spend too much time on it. Then you can just choose to drive that particular challenge with medium or easy difficulty, and otherwise settle for driving in 'Hard'. Previously, there was just one difficulty for the challenges. Either you made it, or you didn't. Now, with the new system, there is a high demand for people to playtest and tweak challenges on each difficulty level so we get reasonable results, allowing both new and experienced players to have fun with unlocking features. If you would be interested in this, please register on our forum and engage in discussions and upload suggestions for challenge requirements. This would be a huge help and possibly make version 0.8 both more polished and released more quickly.

Still don't find anything you fancy? Why not take a look at our forums, read through a few topics and see if you find anything you feel strongly enough about to register and poke fun at our bad suggestions, faulty logic and otherwise mesmerizing bad writing skills (which this blog post is a stellar example of)? Er, maybe you could skip that. As long as people keep things constructive, anyone can join in on the fun! :)