FreeGameDev

Hi all,

It has been a long time since our last update, and after weeks of hard work we are happy to announce the first release candidate for version 0.9. Yes, you read this correctly, it is 0.9, not as we initially said 0.8.2. The main reason for this larger jump in version numbers is that besides of significant better look compared with the previous release, e.g.:

we also decided to break backward compatibility with older addons - they need to be updated and re-exported to work with the improved lighting our new engine offers.

The main new features since version 0.8.1 is the switch from Irrlicht to Antarctica a new graphical engine. OpenGL 3 is now required, and the minimum supported requirements include an intel HD 3000 integrated GPU. Quite a bit of work has also been done to take us closer to online multiplayer (networking), including features like logging in and managing an online account, and online achievements. However, don't get too excited just now because the actual networked multiplayer gameplay is not yet ready to use (this will come in a future version).

Also note that the old addons website (http://stkaddons.net) will be switched to read only and be replaced by a new upgraded website (http://addons.supertuxkart.net/) ready for the new version. All help is welcome to port and/or create addons for the new version of the game! You can read the official documentation here.

You might also be wondering about the delay with the release candidate. After all, beta2 was released over two months ago. Besides fixing bugs (we have fixed over 330 bugs), we also found some issues with supporting older hardware (e.g. automatic resizing of large textures did not work as expected), and we wanted to try our best to make SuperTuxKart run on older hardware. But as mentioned above, you do need a more recent graphics card and driver. Especially if you have a more powerful graphics card, adjust the video settings till you find one that offers the best combination of looks and frame rate.

We are looking forward to feedback and discussions, especially what graphical settings worked best with what card/driver/os combination etc.

You may find downloads for all major platforms here : https://sourceforge.net/projects/supertuxkart/files/SuperTuxKart/0.9-rc1/

Cheers,
Joerg

Sweet! Congratulations to all the devs on the RC!

Congratulations for all of you!

I wonder why every character has bunny ears

Note to the Mac OS X build:
STK was being built for 10.9 and does not run on previous versions... This is not intended, isn't it?

Awesome team! Great job!
I noticed that old add-on karts and add-on arenas actually worked well with 0.8.2 beta. For the karts, I just had to update the xml file to support the kart properties system. Is this true with 0.9?
Also, when will it be available on the Ubuntu software center? Is that up to you or the Ubuntu distributors?

ardanwol {l Wrote}:Also, when will it be available on the Ubuntu software center? Is that up to you or the Ubuntu distributors?

It's up to the Ubuntu packagers.

Amazing news!

XGhost {l Wrote}:Note to the Mac OS X build:
STK was being built for 10.9 and does not run on previous versions... This is not intended, isn't it?

It should in theory work on OSX 10.8, though I do not have a 10.8 system to test it on. Unfortunately, Apple makes it very difficult to support older OSX versions, since they are not available for download, and systems before 10.8 are unsupported by apple

Auria {l Wrote}:

XGhost {l Wrote}:Note to the Mac OS X build:
STK was being built for 10.9 and does not run on previous versions... This is not intended, isn't it?

It should in theory work on OSX 10.8, though I do not have a 10.8 system to test it on. Unfortunately, Apple makes it very difficult to support older OSX versions, since they are not available for download, and systems before 10.8 are unsupported by apple

If you have access to an older system, perhaps you could create a dmg file for us?

Cheers,
Joerg

Auria {l Wrote}:

XGhost {l Wrote}:Note to the Mac OS X build:
STK was being built for 10.9 and does not run on previous versions... This is not intended, isn't it?

It should in theory work on OSX 10.8, though I do not have a 10.8 system to test it on. Unfortunately, Apple makes it very difficult to support older OSX versions, since they are not available for download, and systems before 10.8 are unsupported by apple

I downloaded stk on my Mountain lion 10.8.5 and I'm unable to open it. There's the classical "stop sign" over the icon. When I want to open it, Mac gives me a message that this application only runs on 10.9 or higher.

So there will be no support for snow leopard in the future anymore?

---
Maybe I can try to compile stk on 10.8 or even older systems. I will have a look in the next days...

ardanwol {l Wrote}:Awesome team! Great job!
I noticed that old add-on karts and add-on arenas actually worked well with 0.8.2 beta. For the karts, I just had to update the xml file to support the kart properties system. Is this true with 0.9?
Also, when will it be available on the Ubuntu software center? Is that up to you or the Ubuntu distributors?

Well you can in theory change stuff in the xml it might work but this is strongly not recommended. If we broke the compatibility it's not to just for fun it's because the format has changed. While some backward compatibility remain it's most likely because we don't had the time to remove these old stuff. So you might end up with a track that is "flagged" as compatible but in fact isn't.

So please stick to the recommended solution as listed in the documentation. Also now you have more possibilities (like adding lights, etc).
http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Tra ... new_engine

XGhost {l Wrote}:

Auria {l Wrote}:

XGhost {l Wrote}:Note to the Mac OS X build:
STK was being built for 10.9 and does not run on previous versions... This is not intended, isn't it?

It should in theory work on OSX 10.8, though I do not have a 10.8 system to test it on. Unfortunately, Apple makes it very difficult to support older OSX versions, since they are not available for download, and systems before 10.8 are unsupported by apple

I downloaded stk on my Mountain lion 10.8.5 and I'm unable to open it. There's the classical "stop sign" over the icon. When I want to open it, Mac gives me a message that this application only runs on 10.9 or higher.

So there will be no support for snow leopard in the future anymore?

---
Maybe I can try to compile stk on 10.8 or even older systems. I will have a look in the next days...

Oops I'm sorry, I did get it wrong. It runs on 10.9 and 10.10 (the last 2). I had somehow forgotten about 10.10

There is little we can do about older versions of OSX because Apple is making it very hard to support older versions of OSX

Unfortunately I had no chances to build stk on 10.8 or even 10.6. I tryed with cmake and clang but got always some bad errors. I'm not even able to create a Xcode File. There is still an old Xcode version and the 10.6 SDK lie around and I would like to experiment with them a bit. Fact is, that I don't have much of knowledge with cmake and co and haven't looked into the code yet, what means that I'm not very familiar with the errors I get.
So maybe anyone has already setup a Xcode file for me, that would probably help me looking further.

BTW, on 10.9 I am able to compile and build STK with cmake and clang (but not the Xcode file). Maybe the code is definitely not compatible with older OS.

Cheers

Wow! I'm amazed. All the tracks look amazing! This is an awesome release. Good work everyone!
I'm still having the problem where everything gets very dark after the "Ready, Set, Go!" sequence starts when it's in fullscreen mode. I get the following error message to stdout.log:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

[error  ] GLWrapp: Error when linking these shaders :
[error  ] GLWrapp: data/shaders/slicedscreenquad.vert
[error  ] GLWrapp: data/shaders/rhpassthrough.geom
[error  ] GLWrapp: data/shaders/rh.frag
[error  ] GLWrapp: The geometry shader uses varying uv_in, but previous shader does not write to it.

Other than this, I'm having fun with it and it looks awesome.
Thank You!
ArDanWol
One more question: Is there a 64bit edition for Windows?

Thanks for the update! Good work all!


We've just given this latest version a whirl & noticed a few things.

The driver selection screen shows unequal bar lengths. Screenshot here:

A couple of other things we noticed is on the Egypt map, when nearly exiting the top of the right-hand tunnel, it usually slows the car down, which it didn't do on earlier versions. Screenshot here:I think I read on the forums about driving upside-down being a new feature, so suspect this might be related to that. My brother also said in the Subsea map that he was driving up-side-down on the ceiling of one of the tunnels breifly, I didn't see it though.

And the sides on this brige could do with being clearer, they're quite easy to miss & drive straight into, screenshot here:

We also noticed a bit of slowdown on the Maths Class map. My system is a pretty powerful i5-4570, 8GB RAM, SSD, 2GB nVidia 750Ti (nVidia driver v346.47). Slackware 14.1 (64-bit miltilib). Using STK maximum graphics level 5. We had 8x AI plus 2 humans. The graphics also weren't rendering correctly for some of the objects in it, they were solid blocks of colour. Screenshot here:

Also to begin with we thought the player selection screen was failing to allow the 2nd user to add themselves by pressing fire when they should but eventually managed, it, not sure if there's an issue here or it was user error as we haven't been able to reproduce it.

Sorry if any of these things have already been highlighted.

BioHazardX {l Wrote}:I wonder why every character has bunny ears

I think it's Easter bunny ears, similar to the Christmas hats that appear at Christmas!

Just a couple of little things I changed on my favourite character Xue's skin, which I think look nice (is this allowed?):

Yellow fan tips:

Headlights:

Clearly I'm no graphics artist though.

Edit: maybe I should have put this post in a separate thread. :s

Congrats. Every pre-release it's getting a little bit better. It is still unfortunate that the advanced pipeline isn't working for my ATI Radeon (gives me a black screen). Unfortunately it runs some effects like the spinning kart in the kart selection screen and the speedometer, which are now not working. Also the blinking sky is annoying.

Also, when I run the cocoa temple, after a while my two CPU's go to 100% and the game runs really sluggish. The 0.8.2b2 didn't nearly pull that much CPU.

mr_Spoon {l Wrote}:Also to begin with we thought the player selection screen was failing to allow the 2nd user to add themselves by pressing fire when they should but eventually managed, it, not sure if there's an issue here or it was user error as we haven't been able to reproduce it.

After more playing tonight, we've realised the weirdness in the character selection screen is due to slowdown/lag as it is loading textures or something like that when going from one kart to another & if more than one person is trying to select a kart the input/response delay means you don't know if you are moving the right box or what is going on!

@mr_spoon sure it's welcome, people can do mods and changes characters/track/etc.

Your additions are nice, maybe the headlights could be a bit improved, I'm interested in changing the texture of xue to add this nice little touch. But maybe for headlight true 3D lights could be added.

The yellow on the turbine blade is nice. Maybe you could add something a bit stronger a bit like a waring sign (you often found these on aircraft to avoid the area nearby engines)

Thanks Samuncle. I had a bash making a warning sign with text 'Warning propeller' but the skin gets mirrored on the other side so any text becomes unreadable. I've now made a simple triangle warning symbol with arrows pointing to the fan, see screenshot.

Mystic Island & On the Iceburg were among my fav tracks, hope these get updated soon. Also the penny kart

Congrats on new release, I haven't played yet, but it looks nice.

I've been playing aound with it a bit, and I'm able to get 45+fps on most of the tracks. In the temple track, I get 18-30fps & in the airport/resort track- I get about 27-40 fps. I am using a GTX 650Ti, but my mobo's 4600 is on. I have yet to try my other system

GA-Z87X-OC | IMic USB Audio System | Nvidia 650 Ti | IOGEAR Bluetooth 4.0 USB Micro Adapter | 8GB RAM | Vantec 2+1 FireWire 800/400 PCIe Combo Host Card | StarTech 3.5-Inch Front Bay USB 2.0 Internal Card Reader |i3-4330 3.5.2 NA | eSATA Card | 720p Webcam | USB AC Wifi
2x 1TB SSHD | 500GB SSHD | 1TB HDD | 2TB HDD
USB audio/VoodooHDA
10.10.2 -- Clover 3176

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

<Video
        width="1920"
        height="1080"
        fullscreen="true"
        prev_width="1024"
        prev_height="768"
        prev_fullscreen="false"
        remember_window_location="false"
        window_x="-1"
        window_y="-1"
        show_fps="true"
        max_fps="120"
        force_legacy_device="false"
        enable_texture_compression="fteue"
        enable_high_definition_textures="3"
        enable_glow="false"
        enable_bloom="false"
        enable_light_shaft="true"
        enable_dynamic_lights="true"
        enable_dof="false"
        enable_gi="false"
        enable_azdo="false"
        enable_sdsm="false"
        enable_esm="false"
        old_driver_popup="true"
    >
    </Video>

I do get slightly better performance on my other computer (kubuntu, same GFX card, older Wolfdale CPU)

Is there a website for the Antarctica engine?

After searching around the 'net (and github), I'm not finding it, would be interested to learn more about it, and why you switched away from Irrlicht.