Networked racing

[JontomXire]

Hi, all.

First off, SuperTuxKart keeps appearing at the top of the list whenever I log on. So I finally clicked it. It looks like a good game to try my eldest daughter (8) on. She plays the stupidest web games, making milkshakes or doing makeovers for virtual girls to impress virtual guys. Ugh! She quite likes playing games, but considering how old she is, she's really bad at them! Hopefully she'll love this game and gain some hand-eye co-ordination at the same time.

Anyway, I see the game says you can play against other players with split screen. We have two main gaming computers at home (and an antiquated laptop that the kids refuse to use). Is it possible to play against each other on different computers across the network?

If not, are there any plans to add it?

I would volunteer to help, but my time is taken up between a new baby and a different project.

Thanks,

JX.

[Arthur]

Hi, thanks for your interest! Currently SuperTuxKart does not have network play but this is planned to be added in version 0.9.

[JontomXire]

Great. Thanks for the reply and the info.

FWIW I think SuperTuxKart is a great game. I was pretty bored when I had a quick try at a normal game on beginner level, but then I tried story mode at expert level for each challenge and that's much harder and just so much fun. One point though - I spent ages trying to crack the challenge where you need to get 16 nitro points. It wasn't made clear that you need unspent nitro. I just thought I had to pick up 16 and could then use them and still complete the challenge.

Anyway it occurred to me this morning that I have an old console style USB gaming controller lying around. I think I'll plug it in and give it a go and see if I can get multi-player working and then I can enjoy blowing up my daughter with fairy cakes and so on. Muahahahahaaa!!!!

[hiker]

Hi,

Anyway it occurred to me this morning that I have an old console style USB gaming controller lying around. I think I'll plug it in and give it a go and see if I can get multi-player working and then I can enjoy blowing up my daughter with fairy cakes and so on. Muahahahahaaa!!!!

A simple lan-only networking (i.e. dumb slave that only forward the players input to the server and receives updates from there) is not too difficult (I did this around 3 years ago), but not really useful in the long term for STK - I admit I likely wouldn't even try to integrate it in our trunk, since we (hopefully as part of GSoC) will start working on the WAN implementation soonish (depending on GSoC acceptance and proposals). I don't want to discourage you, just to avoid disappointment. If you are on the other hand interested in the proper WAN implementation, then please contact us, since we can certainly need help with that!

Reason is that the simple LAN approach is completely unsuited for WAN games, which we want to have (search our wiki for networking to get some background, and or our gsoc idea/todo list for lobby and STK replaying). You could try an old stk version from around that time (0.6??) - lan networking mostly works, iirc it had a few bugs with items. But according to reports it was already too slow to be playable with wireless networking. It's hidden, search the forum for details on how to use it (I honestly can't remember *blush*).

Cheers,
Joerg

[Arthur]

0.6 yeah and you had to enable it in the config file.