Looks amazing, gonna get some friends to install and test a network (internet) game. We’ll probably jump a few continents to get us all connected so it will be interesting to see how the netcode handles players with varying latency.
I wonder how’s difficult is it to create tracks for STK...
Seems like the typical way is modeling them using blender, with special objects and properties to mark game details: https://supertuxkart.net/Making_Tracks
One of the ideas lodged in the back of my mind since the time of Twisted Metal 2, is to stick a 3d map of my hometown in an arcade ‘sandbox’-style racing game. Might be possible one day when we get cheap mainstream drones with laser rangefinders.
Great news! Now if only we could get FreeCol[1] 1.0.0. Or at least 0.12.0. If you like free strategy games or loved the original Sid Meier's Colonization, this is a must-play.
Ouch. You just made me wonder if Widelands (Settlers II clone) still exists, since I hadn't looked at it in what feels like at least a decade. It seems like it does, but development happens at a snail's pace:
There's also been a remake of Colonization in one of the recent Civilization games, I think. (But not open source.)
I am still waiting for a good remake of the first Master of Orion. The science system was very clever and the absence of base micro-management left you attention for bigger points of strategy.
In most 4X games the technologies are arranged in some fixed acyclic graph. Colonization's founding fathers are different. And so is Master of Orion: the technologies are available in six ladders and you can research anything within a few rungs of your highest technology on that ladder. Each faction in each game has some technologeis randomly missing. Some technologies might not be in your game at all.
So you never knew whether you were going to get your favourite weapon systems or terraforming tech in your game. Or whether you had to trade / loot / steal it from other factions or whether you'd just not be able to acquire it at all.
There are some remakes of MoO, but most of them take their cues from the relatively much more bloated sequel Master of Orion 2.
Wow, this has been in the making since forever. I truly admire the dedication that went into this project for over a decade now. Congrats on that release!
Seeing as it's one of most popular free software games, this is sorta like Wine coming out of the alpha after eighteen years when it was actively used by game publishers for ports to MacOS.
Awesome work! It's amazing how the community keeps on making the best things out of it, I can't be any less excited by all the progress they are making.
I'm pretty sure that there will be another online version of supertuxkart.com as part of their "supertuxkart", but I've never seen it mentioned on HN.
Compared to the most known ...Kart games? It's playable outside of a single closed platform. For those of us who are not console fans/owners, most ...Kart games simply don't exist. (In a completely legal way, anyway)
Just seeing the word "tux" reminds me of a lot of really sub-par quality games and applications of ~2003 that people would talk about as if they were just as good as the commercial offerings.
People would seriously talk of it being "the year of the linux desktop" and "the year of linux gaming" while trying to claim that tux racer felt like a AAA game.
If the best thing the platform has to offer is ports and rip-offs of other games it's not a viable platform and it's insulting to people's intelligence to try to claim otherwise.
I'm not knocking the effort maintainers put in and I'm sure they learn from it and enjoy the process. That's not something to be dismissive of. But claiming it's superior to commercial games insults the genuine quality in games out there, and actually harms linux gaming because it reduces your credibility when talking about gaming.
I get your point, but please compare the ~2010 screenshots to the present ones and actually play a few rounds. For me at least, it’s more fun than a number of proprietary modern console racing games at zero dollars and open source.
> Just seeing the word "tux" reminds me of a lot of really sub-par quality games and applications of ~2003 that people would talk about as if they were just as good as the commercial offerings.
How is that relevant to this game? The developers have put a lot of work into this game and you're posting about your experiences 16 years ago about things "people" said about games back then.
> If the best thing the platform has to offer is ports and rip-offs of other games it's not a viable platform and it's insulting to people's intelligence to try to claim otherwise.
It's hard to see any logic behind this argument. If you don't like like it, that's your choice, but it's ironic that you seem to think Mario Kart was an original game. There were only like a million racing games that came before.
It doesn't have to be AAA-worthy, the fact that it's open source is what makes it awesome. If I were looking for something proprietary and more AAA-like, I'd look at 10985 games available on the Steam store that are Linux-compatible (not comparable to 52616 available on Windows, but comparable to 18087 available on macOS).
You're counting the wrong thing. They're not talking about the number of kart racers out there, they are talking about the number of people who play better kart racers.
Like the reason "the year of the Linux Desktop" hasn't happened is not explained by pointing out that there are a lot of OSs and Linux is better than most. It hasn't happened because everyone is using Windows and MacOs. If STK isn't comparable to Mario Kart, then it isn't good. Everyone is playing Mario Kart; that's the standard to beat.
Why would you think it's sarcasm? I don't think the game is bad at all. Modern games like action games (war, etc) cost millions to build, this is obviously a simple game, but it's on par with simple, commercial games to me.
Might have been thinking of Tux Racer, which was 2000. Tux Racer was more like a snowboarding game than a kart racer though. Still well into the GUI age though.
2000 was a really weird time for Linux, in hindsight. KDE vs GNOME was getting into full swing, ESR was making all these apocalyptic predictions about the software industry and people listened to him, RMS was in peak "guh-new-slash-linux" mode (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html), and the dotcom bubble hadn't burst yet. Linus gave the keynote at Comdex in 1999, and Comdex was still a big deal.
It's good that that era led to lots of funding and popularity and further development of FLOSS, but in hindsight (to me at least) it looks like so many distractions and heated arguments over petty differences. I mean, it still is, but it used to be too. :)
Basic steps, you'll need a bit Google for things specific to your device.
1. Enable developer mode
2. Enable sideloading apps
3. Download an APK of the app.
4. Your device should take it over from there.
I ~have~ had a Fire Phone, and it was fairly easy to install the Google Play Store (only because that's where all the apps are, unfortunately,) and installing Aptoide is also pretty easy, too.
I tried unsuccessfully to get a usb Xbox controller to work with this game recently on ubuntu. Never found a workaround to get it to be recognized as a controller or keyboard. I do love this game though!
I highly recommend a Wiimote if you have one lying around. Super easy setup on Linux (couldn’t figure it out for the life of me on Windows, but that probably has more to do with me than the OS), the gyroscope works, vibration works, and overall it’s quite a lot of fun. I think I got a maximum of four simultaneously connected.
I'm not sure about Linux, but on OS X there was a fantastic utility you could use to do really advanced stuff (AppleScript / Automator integration, for two), but the really cool thing was that you could ise up to eight WiiMotes at once- the last four were the same indicators, but the lights were inverted.
Not sure if you can do it with the current set of utilities for Linux, but the WiiMotes themselves support going up to at least eight.
Did you try antimicro? It's what I use it to play Unepic using a controller to send keyboard presses. The game is supposed to have controller support, doesn't seem to work but it works flawlessly with antimicro, though the controller doesn't provide quite enough buttons for all the hotkeys in that game.
As aasasd pointed out, it exists, but isn't part of the core distribution.
The openSUSE folks include it (Geeko) in the version that you find in their repositories, so that's why you might think that it is included by default.
I remember seeing some TuxCart arcade machines in the Middle East last time I visited. Really wasn’t expecting an open source game to be in an arcade! But after thinking about it, it makes tons of sense: no royalties just the cost of the cabinet and sticks.
You'll have to nudge the F-Droid maintainers for that. They grab the source code and compile it themselves. The app developer isn't really involved, they just provide the source code and ideally ensure that it can be easily built by others.
Though you may want to give them a week or two before you go nudge them. They might build it on their own when they find time for it.
This looks great. I grew up playing supertux (pretty much the only computer game I had), and this brings back a lot of memories. I credit it with a lot of my interest in programming/open source; figuring out to mess with the game as I got older was an excellent experience.
82 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadI wonder how’s difficult is it to create tracks for STK...
And weirdly enough there's already a mod and a process to convert OpenStreetMap data into a track: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SuperTuxKart
https://www.moddb.com/mods/supertuxkart-openstreetmap-mod
[1]: http://www.freecol.org/.
> Saturday, 17 October 2015
Ouch. You just made me wonder if Widelands (Settlers II clone) still exists, since I hadn't looked at it in what feels like at least a decade. It seems like it does, but development happens at a snail's pace:
https://wl.widelands.org/news/
I am still waiting for a good remake of the first Master of Orion. The science system was very clever and the absence of base micro-management left you attention for bigger points of strategy.
In most 4X games the technologies are arranged in some fixed acyclic graph. Colonization's founding fathers are different. And so is Master of Orion: the technologies are available in six ladders and you can research anything within a few rungs of your highest technology on that ladder. Each faction in each game has some technologeis randomly missing. Some technologies might not be in your game at all.
So you never knew whether you were going to get your favourite weapon systems or terraforming tech in your game. Or whether you had to trade / loot / steal it from other factions or whether you'd just not be able to acquire it at all.
There are some remakes of MoO, but most of them take their cues from the relatively much more bloated sequel Master of Orion 2.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181215171436/http://sirian.war... has some really cool write-ups and http://www.sullla.com/MOO/moo.html is a bit more recent.
If you want to play, make sure to get the latest community patch.
https://github.com/unknown-horizons/godot-port
> which took even longer than the port from PLIB (anyone remember that?) to Irrlicht in 2010
I'm pretty sure that there will be another online version of supertuxkart.com as part of their "supertuxkart", but I've never seen it mentioned on HN.
I also cannot wait for openage, the Age of Empires II open source engine. https://openage.sft.mx/
https://play0ad.com/ - this is a completely open source project being built.
Needless to say we are big fans and being able to play over the lan will be awesome!
As a Linux user I can confidently say that a lot of software for the platform is rough around the edges, but SuperTuxKart is absolutely awesome.
Care to expand on how SuperTuxKart is superior to commercial racing games?
Just seeing the word "tux" reminds me of a lot of really sub-par quality games and applications of ~2003 that people would talk about as if they were just as good as the commercial offerings.
People would seriously talk of it being "the year of the linux desktop" and "the year of linux gaming" while trying to claim that tux racer felt like a AAA game.
If the best thing the platform has to offer is ports and rip-offs of other games it's not a viable platform and it's insulting to people's intelligence to try to claim otherwise.
I'm not knocking the effort maintainers put in and I'm sure they learn from it and enjoy the process. That's not something to be dismissive of. But claiming it's superior to commercial games insults the genuine quality in games out there, and actually harms linux gaming because it reduces your credibility when talking about gaming.
How is that relevant to this game? The developers have put a lot of work into this game and you're posting about your experiences 16 years ago about things "people" said about games back then.
> If the best thing the platform has to offer is ports and rip-offs of other games it's not a viable platform and it's insulting to people's intelligence to try to claim otherwise.
It's hard to see any logic behind this argument. If you don't like like it, that's your choice, but it's ironic that you seem to think Mario Kart was an original game. There were only like a million racing games that came before.
It doesn't have to be AAA-worthy, the fact that it's open source is what makes it awesome. If I were looking for something proprietary and more AAA-like, I'd look at 10985 games available on the Steam store that are Linux-compatible (not comparable to 52616 available on Windows, but comparable to 18087 available on macOS).
But there are millions of kart racers out there, and many of them are pretty poor. STK is better than most of them.
Like the reason "the year of the Linux Desktop" hasn't happened is not explained by pointing out that there are a lot of OSs and Linux is better than most. It hasn't happened because everyone is using Windows and MacOs. If STK isn't comparable to Mario Kart, then it isn't good. Everyone is playing Mario Kart; that's the standard to beat.
Why would you think it's sarcasm? I don't think the game is bad at all. Modern games like action games (war, etc) cost millions to build, this is obviously a simple game, but it's on par with simple, commercial games to me.
- Nethack.
- Everything ScummVM supports. Note that a lot of AGI games are amazing.
- Current Dave GNUKem. Addictive. A lot.
- Crack Attack.
- XUV. Ok, Ultima IV has non-free data, but it's still remarkable.
- FreeABUSE
- Retux
Technically libre games may not be on par, but fore sure you'll have jewels out there.
Last update on Tuxkart - 5MB (the author apologies for the size of the download)
"" "" "" SuperTuxKart - 574MB
2000 was a really weird time for Linux, in hindsight. KDE vs GNOME was getting into full swing, ESR was making all these apocalyptic predictions about the software industry and people listened to him, RMS was in peak "guh-new-slash-linux" mode (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html), and the dotcom bubble hadn't burst yet. Linus gave the keynote at Comdex in 1999, and Comdex was still a big deal.
It's good that that era led to lots of funding and popularity and further development of FLOSS, but in hindsight (to me at least) it looks like so many distractions and heated arguments over petty differences. I mean, it still is, but it used to be too. :)
Does it run on Android?
Not sure if you can do it with the current set of utilities for Linux, but the WiiMotes themselves support going up to at least eight.
Because, even to my ultra-cheapskate taste, the Sanic game still looks too lo-fi.
Edit: well apparently it's quite possible to do something to that effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSsPDEnpFGo
Though of course the handling, tracks, etc likely still need careful tinkering.
https://supertuxkart.net/Discover
I wonder if this is a reference to Larry Ellison. He owns most of the Hawaiian Island of Lanai.
The openSUSE folks include it (Geeko) in the version that you find in their repositories, so that's why you might think that it is included by default.
Though you may want to give them a week or two before you go nudge them. They might build it on their own when they find time for it.
The switch would be a great platform to sell a port on.
Thank you Super Tux devs!