It’s hallowe’en, and there’s a frightfully good treat waiting for fans of the free, open-source racing game SuperTuxKart – a new beta!
The first beta of SuperTuxKart 1.5 offers an array of improvements, touching everything from the underlying game engine to the user-interface through to networking features and score announcements during online multi-player races.
No new tracks, karts, characters, or items included this time (those are planned for SuperTuxKart 2.0 along with a myriad of other major changes) but there is a new music track for the Das Luna Arena.
Other SuperTuxKart 1.5 beta 1 changes:
- New benchmark feature
- Dedicated Display tab in Settings
- Ability to set/edit favourite karts/tracks/arenas
- Ability to search for karts/arenas by name
- Rescue bird now places kart towards ball in Soccer mode
- Recent blog announcements show in the Online screen
- Audio level tweaks, including better accuracy for low audio levels
- Smooth scrolling enabled in game engine
- New maximum frame-rate option
- Some graphical effects show on legacy video drivers
- Improve Cascaded Shadow Mapping
- Shader, level of detail (LoD), shadowing, and scene node improvements
- LoD settings now included in graphics presets
- Game window resizable in all UI screens
- More skin variants for Classic and Cartoon base theme
- Help information added to Lap Trial mode
- Higher resolution textures generated for scalable fonts
Naturally, there’s also a veritable bus load of backend and build system changes, code cleanups, compiler optimisations, and bug fixes.
Fancy playing trick or treat? You can download the latest beta builds from the SuperTuxKart GitHub releases page, where builds for Windows, macOS, Android, and Linux are provided.
To run the Linux build on Ubuntu simply extract the TAR.GZ archive and run the run_game.sh file inside to launch the game.
Whilst testing, be sure to note any ghoulish goings-on and report them upstream to developers. This will help ensure the final release arrives exorcised of errors and free of unforeseen frights!