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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I wish there was a way to release free software and also charge money for it. This team deserves more than just congratulations and donations for all their good work
In todays market, selling it through Steam/GOG and co could work too. Enough people might do that just for convenience sake, even if they could easily download a binary release for free.
It's very similar to what OsmAnd (free software map application for Android is doing).
The standard application from the Google Play store is limited in how many maps you can download and you can purchase the OsmAnd+ app for unlimited maps.
Or... Get the same OsmAnd+ from f-droid :)
I quite like this model of charging users that are using the proprietary ecosystems.
It sure worked on me, I happily paid for OsmAnd+ =)
This seems like a fun project, but it's not really anything special. Most software has either viable or superior FOSS versions (MS vs LibreOffice as a prime example), but games seem to be severely lacking in this space.
It looks and feels like a game from the mid 2000s. It doesn't perform particularly well, and there isn't anything technically impressive about the game, especially considering it's been on the go for almost 15 years.
It's very hard to get people to collaborate on a game in harmony without a clear leader. OSS games (and a lot of open source software in general) will always suffer from having "too many cooks in the kitchen."
I actually had GIMP in mind writing this comment - the tool itself is a victim of too many cooks, but yet manages to be a solid piece of software, despite it being clunky.
Another example is Blender, it's a bit hard to grok, but overall does the job extremely well once you get over the warts.
Even in terms of fundamentals, this game is a little... lacking. Default controls, graphics settings, UI, animations are all very early-noughties (that's without commenting on the quality of the artwork, it's actually quite a nice style and some of the assets are cool), things have evolved hugely since then.
That's been my experience with the other (few) FOSS games I've played; they all have an almost pseudo-retro feel to them. I guess the biggest reason to want to play is that it's FOSS.
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.
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.
Go Irrlicht Engine! It says their improved version is called Antarctica. I assume Antarctica is GPL-only? I could really use an enhanced Irrlicht for my program but copyleft is incompatible.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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 also cannot wait for openage, the Age of Empires II open source engine. https://openage.sft.mx/