Stunt Rally now comes with spaceships and cool ancient cities!

Stunt Rally 2.4... talk about feature creep, but I am not complaining ;)

See more pictures of the release here, and don't forget to give some feedback on our forums.

Oh and you can now browse cars and tracks online.

Holiday Racer 2.2 released (aka Stunt Rally)

Obviously someone is having a hard time with the winter in the northern hemisphere right now:

More awesome screenshots of Stunt Rally 2.2 here, and don't miss the details of the new version in the full change log.

Last but not least, discuss it on our forums :)

GSoC 2013 pushes SuperTuxKart forward!

If you follow our planet, this is no news, but the recent advances in graphics, networking a other stuff from SuperTuxKart are quite nice. This is basically a result of them being accepted to this years Google Summer of Code.

Not showing most of the new features yet is this nice video featuring the mascot of OpenGameArt.org as a new player character:



But their blog has many interesting technical details (and other screenshots + videos) to show off the new features.

So if you like to also contribute, or just want to praise the great work, have a look at their FreeGamer hosted forums :)

Stunt Rally 2.1 released

My luck... I do the reluctant once in two weeks post to keep the blog alive, and almost the next day is an unexpected big new release of a cool game ;)

Ahh well... Stunt Rally 2.1 seems to have ventured into even less realistic spheres now:

Awesome alien worlds in Stunt Rally 2.1

A lot more (mostly more conventional) new screenshots can be seen here.

All I need now is a nice unrealistically spongy arcade style vehicle handling, and I am happy :p

Two times (0.)2.0

(Yes, that is a rather thin common ground to combine these two news in one post ;) ).

Anyways, today there is one for the "FreeGamers", aka those that are looking for more or less playable games:
There is a new release (2.0) of StuntRally, and I guess I can quote Twain here too:

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated!

Because it looks like development was not only resumed after the earlier announcement of a project hold, but even increased in pace :)

Anyways, here is a great video:


And the other one is for "FreeGameDevs":
And as they say: good things come to those that wait, and things are better late then never... so I am happy to also report about the Octaforge 0.2.0 beta1 release.

This friendly fork of the Cube2 engine, brings an impressive list of new features on the table, and should once it becomes more "production ready" be a strong contender for the easiest to mod FPS engine out there!

SuperTuxKart Development News

First, after 12 years of development, SuperTuxKart is a candidate for the March project of the month at Sourceforge. This is a huge honor and a significant boost for the project, so please vote for us here.

Second, last month we were featured in Microsoft's IllumiRoom demo alongside Red Eclipse (another FOSS game) and Halo. For those who are interested, you can find the video in the last post. It's the second time STK has been featured in an unexpected place. The game has previously appeared in an episode of the show Friday Night Lights. The episode was critical of drug use and videogames, so downloads for the game probably didn't go up. I am not entirely sure why they chose a kart racer game over, let's say, postal 3, but licensing issues are likely to have played a prominent role in their decision. STK's permissive licenses mean, companies don't need to contact us before using it in media.

Development news

To try these new features out by compiling the latest source code from sourceforge page. Links are located at the bottom of the page.

Bubblegum:
The Bubble gum powerup currently can be dropped by a player to create a track obstacle. While not finalized, there is an idea to make it more useful by including a second phase to this particular powerup. The first phase occurs when the player activates the gum, it expands into a pink force-field which protects the player from enemy attacks for 15 seconds. If the player is hit by a weapon while the force-field is up, the shield is destroyed, and bubble gum shrapnel will hit any players within a certain proximity blinding them for a couple seconds. It will also leave a smear on the ground which if hit, will cause a moderate decrease in the players speed.

The second phase happens if the fifteen seconds pass without the shield being destroyed. It shrinks back down and the player can then drop it on the ground like in the current version of the game.

The new icon

       

Planetarium:

This is a level Samuncle is currently working on.

Konqi's new kart:

Here's what will likely be the final version of Konqi's new kart. It now includes pedals and a steering wheel. It's looking good.

New Peripheral Support: Wiimote

Funto is working on adding wiimote support via the open source library “wiiuse” https://github.com/rpavlik/wiiuse. After 3 years it's finally coming together. Wiimotes now work on Linux and Windows (if you compile from the latest svn). It is not working on OS X yet, but Auria is buying a wiimote to try to get it working on her Mac. There are also some issues with tuning and steering that need to be worked out and we have not integrated support for motionplus, because only the external version was working. So wiimotes with motionplus built in will not work (older models will). We may add the motionplus functionality in later and we always appreciate help.

Game Tutorial:

Auria is developing a gameplay tutorials covering the core gameplay elements for new players. The tutorial takes place on a modified version of the track “Hacienda” and the player takes a single lap around the track. During the lap the game pauses periodically to explains things like how to control the kart, obtaining and using weapons and powerups, how to use nitro boosters and the skidding feature.

New WIP Game Mode: Soccer

Soccer mode is one of our developer funto's, pet projects. It's a multiplayer game mode where two teams fight to push an oversized soccer ball into the opposing team's goal. There is a test level derived from the Stadium arena. Currently, obstacles have been removed, but map makers could always re-add them. It's WIP, and the scoring system is not currently implemented and the system for making team's is still a WIP.

Other enhancements:

- Sparking particles now emit from the kart's wheel's while drifting. It's a welcomed addition. You can also compare Konqi's old kart (below) to the new one (above).

- Characters can now wear customizable hats. We'd love to see what people can make

You can test all these features out today by downloading and compiling the latest trunk of the SVN, located at: http://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/supertuxkart/main/

How to compile from from source:

• How_to_build_the_Windows_version
• Build_STK_on_Linux

This is a guest post by Antoine Stroll.

Fresh versions of Stunt Rally and Warzone2100

Just released today, there is a new version (1.9) for Stunt Rally:

Stunt Rally 1.9

It has a few nice new features, but probably the greatest update is a major change in the car handling physics, including an "easy" mode for those of us not wishing to practice for a career as a professional rally driver ;) and the guys would like feedback in the SR forum so let them know what you think.

A big collection of (partially quite crazy) screens can be found here.

Another great release that surfaced just today is Warzone2100 version 3.1.0. It cumulates all the changes made during the last 2.5 years, however if you tested the RCs already then there isn't too much new. Most notably they mention the new and fully fixed netcode, so that "out of sync" is a thing of the past (unless you have a crappy net connection like me :( ).

Have fun playing!