SuperTuxKart is a really nice free 3D racing game where you choose your character between many different cute karts and drive through many tracks. The game has been improved during the years, offering the player a better and more realistic gaming experience.
STK features many game modes, I find this feature very useful because the game never gets boring when you experience different things. At the moment the following modes are supported:
Game Features
- Grand Prix
- Single Race
- Time Trial
- Follow-the-leader
- 3-Strikes Battles
The SuperTuxKart game has received a new rendering engine which allows new effects and more complex tracks offering a better gaming experience for players.
It started during the GSoC 2013 when a student started working on improvement of the SuperTuxKart’s open source rendering engine called Irrlicht which is being used since the 0.7 version. But in order to shine and being graphically impressive for the user, developers behind this amazing game felt the need of a new engine, a more complex one.
The game has received a lot of complaints about its old out of style graphics, even the British Computing blog has written about this fact.
“The 3D graphics aren’t fantastic (think Mario 64, circa 1996, rather than anything more recent) but let’s face it – if you cared that much about graphics, you’d be on your PS3, rather than reading about a free Linux game on the British Computing Blog.”, reads the article on British Computing.
Since the developers care about the community they have been aware about this and were convinced that improvements should be done.
So, Vincent LeJeune made it possible through a lot of hard work. Thanks to the new rendering engine, game effects such as Dynamic light or Image Based Lighting are made possible in STK.
The team behind the SuperTuxKart game has made available a showcase for us so we can see in action the awesome features that have been implemented. To be honest with you guys, I have never seen so mind blowing improvements before in the history of this game.
Light has been really improved in an extraordinary way, depth of field is more realistic now, God rays have been included and the engine now supports GPU Soft particles.
Blackhill Mansion has received some really good new improvement eeriness, Lights in Old Mine look totally different from the ones in previous releases and the Amazonian Journey has been replaced by the new Chocolate Track.
You guys want to see some nice high resolution screenshots and showcase that really show the improvements to be expected in the next release so we decided to post the following screenshots and a video that are taken from the official announcement made on SuperTuxKart blog.
SuperTuxKart Screenshots
But the good thing is that the surprises do not end here. The next release of STK will have a new coherent universe and a new style. Various hidden references have been added to the tracks, textured look like they are hand painted and colors are bright.
For example the following is an example of a wooden texture.
SuperTuxKart Video
Unfortunately all good things have a price that should be paid, a reasonable powerful graphic card is needed to play this game with is full graphical improvements. This does not mean that you can’t play the STK game in your old hardware, you will but the difference is that you will not be able to enjoy the exciting new features and improvements everyone in the community is talking about.
If your hardware is not able to support all the graphical improvements done in SuperTuxKart you are free to disable them and play the game at good frame rates.
Developer are still working very hard to get all the things in place before the final release as there are many tracks that need to be reworked.
For example, at the moment I am writing this article Vincent is trying to take care of bugs in the various graphics driver out there.
We do not know yet the date of the next release of STK, but the developers intend to publish a pre-release version of the game so they can get the user’s opinion and gather some very important statistics that will serve for the final release.
Install SuperTuxKart Game in Linux
If you like, you can easily get the STK game by downloading it from sourceforge.net. Once the download is finished open a new terminal and run the following commands to start the game.
Download SuperTuxKart for your computer architecture from supertuxkart.sourceforge.net or use the following wget command to download and extract the tar.bz2 archive with the help of the tar utility like shown below.
On 32-Bit System
# wget http://ncu.dl.sourceforge.net/project/supertuxkart/SuperTuxKart/0.8.1/supertuxkart-0.8.1-linux-glibc2.7-i386.tar.bz2 # tar -xvf supertuxkart-0.8.1-linux-glibc2.7-i386.tar.bz2 # cd supertuxkart-0.8.1-linux-glibc2.7-i386/
On 64-Bit System
# wget http://ncu.dl.sourceforge.net/project/supertuxkart/SuperTuxKart/0.8.1/supertuxkart-0.8.1-2-linux-glibc2.11-x86-64.tar.bz2 # tar -xvf supertuxkart-0.8.1-2-linux-glibc2.11-x86-64.tar.bz2 # cd supertuxkart-0.8.1-2-linux-glibc2.11-x86-64/
Running the game is very easy, the only thing you have to do is to execute the shell script under the name of ‘run_game.sh‘.
# ./run_game.sh
Conclusion
Is it just a racing game? No guys, it is not like any other racing game available in the Linux platform. What I really like the most while playing this game is the presence of many ‘cute’ weapons you can pick up and use against your rivals.
Funny characters, action and fun to play!
Good article. Captures some of what’s great about it.
It’s very professionally done. Great attention to detail in intuitive UI. Achievements, Netplay, etc. Every little thing is taken care of.