It’s Halloween, and a thrilling treat awaits fans of the free, open-source racing game SuperTuxKart – a new beta release!
The first beta of SuperTuxKart 1.5 showcases a variety of enhancements, affecting everything from the core game engine to the user interface, as well as networking capabilities and score notifications during online multiplayer competitions.
While no new tracks, karts, characters, or items are included in this release (those features are expected in SuperTuxKart 2.0 along with many other significant updates), there is a new music track for Das Luna Aren.
Other SuperTuxKart 1.5 beta 1 updates:
- Introduction of a new benchmarking feature
- Dedicated Display tab added in the Settings
- Option to set or edit favorite karts, tracks, and arenas
- Search functionality for finding karts and arenas by name
- Rescue bird functionality now directs the kart towards the ball in Soccer mode
- Recent blog updates displayed on the Online screen
- Audio levels adjusted for improved accuracy, especially for lower volumes
- Smoother scrolling implemented in the game engine
- New maximum frame-rate settings introduced
- Certain graphical effects are now compatible with legacy video drivers
- Enhancements made to Cascaded Shadow Mapping
- Improvements to shaders, levels of detail (LoD), shadowing, and scene nodes
- LoD settings are now part of the graphics presets
- Game window can now be resized across all UI screens
- Additional skin variants available for Classic and Cartoon base themes
- Help documentation added for Lap Trial mode
- Higher resolution textures generated for scalable fonts
As expected, there’s also a significant amount of backend improvements, build system modifications, code optimizations, and bug fixes.
If you’re interested in trying out the latest features, you can download the latest beta versions from the SuperTuxKart GitHub releases page, which includes builds for Windows, macOS, Android, and Linux.
To execute the Linux build on Ubuntu, simply extract the TAR.GZ archive and run the run_game.sh file contained within to start the game.
While you are testing, make sure to observe any eerie occurrences and report them back to the developers. This will aid in ensuring that the final release is free from bugs and unexpected surprises!