April 2013 Project of the Month: SuperTuxKart

SourceForge is proud to announce April’s project of the month, SuperTuxKart, a kart racing game featuring Tux and friends.

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As you know, a picture is better than a thousand words, and a video is even better! So we’ll start with a video demo of SuperTuxKart 0.8:

Rich: Congratulations on winning the POTM for April, 2013.

Joerg: Thank you! And thanks a lot for having us here

Rich: Tell us about STK. What is it?

Joerg: STK is a kart racing game. It’s mostly a kids friendly game, but a lot of adults are playing it. Its focus is fun game play, not realism.

Rich: How long have you been doing this?

Joerg: I restarted the project around 6 years ago. At this time the original project was basically dead, left in a better looking, but unplayable state. I started to fix things here and there, and suddenly I had restarted the project. Another developer joined me, and we were able to do a very first release. Since then auria has joined the project, and we have made some huge progress with the game.

Rich: How many people are actively involved in the development of this project?

Joerg: At this stage, there are two people doing the actual coding of STK, one person who is implementing and managing our addon server. Then one artist who works mostly on tracks. On top of that there are some coders who submit a patch or two if they find something that they think needs to be improved, and several people from the community doing textures, icons, tracks and karts.

Auria and myself are managing the project now, and doing the actual coding. Stephen is our addon-expert, and samuncle the artist. Additionally we have Arthur doing the blog posts, and helping with the community. And there are translators who make the game available in different languages.

Rich: I’ve noticed, in game projects, that there’s a much broader set of talents involved than in many other projects. Coders, certainly, but also musicians, artists, and usability people. Who else am I missing?

Joerg: Yes, a game needs people with a variety of backgrounds. We heavily rely on testers, but also have people doing the blog posts, tweets (which we only started recently), and helping people getting started. We have a very friendly community, so new comer who want to help out with a thing or two will easily find help there.

Besides musician we also need sound effects, and generally people coming up with ideas. We do a lot of brainstorming in our forums, discussing ideas backwards and forwards till we get something that will really enhance the game.

Rich: What sorts of things do you typically put on Twitter? Tips? Release information?

Joerg: We have only recently started to use twitter, mainly because of the potm voting. We try to keep people up-to-date with development on STK, show off new features before they are available in a release. Artists use it to show tracks they are working on, and coders might inform about other new features that they are working on. ATM it’s a little bit quiet, since the core team is working on the GSoC application, but once this is done, we will keep it more up-to-date.

Rich: So, GSoC? What are you going to have a student work on?

Joerg: GSoC is a project funded by google, in which student are being paid to work on open source project. It’s the first time that we are trying to apply, and if we are accepted, we will have a interesting list of projects to work on. Our overview page is at http:/supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/GSoC_overview, which links to the list of ideas. We are mostly focusing on getting started with network multiplayer, one of the most requested features of STK.

Rich: Sweet

Joerg: There are nine suggested projects in there, and while the full network multiplayer is too much for a GSoC project, important blocks will hopefully be implemented in two projects (if we get selected for GSoC that is). We have a very experienced team of mentors, all of which are professionally working in the IT area, and we even have a professional game engine developer available.

Hopefully this will be very good for the students participating, in that they get some real life coding experience, but also for STK.

Rich: The way that you talk about the project, it sounds almost like a professional venture. How do you find time to have this much passion about it?

Joerg: I do nearly all of my work on the train to and back from work, which is nearly 2 hours a day. Then I’ll add some time in the evening and/or weekend. It is certainly very encouraging to receive acknowledgement, be it in form of POTM, or seeing that STK is used in research projects like Microsoft’s IllumiRoom and others, or even to see that STK was used in a TV show

Many parents are happy to have STK, since it’s free and kids friendly, and allows them play togehter with their kids.

Rich: TV show? Do tell.
Joerg: Around 4.5 years ago we were approached by the producers of “Friday Night Lights“. They needed a video game to be shown in one episode, and the professional companies didn’t want their games to be used (it was in the context of underage drinking).

So they came to us, and we were happy to get STK on TV this way 🙂

Rich: That’s so cool.

Joerg: Yes, it’s those little success stories that make work on STK so rewarding.

STK has been ported to a ‘one switch’ version which can be played by people suffering from motion impairment, which, imho, shows the strength of open source development

Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in this project, other than playing it, what opportunities are there?

Auria: we can get help from people from a variety of backgrounds. Non-coders can first help with translations, and documentation. Then we have a great need of modellers who know Blender well to help improve or make new tracks
Auria: programmers are also of course very much welcome. We have a good list of much-requested features to code, that we could certainly get help with

Rich: What language(s) is the project developed in?

Auria: The core of the game is developped in C++. Some libraries used include Bullet for physics, Irrlicht for graphics, and OpenAL for audio. Beyond C++ there are also blender extensions written in python, and the addons website (which will hopefully evolve into a multiplayer lobby someday) written in PHP.

Rich: What’s planned for the future? Anything exciting to look forward to in the next release?

Joerg: The most exciting feature is native support for wiimote. We are currently working on some portability issues, but hope to get the solved for the next release. We will have two new game modes – a soccer mode for split screen play, and a ‘Find the Easter Bunnies’ more targeted for kids

Online multiplayer is probably the most important outstanding feature of STK, but it will take some time before we will have this ready. It is currently plannd to become 0.9, but we will have more releases in the 0.8 series to gradually introduce features for that:

Adding a lobby, in-game voting for addons, online highscores, playing against ghost recorded by other people, a tutorial and achievements. Hopefully part of this will be done as part of GSoC.

Rich: Thanks so much for your time, and congratulations again.

Joerg: Thanks so much for having us!