SuperTux

Sep 25, 2016

SuperTux 0.5.0

The SuperTux team is excited to announce the availability of the stable release 0.5.0 after less than a year of development. The most prominent change for this release is a new in-game level editor which allows you to create levels and worldmaps on-the-fly from within SuperTux itself. We would like to apologize for publishing the 0.4.0 release with a large number of issues.

In order to improve the Forest Island in the future, please help by filling out the poll at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe8_nxdagVCHV2s7SX517aDTkEQLVXCA6KaufbPHBxyFtuH_Q/viewform.

If you’d like to help with SuperTux development, you can find more resources in our wiki at https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux/wiki. Please get in touch with us. The fastest way is usually IRC, but please wait if you don’t get an answer immediately. We urgently need more graphic designers and developers for future releases, help in these areas would be really appreciated.

Changes:

  • In-game level editor
  • Improved levels in Antarctica and Forest Island
  • Language packs are fixed
  • Engine performance improvements
  • Extended the scripting API: gradients are now scriptable
  • Added a few more tiles and music
  • New console commands and command line options (related to the editor)
  • Various other bugfixes of issues reported since the v0.4.0 release
  • And more (minor) improvements and changes

A big thanks to Hume2 and Tobbi, who worked very hard on the new in-game level editor, and also all of our translators who worked very hard to translate the new strings in time.

Source tarballs and builds for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) as well as OS X/macOS are available on the Downloads page, or via GitHub. Linux binaries can be downloaded from OBS.

Jun 24, 2016

In-game Level Editor Merged

After almost a year of hard work by Hume2, and contributions by Tobbi and Karkus, on a new in-game level editor, we’re pleased to announce our decision of merging the development branch into our master branch!

As this is a large change to the code base, and we intend the editor to be the major new feature in SuperTux v0.5.0, this will need some serious testing. For this reason, we’re asking you, the community, to help find bugs and also provide us with feedback and suggestions for changes that could be integrated before the 0.5.0 release. Please report bugs here: on GitHub and follow the bug reporting guidelines.

We would like to avoid publishing a release with a large number of issues, as occurred with the 0.4.0 release. We apologize for those problems.

In order for the testing phase to be effective, we need as many people as possible to help test the current development state. This is the reason we provide nightly builds for many major Linux distributions, Windows, and OS X. They can be found here.

Another important consequence of this change is that there are many new, untranslated strings. The translation resources have been updated on Transifex and are waiting to be translated. We need to highlight that there have been changes made in the translation process to ensure the quality of translations. These decisions are summarized in a comment on issue #351. If you want to see your language included in SuperTux 0.5.0, please make sure the translations meet the new requirements listed there. In addition, we’re aware of problems with some translations due to unsupported characters, broken font direction setup or missing character shaping. This issue is being worked on and will be addressed in the 0.6.0 release. For information, see issue #130.

To ensure the translations are included in 0.5.0, you should start to work on the as soon as possible. Strings will be frozen 2 weeks before the release date (we will send out an announcement to translators when that occurs), so please raise concerns with strings before that deadline. In these 2 weeks, only minor localization updates should happen.

Dec 20, 2015

SuperTux 0.4.0

After more than a decade of slow, but hard development the SuperTux team is happy to announce the first stable release after 0.1.3 (which was released on 2005-07-09), 0.4.0. Compared to 0.1.3, this release features:

  • a nearly completely rewritten game engine based on OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL2, …
  • support for translations
  • in-game manager for downloadable add-ons and translations
  • Bonus Island III, a for now unfinished Forest Island and the development levels in Incubator Island
  • a final boss in Icy Island
  • new and improved soundtracks and sound effects
  • new badguys, bonuses and power-ups (air-, earth- and ice-flower)
  • a halloween tilemap
  • new graphic effects (glowing objects, particles, …)
  • levels and worldmaps are scriptable using squirrel
  • much more game objects: trampolines, switches, portable stones, wind, moving platforms, … - most of them have scripting APIs
  • improved statistics
  • many invisible changes, like unit tests, efficiency improvements and more bugfixes
  • much more…

And of course we updated the official levels to make use of all the new features. Compared to the latest beta, 0.3.5a, this release features:

  • updated translations
  • reworked add-on manager to support downloadable and updatable localization packs
  • many bugfixes
  • added iced-graphics to some more badguys
  • melting animation for some badguys
  • updated more levels (fix playability, …)
  • updated build system, featuring unit tests, libraries as git submodules and improved Travis-CI builds to support nightly builds
  • more levels in Incubator Island
  • support for horizontal and vertical gradients that span the length / height of a sector. Add (direction "horizontal_sector / vertical_sector") to your gradient.
  • much more…

A big thanks also to our translators who worked very hard, even providing translations for strings changed after the announced string freeze. We’ll try to not let that happen for the next release. Note: Please remember that language packs are now managed via the add-on manager. This means that you need to install language packs if you previously used a localized interface. Moreover, you may want to regularly reinstall the language pack from the add-on manager to keep the localization up-to-date (an update system is planned for the 0.5.0 release: #270). Merry Christmas everyone, and happy playing!