SuperTux | Hacker News Reader

SuperTux

github.com

268 pointsfloriangosse50 comments

This game got weirdly very popular among kids of a very specific generation, here in Portugal.

The "Magalhães", an Intel Classmate variant that was available to school kids between 2008 and 2010 for a price between 50€ and 0€ (depending in social security status), came bundled with both Windows and a Portuguese Linux distro, which shipped with SuperTux by default.

I've got a bunch of these Magalhães at home due to having my parents work at schools. If I recall correctly, SuperTux was exclusive to the first version of the laptop(there were two) and you can still turn heads nowadays if you take one out in public, which is pretty cool. Too bad that, despite their ruggedness, the Magalhães 1 had a very frail hard drive whose death meant that the BIOS would lock up completely when booting, not even allowing you to get to the setup menu, which for a kid meant that it became a paperweight.

Also in an Andalusian-flavored Linux distro, Guadalinex.

>Portuguese Linux distro

Be curious to know what makes a Portuguese linux distro. Isn't changing the language on any other mainstream distro enough? What does the Portuguese market desire extra on top to warant the extra effort?

While you're not wrong, I believe that the effort was made with the intent of supporting everything in-house instead of relying on the community. The UI(KDE) of the Linux Caixa Mágica (Magic Box) was worked on to be user friendly and translated in portuguese as back then everything was still a bit rough around the edges, it was also pretty well documented for parents. I think my first linux was that one, and I learned a lot with it. Unfortunately I can't say the experience was universal, as the lack of teacher training(the education system evolves very slowly) and lack of resources that involved it lead to a complete flop in the classroom environments.

Shout out to Tux Racer too, still works perfectly (at least the Windows binaries)

https://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/

It immediately crashes for me on Ubuntu 22.04, unfortunately. I wanted to play it.

It's in the default package manager as extremetuxracer which is the fork that's still maintained.

Also: https://github.com/supertuxkart/stk-code

SuperTuxKart runs well on Android, and it will let you use the accelerometers to steer (so you just tilt the whole device like a steering wheel) which gives it a feeling a little like the Wii version of Mario Kart.

Yep, even works with controllers!

My kids will play this together using controllers on the Nvidia Shield, and it runs great. They have an absolute blast!

OpenStreetMaps x SuperTuxKart has got to be one of my favorite hidden niches: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SuperTuxKart

Unfortunately, the three people who programmed the vast majority of modern SuperTuxKart and managed the community were bullied out of the project a couple years ago. [1]

The new team lead was somebody who seemed to have a habit of stonewalling [2] ideas and code contributions from both community members and the dev team, talking down about "newbie-tier players" with "zero skill", and [3] hyperfixating on "balance" (in what is fundamentally a kids' game) without room for fun or discussion. The lead artist, who made basically all the tracks that are worth looking at, and whom I'd worked with now and then to get a couple contributions included, eventually disappeared too.

Naturally, commits, contributors, and blog posts/updates are now at an all-time low. [4]

So, don't let your group dynamic be taken over by domineering personalities, I guess, is the lesson.

1: https://blog.supertuxkart.net/2019/05/my-departure-from-supe...

2: https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=8086&p=77...

3: https://github.com/supertuxkart/stk-code/issues/3888#issueco...

4: https://openhub.net/p/supertuxkart

interesting, and GREAT advice!

From your [1] it looks like the original dev(s?) left because their goal was accomplished?

I'm confused because reputable dev leads getting "bullied out of a project" seems like a 2000s thing which shouldn't exist after the proliferation of git where the repo is in theory decentralized, so nobody could without "commit access" like the CVS days of old.

When the original contributor left because they thought the game did what they wanted it to do, I'm not sure it's really a major sticking point if the new leader decided to be conservative about things... not that I have a stake in it or whatever.

> From your [1] it looks like the original dev(s?) left because their goal was accomplished?

Hiker explicitly says that his reason for leaving isn't because his goal was accomplished:

> > To be completely honest, the main reason for my departure was not that my goal of online races was reached. It is a matter or principle and professionalism. From my point of view a big change has gone through the development team, when new members were added and older members left. Let’s just say that the newer team members preferred to pursue a faster-paced development style with fewer reviews, less documentation, less oversight and a reduced need for consensus, and that our differences in approach could not be reconciled.

This was further discussed on Reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/bpb44y/supert...

The link submitter above themselves had done a GSoC with the original team, and on the situation and the bit quoted above, all he had to say was ":/".

> When the original contributor left because they thought the game did what they wanted it to do,

Again, explicitly not what happened.

> I'm confused because reputable dev leads getting "bullied out of a project" seems like a 2000s thing which shouldn't exist after the proliferation of git where the repo is in theory decentralized, so nobody could without "commit access" like the CVS days of old. > > […] I'm not sure it's really a major sticking point if the new leader decided to be conservative about things...

It sounds to me like you are confused because you expect a technical solution to prevent social problems. Obviously, that doesn't really work, bullies still exist, and even if you fork it's still seen as a big, stressful, hostile action that most conflict-averse people would prefer to avoid doing.

From what I've seen, the new devs didn't decide to be uniformly conservative about things— They still posted on the forums with big plans now and then— But it's more that they compulsively let only their own contributions and drastic changes through.

Any course/tutorial dissecting Tux Racer (or similar) sources would be nice.

Tux Racer even had physical cabinets made at one point.

There was one in I think the left back corner of an arcade we went to in middle school. I pointed it out to my friend, I think.

https://rasterweb.net/raster/2004/08/13/20040813073000/

https://www.highwaygames.com/arcade-machines/tux-racer-9072/

I remember playing supertux as a kid when my grandparents bought me a disk of games for my birthday. It was just a bunch of FOSS games like these ripped to a disk and sold to unknowing grandparents.

Fun to see that the source is out there on github

I haven't played for more than a minute, but reading the README here, it's interesting how there's a different experience with a FOSS game released but still in development, especially over so many years. Instead of "SuperTux 2" you have incremental changes. "The next level is finished, all the boss battles are improved". There's no canonical versions like there are with at least classic console games. I know modern games have patches and stuff but I don't think they rework the game this way but I could be wrong.

> I know modern games have patches and stuff but I don't think they rework the game this way but I could be wrong.

Sometimes game patches for modern games do rework game balance or playability, rather than just fixing bugs.

Yeah, Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 patch changes the game massively, for instance

Considering how broken and beta quality the first release of Cyberpunk was, maybe the 2.0 version is the actual 1.0 version they intended to launch in the first place.

Honestly, yes. I played through the campaign on launch day and noticed a few bugs. The game felt pretty shallow. 2.0 brought to what I though it would be on launch day. Kinda wish I just waited a year or so for the 2.0 update before I played it.

Minecraft (Java Edition) is probably the most notable game like this. It’s continued to be the same game with few engine changes/rewrites from the single dev basement project up until the present day dedicated sub company in Microsoft.

Team Fortress 2 had this effect too. 17 years of incremental patches have resulted in a game entirely different from its original release.

DOTA 2 gets rebalanced constantly; certain characters are made stronger or weaker. Overwatch also received some major changes relating to team composition.

I hate games that do this.

Imagine playing chess but the rules change every couple of months.

They definitely do rework modern games. I don't know if it's still technically EA but No Man's Sky gets massive patches regularly. MMOs also get game changing updates.

> No Man's Sky gets massive patches regularly

To be fair MMORPGs need to do taht to stay relevant.

Does NMS count as an MMORPG?

But to your point yes of course, MMOs that are subscription based need these updates. Regardless, parent was wrong.

> Does NMS count as an MMORPG?

nah, I've personally only played it offline

Well, there actually is/was a Supertux 2. I don't remember the specifics, I think they rewrote it from blit 2D into OpenGL? You can see here : https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux/blob/master/supertux2.d... that it's called supertux2

But yeah this has nothing to do with the actual content of the levels, it only refers to the engine.

To clarify, supertux2 is mostly a distro thing. For a while both 0.1 and 0.3 were shipped, and the user-made levels were not quite compatible between them.

Specifically, 0.1:

* had a fixed screen size

* only let you go forward

* used different mechanics for the fire-throwing upgrade

Nowadays it's been long enough that most levels are written for the later versions. And IIRC recent versions re-added some support for forward-only levels (race against the clock).

I was hoping this would be the belly-sliding game that I had on Mac OS X circa 2001. Someone made it with whatever new-to-MacOS tech to show off what could be done that wasn't possible on Mac OS 9 and I downloaded it from somewhere.

Was a fun third-person 3d racing game of some sort. Tux raced down a hill covered in snow on his front and you could steer around trees and rocks and such. My memory is probably getting the details wrong.

Edit: haunter had the answer. It was a port of TuxRacer.

See the other comment about tux racer

This binary runs on latest macOS: https://github.com/drodin/extremetuxracer/releases/download/...

src: https://github.com/drodin/extremetuxracer

One of my first linux distro was Knoppix, which had inside incredible games like Kobo Deluxe, Frozen Bubble, The Battle for Wesnoth, and of course SuperTux.

Those classics (plus Pingus, Numpty Physics and Mokomaze) were what I used to be playing on my first GNU/Linux smartphone, Neo Freerunner:)

This brings me a long forgotten childhood memory, I remember going to my cousin's house and she having a linux machine (It had a linux sticker on it), we played the hell out of this game. Unironically this was also my very first encouter with Linux.

It's a little odd that there's a wasm build that's seemingly only available for download from the official sources, rather than being playable on the web.

Wow, it's still alive. Around 20 years ago we modified the sprites of this game to create a new games featuring our classmates and friends. It was great fun.

How is Grumble, anyway? Has he found his sense of snow yet?

he's around on GitHub https://github.com/Grumbel

classic game

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