Tuxracer.js play Tux Racer in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Tuxracer.js play Tux Racer in the browser

github.com

141 pointsretro_guy41 comments

Linux gamers from the Linux Game Tome days might enjoy learning that we ported Neverball to the browser (mobile, too) some years ago.

https://play.neverball.org/

Oh, this brings back memories of interning in the IT lab at the local university.

Has anyone done Frozen Bubble?

Yes! And let's not forget lbreakout2!

https://www.y8.com/games/frozen_bubble_hd

This is a great port, but you'll want an ad blocker. It works well saved as a web app from Safari.

Impressive work.

Maybe it's my memory from 20 years ago playing tricks on me, but to quote Civvie 11: "It's like playing a version of [Extreme Tux Racer] where everything was moved two inches or so to the left."

I also played it back in the day and it seems perfectly accurate to me, at least in terms of control and physics. After a few goes I'm quickly approaching my old personal best on Who Says Penguins Can't Fly. One thing I'll note is that the "best score" display seems to be only based on time, not herrings (which I actually prefer, but I know that's not how you're supposed to play it).

This was always a victory to teenage me after fighting with SDL and Nvidia drivers on Gentoo. Getting this to work with good framerate was always so exciting. Nostalgia hit for sure.

Funny, I've loaded it in the browser, played it, was happy like kid. Then I just entered 'extremtuxracer' in my terminal and tada, played it locally without browser. Not to blame tuxracer.js, this is great. But sometimes you forget "normal" software.

the browser version doesn't work for me, the maps are messed up. anyways i did the same. except i had to install it first, because this is a relatively new laptop. i did have it on the previous one and almost every machine of mine before that.

i even made my own courses. one thing that i'd like to change is the slope. i made one course that would start in the center and then go in concentric circles around the starting point. it worked, kind of, but it was tricky. it would have worked better with a slope of 0 and a greater height differential from the highest to the lowest level. maybe some day...

Hearing that song again after almost 20 years made my day

Skipped playing the game just went straight to download the music

https://github.com/ebbejan/tux-racer-js/blob/main/public/ass...

That's the first time I heard the song. My Linux audio drivers never worked

Given that the original project (at https://sourceforge.net/p/extremetuxracer/code/HEAD if i'm not mistaken) is C++, I wonder if it is possible to port the original in some form using WASM.

This is not to take away from the work that the OP has done - it is impressive, I'm just kind of thinking out loud here.

Looks like it would be possible with Emscripten but I'm not sure what OpenGL version its using so that's probably the biggest dependency there.

I tried doing this a few years ago, mapping OpenGL 1.x primitives into WebGL was indeed a pain. There were some translation layers but they were either incomplete or targetting GLES, not classical OoenGL.

I then attempted to actually rewrite ETR to use GLES (or modern OpenGL in general), but that also turned out to be quite an effort given how the original engine/game code is structured.

Interesting. Sounds like a rewrite would be faster since the game itself doesn't seem that complicated.

I wonder if the commercial version of this (from Sunspire Studios) is floating around anywhere. I recall it being even more satisfying to play.

Looks like the author has gone on to have a successful career in game rendering, working on (among other things) Infamous and Ghost of Tsushima.

I have a CD copy of the game, and many fond memories playing it with the wife in the early 2000's...

That music is stuck in my ears for so many years...

Is there any way to contribute levels to Tuxracer these days? I made a pair of really long ones (~10 min and ~20 min)

Oh, fantastic! I've tried rebuilding this for macOS half a dozen times, and never quite managed for one reason or another. And now you've brought it to the browser.

I might try adding reflections and translucency to ice someday.

If you want to play locally on macOS, here is a build. If it fails to run, it is likely the error "The requested video mode is not available" and can be run if connected to an external monitor (then you can disable fullscreen and launch without an external monitor).

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

How was this done? Did the author rewrite the source in TS?

Their used to be a racing game, around 2005 - 2008, in the Ubuntu repositories called Torque (or similar)?

Anyone knows what happened to it?

TORCS?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/torcs/

Not the same one; I remember it only had one car (red one, Mitsubishi maybe) and one track. Very much a WIP.

I remember this game as well. I wish I could remember the exact name.

Was it this one? https://sourceforge.net/projects/trigger-rally/

Yup :-) Still in the repo. Got a lot more tracks now too.

What type of racing? Drifting, simulation?

There aren't many FOSS games from that era, are you sure about the name?

Might it be ManiaDrive?

http://maniadrive.raydium.org/index.php?downloads=yes

Or vDrift?

https://vdrift.net

Thanks for bringing me retro feelings of my first Linux days back!

This works really well on mobile. Kudos to the author.

i enjoyed falling off the left side of the map in "finding vodka". 800 is terminal velocity

Reminds me the Adobe Shockwave games

Penguins also like to have fun

But you have to install Node.js to run this "in the browser"? Why isn't this just a web page?

It could be a webpage but the developer would have to host it on a server somewhere (which would cost something). With the instructions to run it on the GitHub page, you are effectively running a server which is hosting the game.

There's a link at the top of the README to https://0x00eb.itch.io/tux-racer where you can play it without needing to host it yourself.

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

This guy ports open source games to mobile devices and sells them under their original names. (Selling is okay, misrepresenting them as the official version is not.)

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