After more than 7 months of development that began after the v1.1 release, Game of the Month and its team of independent developers have had the pleasure of announce the launch of Super Tux Kart 1.2. It is a new stable version that includes an extensive list of new features, but there is one of them that would stand out for all fans of this kind of clone of the SuperMario Kart that became so popular in the Nintendo world.
While many of you probably get along with the keyboard when playing on a computer, other users prefer to play with controllers. For that reason alone, for us SuperTuxKart 1.2 is an important update, since it has improved support for gamepads. Below you have the list of most outstanding novelties that have arrived together with the new version of the most sympathetic car game available for Linux.
Highlights of SuperTuxKart 1.2
- Much improved support for controllers (gamepads) when using SDL2 instead of Irrlich for creating windows. Regarding this, it now supports "hotplugging" of the drivers, most of the bugs related to the controls have been fixed and now the mapping is easier.
- New settings to customize the game camera.
- New "Cartoon" theme, which is a new modern theme that was announced in the past. This theme displays alternate icons.
- An improved online rating system. Online rankings have been reset to keep up with you.
- Now you can resize the game window in it without going to the options.
- The minimap now shows basketballs.
- Haiku support.
- Any add-on kart can now be used online even if other players don't have it.
- Three upgraded karts: a new Kiki kart and upgraded Pidgin and Puffy karts.
- Added support for LAN IPv6 servers.
- Increased speed and performance of server creation.
- In-game creation of a racing server is now possible on iOS devices.
- Improved tutorial with free-flow racing.
- Support for SVG icons.
- New tips for soccer mode.
- Team chat for team games.
- Many many minor improvements and fixes that they don't mention because they wouldn't fit in one article, but say they add up.
- On Android:
- All official tracks have been included in this release.
- Ability to use a custom splash screen at startup and a better progress indicator during data extraction after download.
Now available from the developer's website
At the time of this writing, SuperTuxKart 1.2 It is now available from the developer website for Linux, Windows and macOS, but in all cases we will have to download what is available from there. I mention this because in Linux we can install it from the official repositories of many Linux distributions, from Flathub (Flatpak) and Snapcraft (Snap), but none of these sources has been updated at the time of writing. Yes, we can download its tarball and its source code.
With regards to Android version, link It takes us to the official Google Play, but what we can download right now is the first RC of SuperTuxKart v1.2, which means that it is not updated either. There is another beta version that was updated on August 18, but they don't say what numbering it carries.
In any case, if the idea of install the "tarball" and you prefer to wait, one of the best options, because of how it works and how soon it is updated, would be to install the v1.1 what's on Flathub, so the wait will be a matter of hours. On the other hand, if you are fans of Ubuntu or the company that develops it, Canonical, we know that the Snap version will also be updated, but I leave you with a devastating data: v1.1, from January, came to Snapcraft on July 7, having arrived on January 5 at Flathub.
In any case, we already have a new version of SuperTuxKart. Let's enjoy it.