http://blog.supertuxkart.net/2017/10/supertuxkart-halloween-update-released.html
New version should take at least 2 minutes off full-game runs. Better map loading times and better driving physics. you can now drift super close to a wall without fear, you might get a small drop in speed if you graze a wall, but it no longer instantly drops your speed to infinite zero. Kiki is best kart. Have a good day. :)
Edit: Final version released - http://blog.supertuxkart.net/2017/11/supertuxkart-093-released.html
As for the map loading times, please don't believe it. I know this sounds bad to say, but they have been saying that every time they change something but there has been no actual improvement for months.
they just pour on the optimization:
My computer is too old to run SuperTuxKart. What should I do?
You can try your luck and run the game. If it works, great! If it doesn't, we're sorry for you, but we can't support everything. We have a limited amount of manpower and time to support old GPUs. If we did try to support old GPUs, it would basically mean no new and advanced features. Please do not open bug reports because your computer is too old to run SuperTuxKart!
UbuntuJackson - they removed the weird city map and replaced it with candela city, it's a much better map. Having a new computer doesn't help much, i have a ryzen1700+ at 3.8 and an rx480, but since STK uses only one cpu thread, the GPU is going to be bottlenecked. There isn't much potential for supertuxkart to take advantage of modern hardware until it becomes a multithreaded application.
kompowice - All closed source games run fine on linux, just open source ones are bad. It's a big job to code stuff and they are making many changes to the code almost every day, just not enough manpower.
BrmBrmCar - The loading times are definitely improved, also, you don't anymore get the weird jitter at the start of maps like Cocoa Temple. Also, you can load a map in a regular race, exit it, then start a story mode run and that map will load almost instantly cos it's still sitting in ram. I haven't tested how many maps you can stack up in this "precaching" method, but it's something.
Let me tell you level loading times are not improved. The only time improved is actually starting the game, but that doesn't matter in speedrunning. And the cache thing won't either.
That is odd. I noticed ingame track load times cut in half (open amdgpu non-pro mesa 17.2 kernel 4.13.9). Maybe your config has a bottleneck in the transmission to RAM or VRAM, the loading improvement comes from there, they reduced the size of the data that is sent to those RAM areas. Precaching matters in full game runs, due to the lack of an internal timer.
The legacy graphics engine has been improved, deselecting "advanced pipeline" should activate it.
The 2 new tracks, Cornfield Crossing and Candela city, are really good, they need to do more of that, more tracks. Ubuntu Jackson articulates that point very well, more tracks are something that anyone can enjoy, whether your pc is old or new. Some more Blender engineers should join the team, to get more tracks made.
A part of me wants to post them a facetious "Feature Request - Prevent community from dying, add more tracks" But new tracks are not something that can be easily made.
I think they should stop making so many battle arenas. If there was online multiplayer, there would be more people playing battle arenas. Since there is no online multiplayer, the majority of people are playing against AI on regular tracks and not battle arenas.
"kompowice - All closed source games run fine on linux, just open source ones are bad. It's a big job to code stuff and they are making many changes to the code almost every day, just not enough manpower. " I checked, there are almost 80 people on github. In comparsion to commercial projects it's ridiculously little. I don't know if that would donations change anything.
" Since there is no online multiplayer, the majority of people are playing against AI on regular tracks and not battle arenas." After all, there is a co-op...
"The only time improved is actually starting the game, but that doesn't matter in speedrunning." Maybe you can afford segmented?
I use the amdgpu drivers on Linux. Though the drivers really don't go well with SuperTuxKart, I really see no bottleneck.
kompowiec - We certainly need to think about how to close the gap between runners PCs. Segmented is a possibility. At the moment I would not feel comfortable submitting an 0.9.3 run in the 0.9.x category, due to my 1 to 2 second load times. 0.9.3 gives me a time of 1:40, 3 minutes better than wr. I asked on their github for new game+ so we would have a new category to run, hopefully to attract more runners. I'm sorry for the confusion, I could have worded my request better. I also should make an account on their forum instead of posting at their github. I've been too busy making supertuxkart videos, not enough time to consider specifics such as this. Benau politely explained it to me and I now understand. Kompowiec, I understand that english is not your native language, your comment on github could be considered as a troll tactic, attemting to cause anger in someone for their own amesement. I give you my forgiveness and I hope we can put this behind us. I understand that sometimes people have bad days. Maybe you just didn't understand the meme you were using because of the language barrier, in which case, disregard that part.
brmbrmcar - The loading problem is almost certainly a hardware config bottleneck, hard drive or ram or gpu. I absolutely agree, amdgpu drivers are awful in supertuxkart, maxing out the graphics gives me 20fps.
"Kompowiec, I understand that english is not your native language, your comment on github could be considered as a troll tactic, attemting to cause anger in someone for their own amesement" God forbid, I didn't want to upset anyone, simply i was surprised - Especially since it this option has been around more than for 8 months! :)
"Maybe you just didn't understand the meme you were using because of the language barrier, in which case, disregard that part." I think so it's shorter version word like SMS language, actually, I couldn't feel the pejorative tone.
I actually tested newest version STK and I have such a weak computer that i can't record live, at most the ghost
Now i found even it's in documentation FAQ: "How do I unlock all tracks? The intended in-game way is to play story mode and beat all challenges. If however you want to unlock everything without playing story mode, you can also cheat by editing a config file. Open the folder mentioned above in question "Where does STK store the user config file". From there, open the folder "0.8.2" then open the file "players.xml". Replace all occurrences of "none" with "hard" (or "easy" or "medium", indicating the highest level at which you have solved a challenge)."
kompowiec - This will explain everything: https://imgur.com/a/HKqkp I am grateful that you have been using so much effort to try to help. I hope you are having a good day.
I get better than 20fps, more like 50-60 on some tracks on max. (but when I recorded that video just then I was limiting the fps, just in case you were wondering) So that makes me even more doubtful of a bottleneck, considering my computer really isn't that high end. And my graphics card is literally the most low-end part. (EDIT: that probably goes to the ram, but 8GB should be more than enough, and I've never heard of ddr4 being any noticeably better)
Later I realised I was accidentally still running ethereum mining when i tested my fps. Now I'm getting about 60 FPS. I was having a problem where OBS recording would drop the frame rate and supertuxkart would only use %100 cpu out of %1600, but i've just tested and stk can now use at least %120. I have no idea why it would suddenly become thread capable, or why it wasn't before. I might actually have been mining the other times as well. Oops lol. Now the game runs okay, but OBS is still only able to record at 45-60 FPS.
Map loading times would be impacted by a few things. I thought the hard-drive would probably be the first place to look, but I just moved the game data from an SSD to a old style drive, loading maps from there was only a little slower. It might have been cached somehow, I'll restart my PC and test again. Maybe it somehow depends on your OS drive being on an SSD?
Edit: Restarting PC did not impact load times. Upon further investigation, supertuxkart uses exactly %96 cpu, this is it's maximum load. The Liquorix kernel patches (or more specifically, the MuQS scheduler) are doing something weird which possibly enables SuperTuxKart to spread it's load onto another core or thread, spiking at about %130 (may be just a system monitor bug). But, the game becomes unplayable and locks up the whole system for seconds at a time. These spikes do not appear to occur on a "vanilla" linux kernel. I will build the latest liquorix kernel patch and I'll investigate the potential for a STK performance increase.
Thank You. I checked and i never had such an option even afther beating the game story [without save], i don't know what it depends on, where meanwhile option "SuperTux" exists in other challenges. I have version 0.9.2+dfsg-2
I know this may sound silly, but is there any room for 100% runs? (All gold cups and achievements) I know it's not much different from all gold cups, but it's .. something?
I've been knocking it below one hour thirty minutes and still trying to improve it
