How to Install SuperTuxKart 0.9.3 RC1 on Ubuntu, a 3D Kart Racing Game released

     SuperTuxKart, aka STK, released version 0.9.3 RC1 on October 28, 2017 the last big update before going on Steam, SuperTuxKart 0.9.3-rc1 dubbed the "Halloween Update". It’s a free, open-source and cross-platform racing game available for Linux, OS X and Windows. It features the mascots of many open source project like Tux, Beastie, Pidgin, Wilber etc, with Mozilla Thunderbird being the referee.

New Features and bug fixes in SuperTuxKart 0.9.3 RC1

• To help you navigate in the dark, karts now have headlights that are automatically turned on during night time.
• A lot of the annoying physics bugs were corrected by hiker. Karts should no longer bump randomly against walls.
• Karts have also exhaust smoke coming out of their pipes.
• Benau also implemented HSV colorization to add some variety to our scenery. Our vegetation is now more varied since it can have random greenish hues!
• For the YouTubers among us, we now have a built-in screen recorder that can record smooth video without the problems of an external program. More instructions are available on our wiki. The recorder works on both Windows and Linux, but we cannot support this feature on macOS at this time.
• As well as adding the recorder, Benau also worked on various graphical engine improvements. After some fixes, we now have hardware skinning when supported by the underlying hardware stack. As a side-effect of hardware skinning, instanced objects can now have a set of multiple animations, and one animation will play for each instance. As an example of this new feature, the monkeys of Cocoa Temple were taught how to clap, do frontflips, and throw bananas.
• Auria and Benau improved loading times, RAM, and VRAM usage by implementing a lazy-loading system for textures. Now, textures are loaded as needed by tracks or the GUI, rather than loading everything regardless of necessity.
• Benau created a custom 3D mesh format to replace our use of BlitzBasic B3D files. This means drastically reduced file sizes and no more skeletal animation bugs for karts like Adiumy. Add-ons using B3D will still work, but new addons won't work with STK 0.9.2 or earlier.
• QwertyChouskie modified Cocoa Temple to make it suitable for the Grand Prix winning cutscene, Alayan designed and implemented a new system for counting points in Grands Prix.
• Eldermé refactored our rendering engine to improve code quality. Stragus from the #opengl channel on Freenode, in addition to serving as our OpenGL advisor, contributed a high-quality mipmap generator.
• AI karts can now drive on walls, thanks to Benau, and non-vital track details can be disabled (Geometry detail level in settings).
• Many fixes to the legacy (OpenGL 2.x) rendering pipeline by deveee and Benau. Now our players with older hardware can enjoy the game a bit more easily.
• Auria fixed camera jittering caused by code that constantly tried to correct camera movement to match kart speed.
• Auria and hiker fixed problems configuring gamepad buttons on Linux.
• Some shaders are compiled at the main menu to reduce lag when opening kart selection screen.
• Three Strikes Battle now has additional lives appearing that you can pick up if you have fewer than three lives.

Installation instructions:

Open terminal and insert command line...

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stk/dev $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install supertuxkart

While the PPA does not support Ubuntu 17.10 so far, you may download the linux tarball, extract, and directly run the executable file (“run_game.sh”) to launch the game.

Optional, to remove wine and revert the changes, do:

sudo apt-get remove --autoremove supertuxkart