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Super Mario Inspired SuperTux Issues Its First Official Release In 10 Years (phoronix.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the go-ahead-and-play dept.

An anonymous reader writes: SuperTux, the free software game inspired by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers, has put out its first stable release in a decade. SuperTux 0.4 rewrites the game engine to make use of OpenGL, SDL2, and other modern open-source game tech. SuperTux 0.4 additionally features a lot of new in-game content, an in-game download manager, and support for translations. SuperTux 0.4 can be downloaded for Linux, Windows and Mac via GitHub.

116 comments

  1. How about.... by Damouze · · Score: 1

    A remake of Penguin Adventure with Tux?

    --
    And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
    1. Re:How about.... by ls671 · · Score: 1

      Just like a Penguin in Bondage?

      http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics...

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    2. Re:How about.... by Ranbot · · Score: 1

      How about we don't let a bloated knock-off of a 3 decade old game become news? Terrible shovel-ware Mario-clone games can be found on every generation of consoles, MS-Dos, Windows, Mac, Linux, handheld games, web-based platforms, Steam store, smartphone games, etc. Another mario-clone should not be a surprise to anyone or news worthy of any discussion on Slashdot.

      I suspect this was submitted by an "anonymous reader" affiliated with this terrible project.

    3. Re:How about.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Super Mario Bros. was itself a ripoff of Pitfall.

    4. Re:How about.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      HEY, this one is different because a smug Gnu face is plastered on it.. It gets the privileges as much as A Quest For Herring dominated linux gaming news in the day. that game was going to change the world

  2. TAGAP by Black+LED · · Score: 4, Informative

    I prefer TAGAP

    http://www.tagap.net/

    1. Re:TAGAP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      TAGAP looks more like Jazz Jackrabbit

    2. Re:TAGAP by Black+LED · · Score: 1

      It's actually more like Abuse or Teeworlds

  3. 80 MB? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Does a simple 2D game really require that much size? Why is everything bloated these days? :/

    1. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by x0ra · · Score: 2

      actually, it's worst than that. The source of the thing is ~480MB...

    2. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by wolrahnaes · · Score: 2

      45 MB of music, 27MB of graphics, and 5MB of sounds. Beyond that largely portability, hardware agnosticism, and security.

      --
      I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
    3. Re: 80 MB? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Seriously? You think it's okay to post solely to conplain about the size of the thing when someone was kind enough to update an old game? Go ask for a refund...

    4. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      I think we're past the times of complaining something being bloated. We look more at the usefulness of the software. Is the game fun, does it run smoothly, react to input nicely, how is the quality assurance, and so on.

    5. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Huh? Are you clueless or is that some crusty joke you're trying to make?

    6. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by grumbel · · Score: 1

      The bloatiness is the result of a lack of cleanup, the project accumulated lots of graphics over the years, lots of that isn't really used or critical, but might break some random user contributed level if removed. So old graphics stay in for fear of breaking stuff. This game is also very "community driven", meaning everybody can contribute some crappy thing and that then ends up in the source tree, rejection of bad contribution doesn't really happen, unless they break something major.

      Biggest chunk of the size is however simply the music, which comes along in very high quality compression, there is no reason you couldn't up the compression ratio and make the package half the size. Some audiophile might notice, I didn't.

      There is of course also the plain old reason that tech advances, 1280x720 true color graphics take a lot more space then 320x200 256 color graphics. Same with midi music vs ogg. Also the game uses plain PNGs everywhere, you could of course use compressed textures or if you really wanted to JPEGs for some graphics, but that isn't really worth the effort and makes modifications harder.

    7. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by grumbel · · Score: 2

      You included the .git tree in your count, so you are counting everything twice. For the rest you can blame git as well, it stores and downloads the complete history, so everytime a music file gets updated a little, you end up with a duplicate music file in the project history, same with the graphics. Git isn't very good at dealing with changing binary files and none of the half dozen workarounds (annex, large file, etc.) are worth the effort to save a hundred megabytes.

    8. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by ElectricHellKnight · · Score: 1

      Oh God, a whole 80 MB? The nerve of those developers! How dare they take up so much space?!

      For fuck's sake, it's almost 2016. I don't know if you're reading this from your old Apple II or what, but you can get a 1 TB hard drive for easily less than $100 nowadays. Amazing how cheap storage has gotten.

      On another note, as probably one of the few people here who actually downloaded and played the game, I can say it is quite fun. Although definitely not as challenging as the original Super Mario Bros., it does add a few new mechanics that are interesting to see.

    9. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by x0ra · · Score: 1

      it doesn't input nicely...

    10. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by x0ra · · Score: 1

      I actually *did* play it, and the bloat is painful...

    11. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by ElectricHellKnight · · Score: 1

      I actually *did* play it, and the bloat is painful...

      If 80MB is painful, how does one such as yourself store music or video files then? That's about five songs in .mp3 format. Seriously, 80 MB is nothing. I think it's been years since I've used any storage medium that could not hold at least 80 MB.

    12. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      45 MB of music

      Would be 4.5 MB if it were MODs, or .45 MB if it were MIDs

      27MB of graphics

      This, not the music, is actually what pisses me off. Use low-res graphics to make them look like low-res graphics. Then use a fancy scaler to make them smooth when scaled way up. We all have supercomputers on our desks and laps now, there is no need to ship high-res textures just to save some CPU. Using low-res graphics with Quincunx or similar actually produces a better retro look than using high-res graphics anyway, so if your goal is to look all retro, that's a better way to do it.

      and 5MB of sounds

      That's bigger than the whole original game!

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    13. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Ok, that's not good then...

    14. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by ledow · · Score: 4, Informative

      MOD need specialist support to play now. Plus they need to be made by the original music creator - they capture each instrument individually and, as such, many things you might want to do you can't, and the mod player is responsible for decoding, timing, etc. which is an overhead.

      MID technically needs hardware support or software instruments to play - and never quite sounds the same. The storage size doesn't include the software instruments - It was 45Mb last time I downloaded a soundfont for a soundcard. Plus they need to be made by the original music creator, and can't have various effects and changes done to them.

      MP3 etc. are just sound recordings, not music formats, and are the final composition, layered with other instruments, effects, etc. Library support is pretty universal.

      Graphics don't scale as nicely as you might think. Like fonts, you can't just scale up or down unless the original is vector. And then you have to process them and people complain that a game with a few boxes slows to a crawl when a lot of enemies are on-screen or requires a long startup time to rasterise them all in the right size first, or requires a 3D card with hundreds of megs of texture memory to hold them all.

      Don't forget that nowadays, just the SDL library is several megabytes. It's supports all kinds of things that didn't even exist back in the 8-bit days. Hell SDL_TTF rendering requires a large library, plus FreeType, plus a font (the DejaVu fonts are 600Kb each or thereabouts). Sure, this is all "wastage" and you could just encode a bitmap font. For every possible screen resolution. Or run in fixed resolution. Like the 320x240's (or even half that) of the 8-bit era. Everytime you double a resolution, you QUADRUPLE the storage size required. So today's 1900x1200 screens require a lot more sprites to fill them and a lot more detail in those sprites to not look shit, and a lot more storage to hold it all.

      There are reasons that things grew. I grew up in the 48Kb era. Have you looked at things like the Skool Daze disassembly. Fuck spending all that time squeezing that stuff into individual bits and still ended up with a ten-screen game because of memory restrictions.

      Don't forget the amount of libraries that are sucked in to any simple program now. Dozens of megs for something as simple as calculator. Everything comes back to MSVCRT and a ton of Windows DLL's. On Linux, everything needs libc, and a bucket of support libraries and devices.

      The reason it's so much more is because computers do so much more. And in terms of programming, I'd rather they spent time on making the game rather than pissing about optimising the graphics format for a 2D platformer. As it is they are short of people, short of code, lagging in development - and you want them to spend an age pissing about prematurely optimising shit using obsolete formats for the sake of some bit-level purism? That's a sure way to lose every developer on the project.

      Especially compared to "#include " and just getting started straight away, even if that drags in megabytes of libraries that almost EVERY game written today uses.

    15. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's it matter to you how bloated it is? HD space is dirt cheap, bandwidth is dirt cheap, CPU power is dirt cheap. I have a bog standard desktop, it's not a game station or anything stunning by today's standards. I have a bog standard i7 2600k chip, 8TB of drive space, 16GB, 2 screens over a single 2GB GPU card and the line to my ISP is 150Mb/s. That's nothing special at all by today's standards. So what if it takes and extra 3 seconds to download some textures for a game? Hell, my phone has 64GB of space and a quad core chip. That's software today, we need fast turnaround and quick development cycles, which means code is slightly less efficient in some areas. Sure, if I'm coding the latest blockbuster for the XBOX or PS4, then sure my C++ core and assembly engines need to be shit hot but it's not going to be a major problem if a bit of software for an overspec'd desktop is a little bigger than expected.

      As they always say, if you really don't like the way TuxRacer ( or any OSS ) is written, fork it and make your own, you can spend the several weeks. I genuinely mean it when I say, I would be curious to see if someone could optimise it and how they did it, it would make an interesting article.

    16. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by DrXym · · Score: 1
      Git will heuristically pack files using deltas so providing two versions of a binary are substantially similar it will only store the difference and is quite efficient.

      The issue comes if the files are not similar in which case you store multiple copies. The problem is compounded if these files are committed frequently (e.g. some nightly build action) in which case the repo bloats out of control. This happens with all source control systems but ordinarily the bloat is confined to the server where people don't see it.

      I suggest if you have to store lots of binaries that it might be stuff them into a distributed database / repository and only hold a reference to them in Git. The build system can fetch the object by its reference rather than its entire change history.

    17. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Space on the / partition is at somewhat of a premium. I would have run out long ago if I didn't know about sudo apt-get clean and removing old kernels.
      That's one reason why apt-getting games sucks. It also sucks that by downloading the .tar.bz2 on the github page you get the source code (plus assets) and a text file with a list of a dozen dependencies in *-dev form, instead of some static build. I thought the source code was in files named "source code".

    18. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      MOD need specialist support to play now.

      You can get a library. It's smaller than a pile of mp3s.

      Graphics don't scale as nicely as you might think. [...] Don't forget that nowadays, just the SDL library is several megabytes. It's supports all kinds of things that didn't even exist back in the 8-bit days.

      I'm not forgetting, you are. You get the scaling with a library. It's still smaller than packing in masses of bitmaps. And speaking of which...

      Everytime you double a resolution, you QUADRUPLE the storage size required.

      In memory, yes. On disk, no. It's typical to use compressed textures now. The amount of processing time needed to decompress small textures is a footnote.

      Don't forget the amount of libraries that are sucked in to any simple program now.

      That's exactly why the media doesn't have to be so big. libraries.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    19. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      Even the 320 kbps version of Stairway to Heaven comes in at around 8 MB, so I'm not sure how you calculated that 5 songs in .mp3 format takes up 80 MB. It would probably be closer to about 20 regular songs.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    20. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      I suspect the textures are PNG (so not really compressed) because of the old s3tc patent issue. That's a 17-year-old feature, so hoping it expires soon. What the hell, I've found a page that says it expires in two years. So maybe it will be supported by free drivers with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Mint 19 and debian 10.

      S3TC just makes sense because almost all hardware supports it (if not you can uncompress them at loading), it saves on storage and bandwith (including RAM bandwith). PNGs can stay on the git repo.

    21. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MOD need specialist support to play now. Plus they need to be made by the original music creator - they capture each instrument individually and, as such, many things you might want to do you can't, and the mod player is responsible for decoding, timing, etc. which is an overhead.

      The Java generation is shining through here. There is overhead, and that overhead is visible. The player routine for MP3s will have even more overhead, but it will be hidden in libraries.

      As for portability, it might run on Linux, Windows and Mac, just as a lot of other high end games these days.
      The memory requirements and processing required means that it isn't portable to any semi low end.
      You aren't going to run this on your Nintendo DS or any other mid-range platform.
      My Amiga is considered to be relatively beefy with a 68060 CPU and 64MB memory expansion. It isn't near being powerful enough to run this.
      This game is about as portable as any other game that is released for Windows, Mac and Linux, and that starts to include high end titles.
      When it comes to indie platformers there are plenty of good ones with good multiplatform support.

    22. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Buchenskjoll · · Score: 1

      worse, or did you mean würst?

      --
      -- Make America hate again!
    23. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We all have supercomputers on our desks and laps now

      We also have hard drives that can easily hold an 80 MB game, so I don't see the issue here.

    24. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Bitmapped graphics take a lot of space.
      Those old games to save on space did a lot of tricks to save space. Such as using the same bitmaps and switching their color pallets around to make them a different creature. Lowering the resolution and color depth so you can store less. Just flipping bitmaps vs having different animations for the opposite direction (assuming the graphics would want to be asymmetrical, like holding a gun in one hand). Less in depth background, often it is just setting the background pallet to a color. A bip and bop vs. a wav sound data...

      So newer games have more animation more colors, smoother animation higher resolution for more details... All comes at a cost of additional storage.

      With a full screen image in 640x480 resolution it would be 1.2 megs lossless. if it is a rolling background it could take 5 or 6 megs for the background image alone.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    25. Re: 80 MB? Seriously? by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      Hey this is the internet, everything no matter how benign is a reason for hate and condemnation.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    26. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >We all have supercomputers on our desks and laps now, there is no need to ship high-res textures just to save some CPU.

      Are you fucking retarded? As you say we have supercomputers on our desks, so why the fuck are you crying about 27 megs of graphics? That 2 minute long youtube video of funny cats you watched when you had coffee was probably more than 27 megs. Stop being an autistic fuckwit, my god. This is why Linux sucks, and will always suck.

    27. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is why Linux sucks, and will always suck. If you want a Super Mario clone on OSX, you open the app store, go to the app you want, and click "get". The End. Look at all of that technical bullshit in you post. Do you realize what colossal waste of time that is for 95% of the population to have to learn? Also, the fact that the "/" partition is always running out of space for you despite that fact that terabyte drives are $100 shows the stupidity of these old partitioning conventions. They used to separate the partitions in case some user started filing up the space allotted to users it wouldn't stop critical system functions, but the irony is, on the desktop you only have one user at a time really, and with the cheap terabytes, you're more likely to fill up the stupid root partition than the home partition. It's just stuck in 1998 quite frankly. Like remember when your swap space was supposed to be twice you ram or whatever? Yeah, that probably made sense when you had 8 megs of ram, but if you blow through 16gb of ram and start having a 32gb swap files thrashing around on your disk...well, that is just bad engineering and it would be correct to say Linux is shit.

    28. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Security? I doubt there is any consideration to security. They can't even get input lag under control, this is amateur crap. Not sure why its on the front page.

    29. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

      It won't even start on my Windows box.

      --
      Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
    30. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by ElectricHellKnight · · Score: 1

      Even the 320 kbps version of Stairway to Heaven comes in at around 8 MB, so I'm not sure how you calculated that 5 songs in .mp3 format takes up 80 MB. It would probably be closer to about 20 regular songs.

      I just double-checked a random Judas Priest song (ripped from a CD) in my library. I don't remember exactly which one. It was just shy of 15 MB. I do remember that it was not one of the really long ones, though. Around four minutes.

    31. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by wolrahnaes · · Score: 1

      Would be 4.5 MB if it were MODs, or .45 MB if it were MIDs

      I don't think we need to go over the limitations of MIDI, I'm sure you know it already and other posters have covered it anyways.

      As for MODs, those work great when you have hardware audio engines with enough channels that you can load the appropriate instruments in to and trigger at the appropriate times. When you're doing all your audio in software, a single preassembled audio track is simpler and more reliable.

      This, not the music, is actually what pisses me off. Use low-res graphics to make them look like low-res graphics. Then use a fancy scaler to make them smooth when scaled way up. We all have supercomputers on our desks and laps now, there is no need to ship high-res textures just to save some CPU. Using low-res graphics with Quincunx or similar actually produces a better retro look than using high-res graphics anyway, so if your goal is to look all retro, that's a better way to do it.

      It's been a while since I've played SuperTux, but I never recall it looking like they're going for a retro low-res appearance. Firing up this latest version to play a level, I don't see any textures that are wasting their resolution.

      Could the game work just as well with lower-res textures? Of course, but so could pretty much any other game ever. As long as they're not doing something stupid like using a 64x64 for a blown up representation of a 16x16 texture I don't see the problem.

      That's bigger than the whole original game!

      It's infinitely higher quality than the audio in the original game too, that's what happens when we can play actual waveform recordings rather than the NES audio system which was basically comparable to an extremely limited form of MIDI.

      8 and 16 bit era game consoles were basically programmed like embedded devices, raw access to all the hardware and a fixed configuration meant that developers could pull all kinds of trickery to achieve much higher quality than the binary size would have you expect. I have a fairly complete NES ROM collection, including a lot of hack ROMs that never actually existed on a cartridge, and it totals just a bit over 100 megabytes. The thing is, that means those games as they are will only ever exist on that hardware because changing anything significant would throw off everything.

      Building something to work the same on a variety of systems means you can't do that sort of hardware-level optimization. It's also really hard, requiring a detailed understanding of your target platform. Abstraction solves both of these problems at the cost of limiting your optimization. These days whether you're targeting mobile, PCs, or consoles it's just not worth the effort to try to shave a few dozen megabytes by significantly increasing the complexity of your code. Disk is cheap. RAM is cheap. Bandwidth is cheap. Programmer time is not cheap. Clever hacks make your code harder to understand for new contributors and introduce opportunities for bugs that need not exist.

      --
      I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
    32. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Not good either. As we can see, the bloat is least of the concerns here.

    33. Re:80 MB? Seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then it wasn't an MP3.

    34. Re: 80 MB? Seriously? by palion · · Score: 1

      Wurst. Which in Swiss German means "Don't care".

      --
      Well, well
  4. Bloat ... by x0ra · · Score: 0

    +64MB to do what was done in 64kB 30 years ago ? Come on, I know it's 2015, but you can do better...

    1. Re:Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Higher resolution graphics, higher colour depth, digital music and sound effects, etc. It adds up fast.

    2. Re:Bloat ... by mark-t · · Score: 1

      Uh.... no. The NES only had 64K of addressable memory. Only a fraction of that was available for games. Super Mario Bros used a 32KB cartridge.

      More than 64K of effective memory on a cartridge was possible with bank switching (up to 1MB, switched in at 32K at a time), but Super Mario Bros did not use that.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    3. Re:Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow, that was magic. Where did all those programmers go I wonder.

    4. Re:Bloat ... by x0ra · · Score: 1, Informative

      they were real programmers, not merely integrating already written code as we do today...

    5. Re:Bloat ... by ElectricHellKnight · · Score: 0

      Look at the graphical difference. This is clearly much smoother and more detailed than anything on the original Nintendo or the Super Nintendo.

      For comparison:

      A screenshot of SuperTux

      A screenshot of Super Mario 3 on NES

      Not to mention the fact that SuperTux is much higher resolution, and the music is in actual music formats (.ogg) instead of 8-bit audio.

    6. Re:Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yet, SuperTux looks worse than Super Mario World for the old SNES in terms of style and taste. Yeah, it's higher resolution and might contain more colors on screen, but it's rather ugly as most FOSS games go.

    7. Re:Bloat ... by Gaygirlie · · Score: 1

      The OP also fails to account for the fact that the game and its libraries have to do in software a lot of the things NES did in hardware. It's easy to cram a game in a small space if you only limit yourself to 3 colours per sprite and use H/W palette-swapping to show different versions of the sprite and it's an entirely different thing to show 8-bit-per-channel RGB and not being able to use palette-swapping for simplistic alternate versions of the sprites in question.

    8. Re:Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They either are writing machine code for embedded devices, or retired from all the shit-pile of money they've made. For those guys, I suspect programming today is for the birds.

    9. Re:Bloat ... by deragon · · Score: 1

      They were real programmers, i.e. paid to work on their project 5 days a week. Pay the current developers of Tux the same and you would see the difference.

      --
      Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
    10. Re: Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah. They should have some sort of thing for handling 32-bit colours in native silicon. Maybe you could even use 8 of the bits for a transparency channel. Someone get on that.

    11. Re:Bloat ... by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      Super Mario 64 only used 8 MB, and was way more advanced than SuperTux.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    12. Re:Bloat ... by rayd75 · · Score: 1

      Uh.... no. The NES only had 64K of addressable memory. Only a fraction of that was available for games. Super Mario Bros used a 32KB cartridge.

      More than 64K of effective memory on a cartridge was possible with bank switching (up to 1MB, switched in at 32K at a time), but Super Mario Bros did not use that.

      Hardware limitations will tame bloat like nothing else. However, given some memory and CPU coupled with a drop-in framework for just about anything imaginable and the growth quickly becomes exponential. My Mario-comparable iOS "masterpiece" Cletus Land tallies in at 35MB. It's easy to get there and beyond when you start adding-in things like a physics engine, many times the screen resolution, quadruple the bits for color, support for several different screen layouts, etc. As I've earned about as much as the SuperTux developers, I'm thankful it didn't take me a decade to get to release.

    13. Re:Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ah, classic Linux game brings up the classic excuse for Linux games being so bad. "Yeah well MONEY!"

      Actually I've heard this excuse when talking about UI, drivers, compatibility, basic levels of support...

    14. Re:Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because it's true

    15. Re:Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I dont think paying them should increase code quality, it would just make it take less than 10 years. This is a pretty amateur game, it doesn't play well and it isn't very well optimized. Look at the CPU usage...

    16. Re:Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      if you don't like it, don't play it. are you being paid to bitch? i bet if you were being paid, your arguments would be substantially better. Like someone else said, fork it and make it better, so we can bitch at your crappy 77Mb file size instead of the current 80. Do you not have anything better to do than bitch about FREE software? Get a life

    17. Re:Bloat ... by mrchaotica · · Score: 1

      Hey, at least it's not as bloated as Super Mario Maker!

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    18. Re:Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So how come when I download a Super Mario Brothers rom it's 3.7megs zipped and not 32kb? Seems to me like you don't know shit. Most PCs do not have 30 gig of ram, but the install of many games is that big, guess why? Because the whole fucking game isn't loaded into ram at the same time, ya fucking dingus.

    19. Re:Bloat ... by omnichad · · Score: 1

      So how come when I download a Super Mario Brothers rom it's 3.7megs zipped and not 32kb?

      Because you downloaded Super Mario World instead of Super Mario Brothers. No, wait. That's 4 MegaBITS (half a meg).

    20. Re:Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Feel free to ask for a refund.

    21. Re:Bloat ... by mark-t · · Score: 1

      So how come when I download a Super Mario Brothers rom it's 3.7megs zipped and not 32kb?

      I cannot testify to know for sure except to conclude that there is either additional information in that rom file that is not part of the game itself or else you may be talking about some other game entirely. If I were to speculate what is going on with your rom file is that since the maximum possible cartridge size that the NES hardware even supported was 4Megabytes, the rom file you possess may simply be a trimmed image of a full dump of a 4Meg eeprom cartridge that contained a copy of the game. That's just a guess, however. The game itself was really only 32kb. The largest game that Nintendo itself ever produced for the NES was 600kb, and was a Kirby title.

      As far as I know, no game ever commercially published for the NES even pushed the cartridge size memory requirement past the 1 Meg mark, because by the time memory prices had dropped to where such large amounts of memory were commercially viable to produce in that format, the console itself had long been obsolete, and game manufactures were no longer producing games for that platform.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    22. Re: Bloat ... by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

      Yeah. They should have some sort of thing for handling 32-bit colours in native silicon. Maybe you could even use 8 of the bits for a transparency channel. Someone get on that.

      I don't think you understand how hardware sprites worked in the good old days. Hardware sprites typically had a limited number of colour slots. If you had 4-colour hardware sprites, your pixels would have values of 00 (blank), 01 (colour 1), 10 (colour 2) and 11 (colour 3). What the colours 1, 2 and 3 are is then controlled by separate memory locations, ie colour1=green, colour2=red, colour3=black. Colour swapping of hardware sprites just mean redefining colour1, colour2 and colour3.

      You can't do this with modern bitmaps, because each pixel is given an absolute value -- a fixed colour. You can't just change one value and have the entire sprite change -- you have to change every single dot one-by-one. It's easier to prerender the colour-swaps in your image editor than to do it computationally every time and then delete them again.

      --
      Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
    23. Re:Bloat ... by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I am not a gamer but I've read people here talking about indies who were still publishing games, commercial games obviously, for the NES and SNES? At least I have a clear recollection of it being discussed and I believe the conclusion was that some of the devs are doing great things still.

      Err... So, I checked Google. This news article is 4 hours old:
      http://www.popularmechanics.co...

      I didn't read it all but I skimmed and it's a new game.

      Which leads to my question, my real question, are any of the *new* games pushing that limit? I'm guessing you don't know which is why I asked you. Not because I want to challenge you (I'm not the guy who argues with everyone) but because I think it might be something you're interested in learning about. Alas, I'm not a gamer. I just have some things that stick in my memory, wanted or not, and this is one of those things. I kind of clearly recall a few people pushing memory boundaries and doing great things.

      Unfortunately, I know nothing more than that. I am not a gamer and haven't been a gamer for many, many years. If you, fine adventurer, so choose then your quest starts here!

      Err... Or something like that. At any rate, I just figured you might find it interesting so I was asking and then I decided to Google and, sure enough, I found a new news story about a new game. (That's an awful sentence and I'm proud of it.)

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    24. Re:Bloat ... by KGIII · · Score: 1

      It has been 30+ years. I imagine that both Mario and Luigi are a bit bloated by now. FFS, how often do you see old and skinny plumbers? They rescued the princess, settled down, had three shit-for-brains children, plus they drink wine and eat pasta all day. Of course they're friggen bloated! You would be too.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    25. Re:Bloat ... by mark-t · · Score: 1

      I would imagine that modern devs for the NES do not publish on a cart at all, but distribute their work as a rom file that is uploaded into an eeprom that is wired to a fake cart that plugs into the device. They still suffer from the 4Meg limit of addressable space in the cart, and even that must be bank switched in pieces at a time, since the NES's 6502 can only address 64K of memory.

      --
      File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    26. Re:Bloat ... by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I have no idea. ;-) I just figured I'd share it with you so that you could look into it if you wanted. You seemed both knowledgeable and interested in the subject and I'd recollected people talking about pushing memory limits in a prior thread so I hit up the mighty Google and found an example of a new game so that you'd not think I was a total lunatic. I'm only part lunatic.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    27. Re: Bloat ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are common image formats that support palette based data. Even without that, it takes on a few lines of code in a loader to implement the same effect, which amounts to a few bytes of code. You can also easily create a simple shader ona modern graphics hardware to do it on the fly so you only need a single copy in memory and just pass an extra color(s) to the render. I've done all myself on projects before, and all amount to something that is simple enough to give as an intro tutorial to graphics rendering.

  5. Great game, confusing web hosting by InfiniteLoopCounter · · Score: 2

    I enjoyed playing Supertux with a younger family member some years back and have some good memories of the game. This includes some of the addons and the early developments into the forest levels with advanced features that were fun.

    Two things I'd like to ask if anyone knows:

    Firstly, why can't the development team put together a single website with up to date info about this game? There was a move to Berlios De and git from SVN if I remember from lethargik, and now it seems to somewhere else. However, no information is left on the other websites that explains where the current stuff is happening or which pages are now obsolete. It would make a lot of sense to clarify this even for people just downloading the game.

    Secondly: What the hell happened to Nolok? Did he really get replaced by a yeti as the main evil guy (as also in the unrelated game SupertuxKart)?

    1. Re:Great game, confusing web hosting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nolok is supposed to be the main boss of the last world, the Yeti (No more Mister Ice Guy) is the boss of the first world.

    2. Re:Great game, confusing web hosting by InfiniteLoopCounter · · Score: 1

      Thanks. Of course, you can't have Penny saved after world 1 if there are other worlds afterwards now.

    3. Re:Great game, confusing web hosting by grumbel · · Score: 3, Informative

      Secondly: What the hell happened to Nolok?

      The same as what happened with the rest of the project, it kind of stalled. There was a lot of development after Milestone1, but that never converged into a finished release and then staled, developers left, new joined, etc., the release now is essentially a snapshot of that incomplete thing with a bit of polish. Nolok is still around and maybe one day I or somebody else will implement it, but there really isn't enough coherence in the development at the moment for that. Here is an animation test from seven years ago.

    4. Re:Great game, confusing web hosting by Halo1 · · Score: 1

      Firstly, why can't the development team put together a single website with up to date info about this game?

      Google turns up http://supertuxproject.org/ as the first hit. It's strange the summary doesn't link it, although I guess it might have risked diverting some clicks to the phoronix page.

      --
      Donate free food here
  6. Now they just need to allowed by future+assassin · · Score: 1

    people to run their own multiplier servers.

    --
    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
    1. Re:Now they just need to allowed by Himmy32 · · Score: 1

      That might spiral exponentially out of control.

  7. good... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    android version plz.

    1. Re:good... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The source is there. Grab the Android SDK and run with it. All the images and sound are there. I've never ported anything to Android but I suspect this won't be *too* damned hard. Seriously, give it a shot. The most you can do is screw up. When you do, and you will - seeing as you're asking for someone else to do it, just keep track of where you are in the process and do some searching. If you can't find an answer then ask someone to help you find the answer and how to better find the answers.

      The only real issue that I can think of, and I've not done this so I'm pulling this out of my ass, would be how you'd input your controls. I bet you could make two buttons, one on either side, and assign them to the A and B buttons - they'd be simple graphics to make and you'd be able to find the existing code that needs editing and how to edit it in the API in the Android SDK. The absolute worst thing you can do is learn something new. Even if you screw up and never get it right, you'll have done something new and fun.

      Give it a shot, seriously. This is, obviously, not me being a dick (or not trying to) but it's me encouraging you to try it on your own. Why not? If you screw up then you're not out a great sum of money. The absolute worst thing that can happen is that you learn something new. You might even find that you like it and decide to do it again. Perhaps you have a talent for it? You'll never know if you don't try. If you get stuck, search, and then ask for help. Don't ask for specific help but ask, "What are some of the best ways to accomplish this and where can I learn more about how to implement it?"

      Really. I promise, you won't get hurt. You won't break anything that can't be repaired. It won't cost you a dime. It will give you something constructive to do with your time. Even if you fail, you'll still have learned something and be able to do better next time. No penguins will be slain in the process. 'Tis pretty easy to take that first step.

      KGIII

  8. Version number by jones_supa · · Score: 1

    Just swap the major and minor version number and call it a day. It's good enough. Even in the commercial software market companies boldly ship version 12.0 Professional Edition and it still can be a pile of garbage.

    1. Re:Version number by InfiniteLoopCounter · · Score: 1

      Having a large number does not make it more comprehensible or give you much useful information other than what is newer than before (*see Firefox).

      Open source versioning is "somewhat" standardised and I am glad that they are sticking to it (1.x for meeting all major milestones, .odd for development, .even for public release). It actually makes sense.

      The other versioning scheme that makes sense is for ongoing software by year and date release, such as Ubuntu releases.

    2. Re:Version number by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      To me 0.x immediately gives an impression of some ramen eater's weekend project.

    3. Re:Version number by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, you'd sort of right. Just make it many weekends, and many ramen eaters.. and a awful lot of ramen.

    4. Re:Version number by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL... the most succinct comment I've seen in a month.

  9. Secret Maryo Chronicles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You should also try Secret Maryo Chronicles - far more advanced than SuperTux :-)

    1. Re:Secret Maryo Chronicles by omnichad · · Score: 1

      The first several levels, yes. Then it jumps the shark with overly complex levels (nearly impossible) way too early in the game. The gameplay, physics, and graphics are all great. It's just not a fun game because of the inconsistent difficulty level.

  10. What an uninspired POS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What an uninspired POS... i guess this is what communist gaming looks like.

    1. Re:What an uninspired POS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dude, that is so true though! Imagine a world where the cold war never ended, but some kind of peaceful co-existence established. This is EXACTLY the kind of shit you would see coming out of the Soviet Bloc!

    2. Re:What an uninspired POS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Feel free to stop using the internet then. It's based almost entirely on open source/communist software.

    3. Re:What an uninspired POS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, developed by the United States government for the expressed purpose of mitigating a Soviet nuclear attack...

    4. Re:What an uninspired POS by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

      What an uninspired POS... i guess this is what communist gaming looks like.

      No. This is what communist gaming looks like.

      --
      Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
    5. Re:What an uninspired POS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Damn it! I was so close. I was guessing it was a link to an image of them building the wall between East and West Germany.

    6. Re:What an uninspired POS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Developed by a Finn and some guys at Berkeley, actually. I doubt you'll find many systems out there still running old school UNIX.

      Also, throw away your iDevices and Androids because they are based on open source/socialist development models.

  11. Why Linux fails by BitZtream · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is an example of why Linux fails as a desktop.

    One guy in the middle of some podunk area of South Asia who doesn't want to make any money at all can turn out an insanely stupid and insanely popular game in a couple weeks by himself.

    You've got '10 years' and its on 0.4 and hardly any fun at all ...

    Open Source games are going to fail repeatedly. Artists who do the actual meat of games are not stupid enough to work on YOUR GAME for free. Without artists and story tellers guiding your way, your design by committee games are going to continue to suck. You can't just hack shit together to make a work of art.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    1. Re:Why Linux fails by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What you write doesn't make any sense.
      You write about open source games, give related examples, and somehow conclude that "Linux fails as a desktop".

      First of all, Linux also has Steam, with 1742 games.
      Just yesterday the Linux version of Saints Row IV was released.
      And last Saturday, Slashdot mentioned Capcom's recent announcement of Street Fighter V for Linux.
      Nowadays, open source games have little to do with Linux failing as a gaming platform.

      Secondly, your remark that Linux fails as a desktop is even more general than how it's doing when it comes to gaming.
      As a desktop OS it's already a success. Millions of people are already using it as their main desktop OS and for them it works just fine.

      What you actually mean is something like "Linux is not yet the #1 desktop OS."
      Well, yeah, but open source games basically have absolutely nothing to do with that.

      I mean, really, re-read what you just wrote.
      You literally start with "This is an example of why Linux fails as a desktop."
      Seriously?

    2. Re:Why Linux fails by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yea and Saints Row IV isn't open source, nor is Street Fighter V. How do these help argue against the quality of open source games?

      Also both sadly underperform compared to their windows counterparts. -- a sad linux gamer

    3. Re:Why Linux fails by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      How does the presence of a bad game make Linux fail as a desktop system? There are countless of games that are equally shit on both OS X and Windows, are you declaring those useless now, too?

    4. Re:Why Linux fails by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yea and Saints Row IV isn't open source, nor is Street Fighter V. How do these help argue against the quality of open source games?

      Also both sadly underperform compared to their windows counterparts. -- a sad linux gamer

      Do you own a magical crystal ball or DeLorean with a flux capacitor? Seriously, Street Fighter V isn't even out yet for linux yet you state it underperformED, meaning past tense, compared to it's Windows counterpart. Seems you have a hardon to knock linux, yet i bet you haven't even used it as a OS recently if ever... but still claim it is a failure. I for one, am so freaking glad i ditched windows for linux... i never have to reboot, never get viruses or malware/trojans, and it never has cost me a penny to own or operate, yet it offers me EVERYTHING one needs for daily tasks, including but not limited to web browsing, media playback, office suite, and games. why does anyone bitch about free stuff? I bet you live a pretty lonely life living in your moms basement fapping to gay porn and playing all your $50 games... all while being forced to upgrade your hardware frequently, which leaves less $ and time for a real life which you apparently lack.

    5. Re:Why Linux fails by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Actually Vietnam has very cosmopolitan and "hip" cities especially Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. They are a lot more advanced than many cities in "middle America". Hardly something you would call a podunk area. Moreover, the guy who did Flappy Bird (which I assume is what you are talking about) was able to become successful due to his marketing efforts more than any coding skill or "viral luck". He, or someone affiliated with him, bought something like $5000 worth of accounts and used it to bump it on to the top page of iTunes. From there other people started downloading it. If you think about it $5000 to get on the front page of iTunes is pretty cheap, so the guy is definitely a quick study as far as marketing goes. On the other hand, it seems he may have violated multiple iTunes ToS by doing that which is why once it became a "sensation" he removed it from the App Store. Not because he wanted his "life to go back to normal" like he claimed, after all who wants $50,000 a day in sales to "go back to normal", no more like he wanted the spotlight to go away so no lawyers notice what he did.

      Your point still stands, tho...Open Source is always going to suck, unless someone is paying a team of people to do the development and then giving away the code like Google or Mozilla, etc. and ten years to make a Mario clone? That is sad.

    6. Re:Why Linux fails by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Did you contribute code to make the game better? Did you pay money for the game?

      If you answered "no" to either of those then you can fuck right off, entitled little leech.

    7. Re:Why Linux fails by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Artists who do the actual meat of games are not stupid enough to work on YOUR GAME for free.

      There's the problem....modern games are more a matter of art than of programming. If you look at the credit list for the recent release of Starcraft, there are tons of artists and relatively few programmers.

      You can't just hack shit together to make a work of art.

      Wow, that's definitely not true. Art gets hacked together all the time. Look at the recent Star Wars movie, it's a rehash with elements hacked in from all over the place. In architecture, look at the spires of Chartres Cathedral for an especially clear example. In painting it happens too.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    8. Re:Why Linux fails by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Define, if you will, "fails as a desktop." Thanks. I'm genuinely curious as to why you think it has failed.

      I'll go first:

      Success means, to me, that the end user is happy/content with the product. The number of users is irrelevant to me. I have plenty of Windows licenses and the means to buy as many as I could ever possibly want. I don't even dislike Windows. I used it for years while Linux sat mostly idle on a spare partition. I'd boot to it, update it, poke a little, and then return to Windows.

      I realized that I was getting mentally fat and lazy and not learning anything new. So, I switched to Linux exclusively. I'm happy with it. I poke and break and learn new things as my days from Solaris/Unix/RedHat return. I enjoy it. I'm both content *and* happy. That's what I call a success. What's your metric for determining success?

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    9. Re:Why Linux fails by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You have some of the most interesting links. I didn't say anything but I enjoyed revisiting (and seeing a larger collection) of the chip art that you posted yesterday. I don't click through to a lot of links. I often click your links. Thanks. (KGIII - gonna save a post and post AC so I won't notice a reply, probably. I just wanted to say thanks.)

    10. Re:Why Linux fails by vikingpower · · Score: 2

      As a systems and software architect by profession, I'll chime in. My metric for success is the satisfaction of all of four constraints:

      1. system must be desirable by user (here, fill in words as "content", "happy", "enthusiastic", "prepared to pay if necessary")

      2. system must be affordable

      3. system must be feasible to the builder

      4. system must be certifiable (which is more than just "testable")

      Now I think it is not hard to see that Linux-as-a-desktop-system easily meets #2 and #3. As to meeting #4, many private users will not care much about it; I certainly don't, not for private use. I consider Linux' history and ongoing development by enthusiastic developers as a strong indication of certifiability, and that suffices - for private use. As to #1, Linux may not seem desirable to many private users who are currently on Windows. This may be a question of marketing more than anything else. Personally, I switched to Linux years ago, doing all my work and all my private stuff on it (besides a Solaris system which I keep for nostalgic reasons, Solaris was my first great love). After the switch to Linux, I never looked back. I rummaged through distributions and tried quite some, then settled for one particular combination that suits my needs (Linux Mint with xfce). What did I get? An infinitely customizable, tunable system that is rock-solid, for which there are tools for any task imaginable on a computer. (The one Windows laptop I have is for working with those customers whose eyes glaze over at the mention of the word "Linux".)

      --
      Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
    11. Re:Why Linux fails by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Those sound reasonable but I'm not really sure that #4 is required for success. It'd be nice though. As I recall, aren't there only a few actually certified OSes out there? I think AIX might have been/is. I haven't looked in years.

      And, again, how very odd. I fully understand your love for Solaris. I was the proud owner of a Sun shop, including workstations, for quite some time. Heck, they've probably got some Sun blade servers sitting in the server room to this day. (I sold and retired about eight years ago.)

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  12. GTG by malditaenvidia · · Score: 2

    Now we just need a final release of Grand Theft Gentoo and it will be the year of the Linux gaming desktop.

  13. The Linux symptoms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Aside from the really bad graphics, the reason this will not appeal to gamers is because you keep slinging around x.y.z version numbers, translations, add-on systems, plugins, integrated download-managers, and generally pushing the game as some utility software. If you want to sell it as a game, then you need to package and advertise it as a game.

    1. Re:The Linux symptoms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "If you want to sell it as a game, then you need to package and advertise it as a game."

      did you buy it? then i guess they weren't trying to sell it as anything, because it's free.

    2. Re:The Linux symptoms by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      That and simultaneously packaging it for Arch, Fedora, RHEL 6, RHEL 7, Debian 7, Debian 8, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 16.04, Manjaroo, Elementary OS.

      My pet wish is also to be able to install on a separate hard drive - Steam allows it - which only requires all the aforementioned distros to make an amendment or special case for that. Perhaps I can make a pseudo-hack like creating a file with dd if=/dev/zero, make it an ext4 file system, mount it loopback, move /usr/share/games in it (doesn't contain the gnome games for a reason), unmount it, modify the fstab, then see if that's going to work at all.

      See, that's funny but I doubt your father or your 14-year-old boy will be able to do that. For comparison, attaining the same goal in MS-DOS 5.0 or Windows 95 could be done with "md d:\games" if you didn't want to use the graphical file manager.

    3. Re: The Linux symptoms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Supertux isn't gigabytes large, like the average steam game. And if you really can't afford the 80 MB, then do as you said and mount parts of your root on different partitions. A less intrusive option would be to jist download the zip release and then extract it outside of your hdd. Or, perhaps lutris (a linux game store) has this option as well. Either way, you have many many more options than with steam.

  14. 10 years of by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "modern" backend creep, while the actual game is still super under-developed. Classic FOSS gaming dev practices.

  15. Yeah! by Kludge · · Score: 2

    Mod parent up!
    He explains well why simple games like Tetris and Candy Crush will never be popular. No story line, no 3D graphic artists, no big explosions, etc.

  16. Ridiculous by ElectricHellKnight · · Score: 1

    The amount of people here complaining about a free game is astonishing. Somebody took some time and put forth the effort to produce something. It's nothing amazing, sure, but it's decent fun and brings back memories of the age of classic sidescrolling platformers. It's Linux-themed Super Mario 3. And yet, some people still find reason to complain. Well good thing it's open source, so you assholes can fix it to your liking.