Super Mario Inspired SuperTux Issues Its First Official Release In 10 Years (phoronix.com) 116
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.
How about.... (Score:2)
A remake of Penguin Adventure with Tux?
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Just like a Penguin in Bondage?
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics... [azlyrics.com]
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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.
TAGAP (Score:5, Informative)
I prefer TAGAP
http://www.tagap.net/ [tagap.net]
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It's actually more like Abuse [zoy.org] or Teeworlds [teeworlds.com]
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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.
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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 do
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Re: 80 MB? Seriously? (Score:1)
Wurst. Which in Swiss German means "Don't care".
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45 MB of music, 27MB of graphics, and 5MB of sounds. Beyond that largely portability, hardware agnosticism, and security.
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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 r
Re:80 MB? Seriously? (Score:5, 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.
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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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
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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
Re: 80 MB? Seriously? (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...
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Hey this is the internet, everything no matter how benign is a reason for hate and condemnation.
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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 s
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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.
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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 a
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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.
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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. .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".
That's one reason why apt-getting games sucks. It also sucks that by downloading the
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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.
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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.
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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
Bloat ... (Score:1)
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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.
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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.
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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 [apple.com] 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 th
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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).
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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 im
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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... [popularmechanics.com]
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
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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.
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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.
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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 m
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Super Mario 64 only used 8 MB, and was way more advanced than SuperTux.
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Hey, at least it's not as bloated as Super Mario Maker!
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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.
Great game, confusing web hosting (Score:3)
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)?
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Thanks. Of course, you can't have Penny saved after world 1 if there are other worlds afterwards now.
Re:Great game, confusing web hosting (Score:4, 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 [seul.org] from seven years ago.
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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/ [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.
Now they just need to allowed (Score:2)
people to run their own multiplier servers.
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Version number (Score:2)
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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.
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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.
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What an uninspired POS... i guess this is what communist gaming looks like.
No. This [wikipedia.org] is what communist gaming looks like.
Why Linux fails (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.
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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 [gamingonlinux.com] the Linux version of Saints Row IV was released.
And last Saturday, Slashdot mentioned [slashdot.org] 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
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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
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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?
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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
Yeah! (Score:3)
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.
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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 [nationalgallery.org.uk] it happens too [discovery.com].
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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 t
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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 p
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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
GTG (Score:2)
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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 (doe
Ridiculous (Score:1)