August 27, 2025

Announcing SuperTuxKart Evolution

A new major game version bringing a fresh experience with heaps of new content and plenty of improvements : that’s what many STK players have been waiting for, and it’s what the SuperTuxKart Evolution project aims to bring about.

The STK team has a vision for this next great step in SuperTuxKart’s journey, and we are committed to bring it to life, honoring the legacy of those whose work allowed SuperTuxKart to become an icon of open-source and Linux gaming.

STK Evolution's logo

We have already thought and worked on many of those changes, and a roadmap detailing our plans will be made available in an upcoming update alongside further details.


Leadership

If you have been following the project in recent times, you may be wondering when the promised 1.5 version is coming. The release candidate came out almost 3 months ago.

To explain this situation, it is necessary to talk about a sad reality of many projects : conflicts within the team. If you want more details, I would invite you to consult our FAQ, but I will give here a short summary.

For months now, Benau, who became co-leader in 2019, has pushed to delay first the RC and then the release, although the code was pretty much ready. When recently pressed to commit to a release timeline and to discuss the project’s future, he scornfully dismissed those demands.

This was the culmination of a series of events that has convinced us that further cooperation is impossible. We wished for a mutually agreeable compromise moving the project forward, but we had to face the reality that Benau was not open to discussion and that his attitude was paralyzing the project.

We have therefore made the decision to remove Benau from the STK organization on GitHub and SourceForge, as well as Devee who for months has been lending his account to Benau.

The STK project is now led by Sven, our lead artist, and by myself, Alayan, our lead game designer.


New website

Part of the chain of events leading to Benau’s exclusion were his refusals to either share control over many of the project’s key resources or use them to do things important for the game’s community, such as opening a new forum for discussions or getting a more robust online server that would not randomly get overloaded, disconnecting players and servers.

Among those resources is the erstwhile official domain name.

We invite you to go over to our new website and bookmark it.

We are actively working on replacing the lost resources, but in the short and medium term this will cause some difficulties for the project and for players. For example, we do not have the required access to update SuperTuxKart on Google Play.

We nonetheless aim to release 1.5 soon.


Closing words

This announcement is bittersweet, as the promise of a renewed development effort is mixed with news of the removal of two team members. Alas, the latter ended up necessary for the former.

SuperTuxKart Evolution is an ambitious project, but we already have demonstrated our capabilities with our past contributions, and we intend to prove our seriousness through hard work, regular updates on the game’s development, and ultimately a great release.

We also wish to renew communication with and between people who enjoy SuperTuxKart. We plan on opening a new forum very soon for this purpose.

If you have further questions, you can direct them at hello@supertuxkart-evolution.com ; or in the comments below.

May 27, 2025

Release Candidate for SuperTuxKart 1.5

The SuperTuxKart team is happy to announce the first release candidate for SuperTuxKart 1.5.

Several months have elapsed since the release of the 1.5 beta version, and more changes than we initially anticipated have delayed the release. Our contributors have been busy with their lives beyond the game, and since 1.5 is the last planned release of the 1.x series, there is always one more bugfix or feature that would be nice to add.

You can download binaries for Linux, Windows, Mac and Android here : https://github.com/supertuxkart/stk-code/releases/tag/1.5-rc1

The final 1.5 release announcement will dwelve more into the improvements since the last major release and I invite interested users to consult the changelog for more details, but since the beta release, the game has received, in addition to many bugfixes and minor features:

  • Better display of karts, tracks and game modes, eliminating or reducing the need to scroll to see the available options,
  • Improved animations for the parachute and bubblegum shield,
  • Graphical enhancements to the overworld as a good-bye to the 1.x Story Mode,
  • New egg hunts on three tracks (Black Forest, Gran Paradisio Island and The Old Mine),
  • SSAA (render resolution above 100%) and Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows for users with powerful GPUs,
  • Spotlight support and significant updates to the Vulkan renderer, bringing it closer to feature parity, although OpenGL remains the default renderer.

Please report any issue you encounter (and that has not already been reported!) on our bug tracker.