Ward Muylaert

Bored with Tumblr, moving to Blogger.

Current posts will stay intact on http://wardje.tumblr.com/. New blog will be on the usual http://b.wardje.eu. Tumblr has no obvious way to export posts so it really will be a fresh start (thanks a lot tumblr).

I guess I quite like this game ;o

Doing 1 lap GPs of a lot of tracks on expert with 19 karts is decent fun, but the challenge was a bit gone. In hopes of at least making the races more challenging (winning the GP is still easy), I edited a configuration file to reverse the starting order at each track. So rather than the first starting in first position etc, the last starts first, then the second to last, etc. At least this way, every race you got to try and get to the front.

To achieve it, in your STK installation folder edit the file

data/stk_config.xml

Look for this part

<!-- Scores are the number of points given when the race ends, order is most-points-first or most-points-last. --> <grand-prix order = "most-points-first"> <!-- Karts on position 1 and 2 will have 3 more points than the next kart; a kart on position 3 and 4 will have two more points than the next; and all remaining karts will have one more point than the next. --> <points from="1" to="2" points="3"/> <points from="3" to="4" points="2"/> <points from="5" points="1"/> </grand-prix>

and change that third line so it says <grand-prix order = "most-points-last"> instead.

After quite some time, here's an update!

In SuperTuxKart, I've grown to like doing Grand Prix with

19 AI opponents

Lots of races (for example, all of them and only 1 lap each)

This has sometimes lead to confusion during the race as to who my direct opponents were and who harmless flies. So I did what any sane person would do and dug in the source code to add it myself of course.

Before you get started, you'll need to shiny up to date version straight from the STK svn repo, for which I conveniently present you an earlier post. After you've gone through all that, it's time to dive in.

Note, I'll use $STK_HOME to refer to the directory that is the repo clone. Which will be, if you followed my earlier post, /opt/supertuxkart/stk. Open the file $STK_HOME/src/states_screens/race_gui.cpp in your favourite text editor and look for this part in the code

if (info[kart_id].m_text.size() > 0) { video::SColor color = video::SColor(255, (int)(255*info[kart_id].r), (int)(255*info[kart_id].g), (int)(255*info[kart_id].b) ); core::rect<s32> pos(x+ICON_PLAYER_WIDTH, y+5, x+ICON_PLAYER_WIDTH, y+5); core::stringw s=info[kart_id].m_text.c_str(); font->draw(s.c_str(), pos, color, false, false, NULL, true /* ignore RTL */); } if (info[kart_id].special_title.size() > 0) { static video::SColor color = video::SColor(255, 255, 0, 0); core::rect<s32> pos(x+ICON_PLAYER_WIDTH, y+5, x+ICON_PLAYER_WIDTH, y+5); core::stringw s(info[kart_id].special_title.c_str()); font->draw(s.c_str(), pos, color, false, false, NULL, true /* ignore RTL */); }

Before this part in the code, add

if (race_manager->getMajorMode() == RaceManager::MAJOR_MODE_GRAND_PRIX && info[kart_id].m_text.size() == 0) { video::SColor color = video::SColor(255, (int)(255*info[kart_id].r), (int)(255*info[kart_id].g), (int)(255*info[kart_id].b) ); core::rect<s32> pos(x+ICON_PLAYER_WIDTH, y+5, x+ICON_PLAYER_WIDTH, y+5); char s[16]; sprintf(s, "%d (%d)", race_manager->getKartGPRank(kart_id) + 1, race_manager->getKartScore(kart_id)); font->draw(s, pos, color, false, false, NULL, true /* ignore RTL */); }

Next open $STK_HOME in a terminal and make again. You'll now have in game information similar to this picture (format is Rank (Points))

My recent suggestion on reddit to allow the removal of some subreddits from my r/all view didn't get any attention, so I ended up throwing a Greasemonkey script together to do just that.

It's nothing special and I wrote it 5 minutes ago so it might still be buggy, but I figured I might as well throw it on here.

TIL, as they say. This is completely valid C++ code, compiling without any errors.

#include <iostream> int main() <% int a<:5:> = <% 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 %>; std::cout << a<:2:>; return 0; %>

Because I seem to keep forgetting this one whenever I do feel like I need it, I figured I'd dump it here.

To see a more concise list of amounts that got changed between two commits, issue:

git diff --stat <old commit> <new commit>

Example output:

I made a post a few weeks back about keeping Supertuxkart up to date. This has, above all, taught me one thing... Don't publish stuff that you only wrote from memory.

So I just now took some time out to try things out myself again, starting from zero. Well, somewhat zero, I already have the correct header files and the likes installed and you'll have to forgive me for not tracking those down one by one.

Important to note here is that the irrlicht requirement has gone up, so we will also be making that one from source. The following steps will be done with root access.

Make directory /opt/supertuxkart/ and go in the directory.

cd /opt/ mkdir supertuxkart cd supertuxkart

Checkout irrlicht's trunk.

svn co https://irrlicht.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/irrlicht/trunk irrlicht

Make irrlicht.

cd irrlicht/source/Irrlicht make

Back to /opt/supertuxkart/.

cd /opt/supertuxkart/

Copy stk's trunk and go in the directory.

svn co https://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/supertuxkart/main/trunk stk cd stk

Make stk.

./autogen.sh ./configure --with-irrlicht=/opt/supertuxkart/irrlicht make

You can now play supertuxkart with /opt/supertuxkart/stk/src/supertuxkart (be sure to run it as your normal user).

To keep things up to date, just repeat the above steps but instead of checking out you go in the directory and issue svn up.

You know what's so great about open source games? You can so easily tweak them to your liking! When I play SuperTuxKart, I like to play it with a lot of other karts in the race, 19 others to be precise. When I do so, I also tend to do championships since I find them generally more appealing than the other aspects of the race.

However, the ingame ranking tends to only show the first few karts due to the sheer size of each icon. It's a bit annoying to see how you or your competitors are doing if only the first 7 karts out of 20 total show! So I went digging through the source code to find out how to change this to my liking.

Before picture

It's actually very simple (after you found out where it gets changed after going through 10s of other files), but you'll need to already be compiling SuperTuxKart from source. The problem is that it isn't a configuration option, so you'll have to change some things before compiling the game.

Go to wherever you are keeping the source files for your SupertuxKart and go into the trunk/src/states_screen/ folder. Open up the file called race_gui.cpp in your favourite text editor and go to this part of the file.

//----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // Draw players icons and their times (if defined in the current mode). void RaceGUI::drawGlobalPlayerIcons(const KartIconDisplayInfo* info) { int x_base = 10; int y_base = 20; int ICON_WIDTH=(int)(40*(UserConfigParams::m_width/800.0f)); int ICON_PLAYER_WIDTH=(int)(50*(UserConfigParams::m_width/800.0f)); if(UserConfigParams::m_height<600) { ICON_WIDTH = 27; ICON_PLAYER_WIDTH = 35; }

If you know some C++, you'll probably already have figured out what to do. For those who don't, this is the part of the code where the width and height of the icon get defined. In light of keeping it simple for myself, I simply changed the 40 and the 50 values to something smaller. You can also give absolute values, or play around with it yourself how you please, but this is what I changed them into

int ICON_WIDTH=(int)(20*(UserConfigParams::m_width/800.0f)); int ICON_PLAYER_WIDTH=(int)(25*(UserConfigParams::m_width/800.0f));

After this, save the file and go back to your trunk/ folder. Recompile the game with make and start playing! This is my result

After picture

Updated 2011-04-19, see this post.

I enjoy playing some SuperTuxKart, but I also enjoy keeping up with its development and seeing changes immediately as they are pushed. Random PPAs will try their best, but if you really want everything, you'll need to use the svn repository directly. I'll give basic instructions for Ubuntu here, but whatever your distro is, the options are most likely similar.

First you'll have to install svn, which is as simple as issuing

sudo apt-get install svn

Next there will be some prerequisites you'll have to install. Since I did all this a few weeks, I won't be able to provide the exact details of what you'll need, but you may find this page useful for that. Some things to keep in mind here is that when during compiling (see later) you get an error complaining about missing files, you will most likely have to install a library and its source files (for this you'll need the libraryname-dev package in the Ubuntu repos, obviously substituting the proper library name). If you're stuck on a particular issue you can always post here. Be sure to keep in mind that

aptitude search <name>

is your friend.

When you think you've got all the proper libraries installed, it's time to continue with the actual installation. Open a terminal and decide where you'll want to install this repo build. Things like /opt, $HOME or /usr/local come to mind. I decided to install it in my home directory so we'll work with that in this example.

Create a new directory and go in it

mkdir supertuxkart cd supertuxkart

Here, we'll download all the source files using svn, issue

svn co https://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/supertuxkart supertuxkart/trunk

Files will start downloading and this can take some time. After this has finished, go into trunk/. It's time to build everything. First we have to generate the configure file.

./autogen.sh

Next comes the usual configure, make (, make install) sequence.

./configure

If all went correctly, you can now compile the game

make

This will take some time, entertain yourself for the next 15 minutes or so. When it's done, you can either start playing immediately by doing src/supertuxkart or you can choose to properly install the game into the appropriate system folders with sudo make install.

A few days later you may be in the mood to play again, but you'll still want to use the most up to date version. Luckily enough you won't have to redownload and recompile everything, svn and make are smart enough to only do the absolute necessary. Update your local files to match the repo's with

svn up

Then build everything again with

./autogen.sh && ./configure && make

When using Firefox Panorama (in day to day use, I still call it tab candy), I find the zooming in and out to be rather annoying as it looks a bit choppy on my laptop. However, a quick trip to the configuration settings solves this quickly.

Open a new tab and go to location

about:config

Having grown to like some unicode characters while talking on xchat, I decided there was a better way to enter them than to use CTRL+SHIFT+U + Numbers (linux) every time again. So I dug into the Python XChat interface a bit and threw together a quick script that will check everything you write and replace certain things with prettier unicode variants. Figured I'd post it here in case someone somewhere can find it useful.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- __module_name__ = "Unicode" __module_version__ = "0.1.20100130" __module_description__ = "Replaces random smileys with Unicode variants" import xchat def intercept_print(word, word_eol, userdata): line = word_eol[0] \ .replace("<3", "♥") \ .replace("=)", "ツ") \ .replace("^^", "^̮^") \ .replace("!!", "‼") \ .replace("°C", "℃") \ .replace("->", "→") \ .replace("=>", "⇒") xchat.command(" ".join(["msg", xchat.get_info("channel"), line])) return xchat.EAT_ALL # Empty command means catching normal text apparently xchat.hook_command("", intercept_print)

This is probably a nobrainer for a lot of people, but given my limited knowledge of Python I found this useful to write. Load the script and issue /inspect to see all the public methods of the xchat object.

I am still faithfully running WhatPulse. However, when installing it on a fresh Ubuntu install on my laptop, I encountered that "good old" problem again where WhatPulse starts too soon. That is, after adding WhatPulse to the start up applications, it starts before the notification-area-applet which is a bit problematic since WhatPulse resides there by default.

In the old days, I used to fix this by adding in this small script that would sleep for 30 seconds before starting up WhatPulse. Instead of adding WhatPulse directly, I would then simply add that script to the start up applications and voila.

#!/bin/bash sleep 30 /home/ward/.whatpulse/WhatPulse

The last line there is obviously the way to my WhatPulse executable.

This method worked, or I don't remember an occasion anyway where it didn't work. Upon inspection though... it looks a bit hacked together (excusez-moi le mot, it feels odd to call three pretty standard lines a hack). So I rewrote it a bit to be more foolproof.

Here's how I have things set up now:

A folder ~/.whatpulse where I extracted the WhatPulse binary

A script in that folder wp.sh

#!/bin/bash while [ -z `pgrep notification-ar` ]; do sleep 5 done # Change the following line so it matches the location of your WhatPulse file /home/ward/.whatpulse/WhatPulse

And that script added to my start up applications.