Blender and Super Tux Kart progress

It has been a day now and I am pleased with my progress. Blender .org has a fantastic collection of tutorials that augment the book ( "Introducing Character Animation With Blender" ) I have as reference. I am able to move around in 3D space and deform objects easily. I can install and modify textures. I have imported the Kart .ac files and modified them and saved them as new tracks and I have Python ( .py ) scripts that allow me to create complete game environments. In a period of one day I was able to get the source for TuxKart and read the documentation on their wiki to understand how the program runs and uses resources, then import it into blender and create a new game track. It is thanks to very good and understandable documentation of th source and operation of the user interfaces. These people deserve a big A⁺⁺ for this. I will have to submit my new track and objects when I am done, so everyone can use them. I guess that is my payback or forward or sideways.( whatever you want to call it )

I have modified the textures of the surfaces with Gimp and saved them as .rgb files. That was funny and I created a volcano from a waterfall by switching the texture from water to fire. I will have to make a configuration menu item for some of these things.

I am also keeping an eye on the lower level openGL to add a button for hardware compatibility to use some of the more advanced features of newer cards. I think it would be a good addition to their game and others to allow the identification of DRI capabilities and modifying the game to be faster, more surfaces, higher res, and larger number of materials. My background in Mesa3D and openGL dev should let me do this fairly easily. I can just query the openGL interface for version number and proceed with identifying extensions and capabilities from there. I will have to modify the Tux source to allow it to run with the new methods. It is currently set to use the slowest and oldest of cards for compatibility reasons and I am sure a config with that as default should be okay.

It means submitting a patch and joining tux so it will be a while before those changes might show in Super Tux Kart. And a little longer to the distros, and even longer to Ubuntu. I will have to see how long a fix takes from submission ( patch ) to debian, to apt to ubuntu.