SuperTuxKart continues getting even better. The 1.0 release back in April was huge, with SuperTuxKart 1.1 getting a first Release Candidate now to improve on the previous new features like online play.

Getting online play into a better state has been an "important area of focus in the new version", with the team adding in things like "IPv6 client and server support, improved synchronization (especially for collisions), expanded support for AIs, management features for server owners, and increased support for addons, along many more minor fixes and quality-of-life features" which all sounds pretty fantastic.

A new arena for the battle mode was added, Pumpkin Park (image below), previously only given out as part of a supporter gift package:

The UI also went through some updates. A lot of the focus there was on scaling to higher resolutions like 4K. You can also now adjust the font-size to your liking, something every game should allow. Emoji has invaded SuperTuxKart now too when chatting, the Emoji support has also enabled the developers to add country flags for players in the online mode.

Plenty of other quality of life updates to this FOSS racer like full support for unicode file paths, prevention of "this program is not responding" messages, fixes for rare crashes, battle spawn points are now random and so on.

Something they also wish to do is change their licensing, to have a dual GPL/MPL license. They said it's to "give the project more freedom to deal with some software repositories like Steam, while sticking to free software.". Amazing to see progress on it pick up again like this. See their blog post update here, download the 1.1 RC here.