Talk:Tux Racer

Speed

the up arrow, "paddle" will slow Tux down when at a high speed

Thank God I read this page - my times have gotten better by 10 seconds in some cases. :-) Evercat 02:43, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Sunspire

Anyone know anything else about sunspire going bust? --there_is_no_spoon 12:27, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

They just quietly vanished. Their website has reverted to their domain name registrar - so they obviously weren't even selling enough stuff to justify the couple of hundred dollars a year it costs to keep the domain open and a website running! It was pretty inevitable though - they only ever made one game and it had to compete with a completely free version of the exact same game. That's a tough sell! Taking the OpenSourced version and going closed-source commercial with it lost them a LOT of friends and respect in the Linux community - that can't have helped their sales either. I don't think it was much of a 'company' in the first place - just a couple of guys who'd just left college who decided to try to make some money. As I recall, Jasmin Patry said that he and a friend had bought a copy of Maya to do better 3D modelling for the game and that they had to take it commercial in order to recoup that cost. Well, I guess that's their call - but for the quality and complexity of 3D models they used in TuxRacer, they could have used any of the free 3D modellers or AC3D ($40) rather than Maya ($1000 to $7000 depending on what options you pick!) Spending that much money on a tool - and then only using it to make one game doesn't make the best business sense. SteveBaker 12:56, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Gender

Isn't Jasmin Patry a 'she', rather than a 'he'?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.183.41 (talk • contribs) 23:01, August 29, 2006 (UTC)

Nope - the couple of times we met, Jasmin seemed pretty male. SteveBaker 00:15, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Screenshot

Is it just me, or does the current screenshot have some sort of clipping problem that makes it look rather weird? Wouldn't a screenshot showing tux sliding down a slope be a better representation of the game? - James Foster 15:49, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Done! SteveBaker 18:38, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Planetpenguin site down for long time

This page features a link the the Planetpenguin racer site (http://projects.planetpenguin.de/racer/). The website has been unavailable for several months now (nearly a half year now). I've checked from different locations to check that it is not my connection.

This leaves two options: 1. The site has moved. Which I hope, because it a great game, and the link needs updating. 2. The PPracer poject had died, in which case the page needs a serious overhauwl.

I don't know anybody on the inside, so if somebody could find out I'd be much oblidged...

Offtopic for Wikipedia but if someone still has a copy of the source package, we should put it up on SourceForge or something so it doesn't get lost again. I'd be happy to make that happen - but I have no idea where the sources are. SourceForge never completely deletes packages - even if they aren't active. SteveBaker 16:37, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

I found a mirror of ppracer-0.3.1 over on http://www.linux-gamers.net - it includes the sources - so the game is safe on my hard drive. I'll try to find out what happened to PlanetPenguin - if it's really dead and the project didn't move anywhere else, I'll stat a ppracer project on SourceForge. Thanks for the heads-up. SteveBaker 16:56, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

PlanetPenguin Defunct

I came to mention that Planet Penguin's website was defunct, but it looks like someone beat me to it. I tried to confirm what Steve said about the sources being available on linux-gamers.net, but I could not. They are, however, available on debian. http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/ppracer/ppracer_0.3.1.orig.tar.gz.

There is also a 0.5 alpha version. Here is a link to the download from softpedia: http://download.softpedia.com/linux/ppracer-0.5alpha.tar.bz2