Great news!
After couple of release candidate versions Ande just announced on Turbo Sliders -forum that Turbo Sliders 2.0.0 is now officially released. You can download the game from these links:

For Windows: http://www.turbosliders.com/download.php?type=win and for Linux: http://www.turbosliders.com/download.php?type=lnx

The most important change in 2.0.0-version is removing the track restrictions from the demo version. So now demo players can taste the full sweetness of different tracks. The game isn't freeware like it used to be on the 0.86b -days but opening the game for demo-players is great.

Other newsworthy enhancement is the new game engine with OpenGL support and smooth FPS. And of course there are lots of added features for track makers and game servers.

Turbo Sliders 2.0.0 is still the same game as 1.0.8 and now even better. Try it out!

The changes list contains the following issues:

• Track restrictions removed from the demo version
• Game engine improvements: smoother network game and more accurate lap times
• Added OpenGL and smooth FPS support
• New track record format and directory, old players and records not valid any more. Old player data can be imported but a new id is generated.
• Support for total conversion mods (read README-totalmod.txt)
• New server script options (/source and /cmd, read README-autoserver.txt)
• Track loading always done using a fixed scale. No need to test tracks with different resolutions any more. To disable this feature, set UseFixedLoadScale to 0 in sliders.ini (not recommended).
• Start positions can be freely adjusted
• You can make Single Lap Tracks meaning the last control line specifies the finish line and only one lap is driven
• New view modes in editor: Terrains and Full View
• Random start mode added, added command /startmode [0|1]
• Added /startpos that can be used to force player start positions
• Added command /demoplayersallowed [0|1]
• A track can be selected multiple times in tracks menu by holding Shift.
• It is possible to kick spectators by IP and define how many spectators are allowed with /spectatorsAllowed, /who also lists spectators
• Fixed sticky Alt after Alt+Tab
• Tracks can have gravity (to enable for example space ship races or battles)
• Automatic support for more resolutions, including widescreen ones
• Cars of disconnected players are stopped
• Added command line parameter -capture which saves the first n seconds of recordings as bmp files in directory capture
• Command /continue always restarts the server in Cup End mode
• Fixed editor sometimes showing a new tile in a slightly inaccurate position
• Updated libraries, using DirectDraw is now optional and not default

Turbo Sliders has been a bit quiet during the year 2008 but some weeks ago Ande announced that he has again worked with the Turbo Sliders codebase and developed some sweet features.

The announcement was made at the end of August and said that a beta version would be coming in few weeks. That would be great but we will see.

Update:
Ande has released a release candidate version of Turbo Sliders 2.0.0 for beta testing. We still have to wait for the final version because there are some performance issues with DirectX and SDL-libraries and Ande is experimenting with OpenGL-libraries to fix those things.

And here is the feature list what Ande wrote to the Turbo Sliders -forum:

New features in 2.0.0: (more to come?)
----------------------------------------------
- Track restrictions removed from the demo version.
- Game engine improvements: smoother network game and more accurate lap times
- New track record format and directory, old records not valid any more
- Support for total conversion mods (read README-totalmod.txt)
- New server script options (/source and /cmd, read README-autoserver.txt)
- Start positions can be freely adjusted
- Random start mode added, added command /startmode [0|1]
- Added command /demoplayersallowed [0|1]
- A track can be selected multiple times in tracks menu by holding Shift.
- It is possible to kick spectators by IP and define how many spectators are allowed with /spectatorsAllowed, /who also lists spectators
- Fixed sticky Alt after Alt+Tab
- Tracks can have gravity (to enable for example space ship races or battles)
- Automatic support for more resolutions, including widescreen ones
- Added command line parameter -capture  which saves the first n seconds of recordings as bmp files in directory capture
- Updated libraries, using DirectX is now optional

Especially enhancing the demo version is great and hopefully brings new players and some great racing. Also game engine improvements and some new features for track makers are superb.

During the years players have requested many new features (an old list of requests) and again when Ande said that a new version would be coming the players went frenzy with new and often silly requests.

It will be interesting to see how things develop.

I should have done this long time ago but better late than never. Sliderpoint can now be found at http://sliderpoint.com/. Things are now easier to manage and separates the content from my personal site.

Please update your bookmarks and links, if possible.

Cheers,
Hengari

Again it is time to change one number and move on to the next year, year 2008. But before that, lets do a quick review what has happened on Turbo Sliders in 2007.

As you can see, Sliderpoint has been pretty quiet lately but the game hasn't. We have seen lots and lots of great tracks and three track making competitions. Also there has been racing tournaments by different organizers and the competition has been tight. Ippons have continued their IRT, IHLC and DIT -tournaments, GPOR has raced with antisliders and F1-cars and TSM has driven on MotoGP- and F1-circuits. Also Keppana has started his F1-cup in Autumn. Of course there has been many full contact -cups and some nice slider cups.

Well, the racing year has been more or less satisfying but the biggest change in the world of Turbo Sliders came when the community finally got a decent turbosliders.com-site with updated content and active forum on single address. This had been on the waiting list for a long time and thanks to Dede it came true. Nice job although the making could have been organized a little better.

The players count has stayed about the same as year before and new drivers and teams have come and some old ones have retired. As usual, there could be more activity but if you put a server at evenings, it will fill up. The TS server list has seen some big changes when PTX put their gloves to the coat rack and some new hosters arrived to fix the shortage. We got a new community server to admin and use for racing and generally speaking the game servers state is ok.

Turbo Sliders as a game haven't seem any updates since the 1.0.8 -version but hopefully we will get some updates to fix the performance issues with Windows Vista. Also there has been questions about running TS on Macs but for that we will need a Mac-version of TS. Considering the questions about Turbo Sliders on Linux, the amount of Linux users has increased so I also updated my Turbo Sliders on Linux -guide.

The year 2007 has been interesting especially the last quarter and hopefully the year 2008 will continue the growth and prosper of Turbo Sliders.

For a starter to year 2007 it was about time to update the Track Review lists and get some awesome tracks listed. It's been over 8 months when I last updated those lists and about 6 months since Jarno did the Track Review. In 8 months there were released lot of tracks and it took some time to drive them all. First I thought that the lists would be done by November then by December but always there was something more important to do. Finally I found some time and updated the lists with new review criteria.

Now the tracks are driven thinking about drivability, fun, style, skill and given points from 0-5 to each of those aspects. Total points are counted by multiplying drive x 0.85, fun x 0.45, style x 0.55 and skill x 0.15 and summing them up. I also added pit, jump and length -fields to help it give some basic info of the track.

Along with the new Track Review lists I suggested new settings for the PTX Turbo Sliders servers. Racing server to have 5 laps / 12 track / cup, last race -start order, random cars and non-ghost. "Fun" server, which now have normal tracks with jumps etc., to have 5 laps / 12 tracks / cup, random -start order, all cars and non-ghost. New settings have been on the way for sometime and there was some discussion about new settings on Z's blog. As of today the servers aren't updated so we will see how those settings will work.

Enough of chit-chat. New tracks and new lists so go and check them out!

Tracks Review (txt) | Tracks Review Sorted (txt)
Racing Tracks (zip) | Fun Tracks (zip)

ps. Drupal 5.0 was released some days ago and by updating this the Guestbook is now off until the module is updated.

There is Track making competition in the JGG forums and I made a new track for that. There was too little time for testing so the 1st release had a problem with the start grid. The fixed version was named hg_Ezartian and has the grid replaced. Both tracks were driveable. You can download hg_Ezartian from the tracks -section.

Hg_Ezartian is designed for Slider and is nicely driven also with Speeder. Nothing fancy, different styled starting line and easy curves.