JoergHenrichs
About Joerg Henrichs
I am the current project leader of STK. After installing Suse Linux on a new computer a few years back I discovered TuxKart when looking at the games included - though I wasn't too impressed by the graphics. When I discovered that a 'Game of the Month' team is working on improving the game, I was quite interested, but further googling showed that the project ground to a halt without a release because of endless discussions and blaming for performance problems etc. Due to my professional interest in performance optimisations (see below) I had a look at the code, but had to discover that the performance problem was rather easy to solve, but that too many bugs made the game unplayable. I had some ideas about a 'kind of' racing game, and thought that STK might be a good base to start with ... if only the bugs were fixed, the physics improved, network multiplayer included ... I started on working on all of this, got other people on board, and we were finally able to make a first release of SuperTuxKart. By now (four releases later) the bugs are fixed (I am not saying that we didn't introduce new ones), the physics are better, network multiplayer will be coming - but in my opinion it is still a long way before STK becomes a good game. I currently consider STK a game with a lot of potential - but I'll do my best to get it to being good. Embarrassingly I have to admit that till a few months ago I have never played Mario Kart or any other similar game, but after too many people and reviews mentioning that STK is 'like Mario Kart' I downloaded Mario Kart 64 on the Virtual Console of the Nintendo Wii.
Professionally: I live in Melbourne, Australia, and work for Sun Microsystems as an Application Specialist for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Previously I worked as a Benchmarker and Senior Applications Analyst for the High Perfomance Computing Systems Division of NEC. If you don't know what a benchmarker does: I optimised codes of (current and potential) customers to run as fast as possible on the NEC vector architecture. And since I am always interested in the performance of scalar CPUs, I thought that fixing the performance problems of STK would be a good way of giving something back to the Open Source community.
Personally: After graduating in Computer Science in Germany I came to Australia more than 8 years ago (why? It's a nice country to live in ... give it a try), and am triple-married (once in Australia, once in Taiwan, once in Germany) to Tzu-Yang, aka Yoko, an artist from Taiwan. A bit over a year ago we had our first child Lia Helene, so my life is somewhat turned inside out at the moment, and spare time is rare. I mostly work on STK on my way to and from work - with a laptop during my approx 45 minute train ride. At home I try to have as much time as possible for my family, so I usually don't have any time for STK, and while I try to answer all emails and posts asap, now and again it just happens that it takes a day or two - esp. on the weekends.
When I am not working on STK, I am managing one of the largest online boardgame data bases (luding.org), read a lot of Sci-Fi and crime stories, try to find time to actually play some board games and learn golf. At the moment Yoko and I have given up on finding time to dance Argentine Tango :)
Joerg (aka hiker)