Discover TrackMania with the unofficial trailer!

Trailers are cool. Videos in general are cool. TrackMania is cool. What can possibly go wrong? Here’s an unofficial trailer by POBmaestro. I’ll let him do the talking himeslf:

In appreciation of Nadeo’s generous hard work in releasing the free upgrade Trackmania Forever, I have created an Unofficial Trackmania Trailer. This project took four weeks of many a late night while trying to balancing work and study. The trailer, released initially by Florent of Nadeo, is designed to appeal to new and veteran players alike, in that it traces TM back to its roots back with the original Trackmania, then through to the masterpiece that is TMF. In its first week of release, the trailer has already received a great deal of wonderful feedback, which has made all the efforts feel well worth it and then some more.

The usage of Ghosts in Forever (Tutorial - part 2)

Written by Alcator.

In the first part of the tutorial, I explained what Ghosts are and how to import them into a clip so that the player gets some virtual opponents for Solo play. The tutorial continues with more details… Note: To see the images correctly, use the right-click menu function “Show image” or “Display image”.

Re-skinning and renaming the ghosts

As soon as you start using multiple ghosts, you may notice that having them all use the same skin is not very appealing. Trackmania is a world-wide competition game, and it’s great to promote this using skins. TM Nations Forever contains skins for almost all countries, so the obvious choice is to pick several of them and skin each of your ghost instances differently. United comes with at least 7 skins for each environment, which should be enough for most tracks.

The usage of Ghosts in Forever (Tutorial - part 1)

Written by Alcator.

Trackmania Forever (both the Nations and United version) enhances the MediaTracker Editor with a powerful new feature: “Import Ghosts”. This tutorial will provide you with all the information you need to successfully use this feature in your tracks.

First of all: “What is the ghost?”

This is not as simple as it may seem. All of you are surely familiar with “Replays” - the recordings of your attempts on TM tracks. You upload Replays to TMX to register a World Record or Personal Best on particular tracks, but Replays are just one version of Ghosts. The feature I’ll be tutoring you about here can use both standard Replay- and non-Replay- Ghosts, so you need to understand both properly.

Tmx downtime, again sadly…

As you may have noticed, TMX is down for about 3 days now. Again because of hosting problems. As MrA states on the official TM forums:

Yep, the host wants TMX to pay for a dedicated bandwidth due to what they are calling a high level of ‘acculated traffic’ … In other words we are busy…
However, we are not anywhere near our month limit (or close to it) from our own measurements and so at the moment we dispute this…
I’m quite annoyed that they choose to suspend the site, I don’t think its correct behaviour from them, but we will not be bullied by that…

As MrA states in an additional post, they hope to get access today. When they do get it, the site needs to be taken offline.

We wish the TMX-staff good luck in getting tmx back online.

Read more here

Trackmania Forever Review - Day Two

A while ago, you got the “Day One” review. Now here’s the follow up: Day Two.

Written by Alcator.

This time, I’ll review the in-game track editor and MediaTracker editor.

The track editor has been enhanced with a second, “simple” version. This one is very similar to the “Puzzle” mode editor: You only have the tiles groups available at the bottom; no mediatracking, no nothing. It’s much easier for complete newbies to work with the editor now. A thing that should be stressed is that during the loading of the editor on your first day, a big graphical hint image about the usage of mouse is displayed, so new users quickly learn how to work with it.