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.

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.

TrackMania Forever Review - Day One

Written by Alcator.

Just a few hours after Forever became available, I downloaded it and installed it. This review - the first part of it - describes and comments on things that I experienced during the first 24 hours.

Shooting your video: the quick and easy way!

Written by Djoszee.

Did you ever have the feeling your track needed a video? Don’t worry, here is the easiest way to do it!

• 1.Drive a replay (if you want cool camera’s, use the mediatracker on your outro. Or, see 4b)
• 2. save the replay
• 3. go to editor>replay
• 4a.select the replay you want, click ok
• 4b. In case you want to add camera’s to your replay, which doesn’t have an outro.

A screen pops up, select ‘edit replay’. Now delete the entire camera block, create a new one and place your own camera’s.
Save your replay, use a different name so you’ll keep the original in case you need it.

• 5. a screen pops up, select ’shoot video’
• 6. it will ask you to make the game window smaller, press alt+enter
• 7. now you can shoot the video.
• 8.select resolution 640*480 and 25 fps and press ok
• 9. a new window pops up, select ‘full frames’
• 10.the game will record the video and save it to your trackmania drive (like c\program files\tmn\video001.avi)

Now you will need windows movie maker, I hope you have windows XP. Maybe one of your friend can help you, but the avi is probably big (so you need to burn it on a dvd). If you have XP but didn’t install moviemaker, just use google and download it. You can also use a different video editor program, but you’ll have to figure that out yourself…

Alcator’s Purity Rant - Mixmaps are evil

Written by Alcator.

This article will be very different from anything I’ve written for the blog before. After a long row of guides and tutorials, I’m going to rant. I’m going to rant, because something that shouldn’t be happening is happening and it’s supported by those whom we’ve learnt to consider “authorities”.

The thing in question are the so called “mixmaps”. Mixmaps, with the name probably originating with TM/TMX user “Mixo”, are TrackMania tracks which contain blocks that you won’t find in the in-game editor’s building blocks lists, and/or transitions/connections of these blocks that are not possible within the editor. Examples of such “new blocks” are:

Article - 5 Quick Tips For A Better Looking Bay

This article is a follow-up to Micster’s scenery article about the Sunrise mood. Written by Micster.

Bay can be one of the harder environments to build good scenery in, especially in the Day mood, so here are a few quick tips to keep your Bay tracks looking great, without costing too many coppers.

Quick Tip - Changing the Loading Screen

Written by Hastings.

How to change the loading screen

You can very easily change the loading screen of your TMU game.

Normally, you see a grey wallpaper with the TMU logo, like here.

You find this loading screen in the folder GameData/Menu/Media/Texture/Image in your TMU folder (not the one in My Documents). It is called - how convenient - MenuStartUpBg.tga. Now just right-click on this file, click on Rename and add the extension .bak to the filename: MenuStartUpBg.tga.bak. Don’t worry, you do no harm to the file.

Now do the following with the image you want to see as loading screen:

1. Open your image.
2. Resize it to 1024×1024.
3. Click on “Save as …”, rename it to MenuStartUpBg, choose TGA as image type and save it.
4. Put it into the folder indicated above.

That’s all. The next time you load up TMU, you should see your screenie.

Example here.

Quick Tip - Changing Menu Background Video

Written by Hastings.

How to change the menu background video

Are you tired of always watching the same four videos in the TMU main menu? Would you like to see other environments moving, perhaps even entire races or your own creations? It is perfectly possible.

Article - Making the Most out of your Mood (Sunrise)

Written by Micster.

About a month or so ago, I released a small article showing how scenery can have an impact on a track. Now I’m going to show you how each mood used in your track can significantly effect how your scenery appears. I’ll be using Island for all the demonstrations here, as it provides the most unique mix of scenery.

Today the focus is on Sunrise.