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.

This trailer features no less than 345 replays over the 7 environments, with dozens of hours of directing, and the same again editing and sound mixing. The movie has been created using only free software, which may have hampered the quality slightly, but is a modest compromise for a student’s budget! All the original footage took up around 15gb, which has now been reduced to a mere 25mb for the low-res version. It has been a momentous project, but one I am proud of and hope many others will continue to enjoy.

Well I might as well divulge in a quick “making of” whilst I’m here for those who are interested! The trailer started production during the mid-beta stages of TMF. With no news on an official trailer being released anytime soon, I decided to create my own.

The first step I took on this long voyage was to do the music mixing. This involved choosing what I believed to be the most representative sample from each music track, and then blending them in an order which sounded most natural. With the basic layout now set out, I now needed to give the viewer something interesting to look at.

For each of the seven environments I decided to choose appropriate tracks which could show the environment in a representative matter. I aimed to race around 10-20 replays for each one, which while this isn’t a ground breaking number, did a job fine and kept the project on schedule. The racing was of course the most fun part, and in relative terms the easy part.

After the fun and games came the media tracker directing. While I kept Micster’s excellent work on his two tracks, I had to do the rest myself. This took an overwhelming amount of time to get it all to look right. Getting the hang of the fiddly new media tracker was one thing, but coming up with something creative was something else.

Once I was happy with the actual directing on each track, I recorded the footage and imported it into, wait for it, Windows Movie Maker. Not a great app many will be shouting out, but it’s free! It was then a simple matter of editing it all together to get it all right. I say a simple matter, but I lied. What I really mean is a pain staking amount of work. I won’t delve much further into the editing process, as I can see you are already losing interest, but it involved a heck of a lot of tweaking and trial and error to get it to a state I was happy with.

After much of this frustration, I finally came to save the movie. And that’s when I got a nasty shock. Movie Maker kindly told me that just one of the hundred or so clips was corrupt. It was now a simple matter of going through them all to find out which one it was. Just my luck it was the very last one! After fixing that it then told me that the movie was put simply “too complicated” to save. To get round this I saved one half of the movie, then the other half, and then finally sticking the two together. So if you didn’t notice a little glitch during the desert TMF scene I must have done an ok job.

Now with the final cut of the movie uploaded, I had the not so easy task of uploading and hosting the trailer. Fortunately the kind guys at Gameon.co.uk were at hand to help me with this by creating a youtube upload, in addition to three mirrors. Without these nice folks my free bandwidth limit would have been maxed out in the first few days!

The tactical decision of how to publish the trailer was the final hurdle. Both TMX and TM-Tube were down, so my avenues to expand were limited. So who better to get the attention I thought it deserved, than with the charismatic Florent. His kind actions in publishing the trailer on the official forums were more than I could ever have hoped for. My final piece of hard graft with this project is well, telling you guys about it. I’ve certainly enjoyed explaining the process of how this came about, even if you’re now looking for a cushion to snooze on!

So without further ado, here is the original post by Florent, lovingly presenting the trailer.

Thank you for you time, and enjoy.

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.

A word of caution: I don’t recommend using custom skins on ghosts; if the player playing the track does not have the particular custom skin in his system, then either the ghost will be one-colored, or, what’s perhaps even worse, the skin file(s) will start downloading during play, causing lag.

Choose brighter skins for guidance or help-providing ghosts, choose darker skins for cunning and malicious ghosts (such as ghosts running in opposite direction).

To re-skin an imported ghost: Click on either key of the ghost’s block in the MediaTracker editor; the left panel will be populated with information about the ghost. Next to the Skin header, a button with “…” on it allows you to choose a different skin for the ghost.

To re-name the “MT track” of the ghost, click on the name on the first line of the left panel, and edit it. This is useful for multi-ghost clips, because normally, Ghosts are all named after the player that recorded them. If you want to have the Gold/Silver/Bronze opponents, it may be a good idea to rename them for your own convenience to “Gold”, “Silver” and “Bronze” so that if you later decide to update one of them, you will know which is faster. This is even more true in cases where you use one ghost more than once (explained later), because in such situations the total length of the ghost is not helping at all (while in the case of the Gold/Silver/Bronze ghost, you could always click on it and see the total length (time) of the ghost, thus recognizing which one is fastest and thus gold).

What does the “off-set” line do?

Now it’s time to get really wild. The thing is, the ghost file contains the ghost’s positions recorded many times each second. So the ghost knows exactly where it will be after 5 seconds and 20 hundredths of a second (00:05.20). Therefore, you can tell the ghost to start playing from the position where it was at some exact time (during recording). And this is the place where the miscalculation mentioned in part 1 may cause you some trouble, but let’s go slowly.

Numbers in the image mark the following: 1: The name of this “track” for convenience, 2: the “offset” value (in seconds), 3: the button allowing changing the ghost’s skin, 4: the block-start value (from this moment, the ghost will be visible). Right-click the image and select “Display image” to see it full-size.

The offset value is in seconds; they may be fractional, but the value entered must be seconds, not “time”. So, to enter an offset of 2 minutes and 10 seconds, you have to enter the value (2 * 60 + 10) = 130.

This value says from which point of the ghost’s record should the ghost start playing. So, if you recorded a ghost that takes 10 seconds to pass the first CP, and you want the ghost to appear when the player enters the first CP tile, you place a clip’s trigger at the CP and import the ghost to the clip, then set the offset of this ghost to “10″. However, the bug comes into effect here - the MT editor will incorrectly ADD an additional off-set to this value: It will add the time your main ghost took to get to this CP. However, when you actually play the track, this will not happen. The consequence is that unless the clip with imported ghosts gets triggered right on start, you will _always_ see the ghost at a different location in the MT editor than where he actually will be in game. This can become very frustrating and/or hard to precisely position the ghost. The following picture illustrate the problem:

Here you see that although the ghost has an offset of 0, it is shown next to the player’s car (in the MT editor). The following picture shows a custom view of actual racing situation:

As you can see, in real race, the ghost starts on Start due to the offset value 0.

If we give the car the offset value of 3.5 (which is the time at which we passed the CP during ghost recording…

… we will see the ghost incorrectly behind the finish gate, while in race…

… the ghost correctly appears next to us. *Sigh* Nadeo!

There is one way to hack around this:

1. Import the ghost to a clip (perhaps temporary) that gets triggered on start (has a triggering cube on start).
2. Adjust its offset so that the ghost is precisely where you want him to appear - in this case, since there’s nothing to bug-ADD to the offset, this will be precise.
3. Remember the off-set value (you can use the Clipboard if you’re bad with numbers).
4. Go to the real clip which you want to use the ghost in.
5. Give the ghost the same offset you found out in step 2.
6. Done.

Another problem you may experience (I couldn’t test this on multiple computers, so it may be caused by my computer, although I doubt it) is that the ghosts don’t move if you preview-play the clips in MT editor. They just stay on their starting position (shifted by the offset) and do nothing. This makes it even harder to synchronize things like custom camera movement or camera shake effect with their movements, so be prepared to go through a lot of try-and-error. The results, however, when you finally succeed, can be very rewarding.

One last cool thing that I’m curious if anyone will utilize for some wild effects:

(This happened when I moved the start key of the ghost to the right - as in the first picture.)

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.

A Ghost is a recording of a car’s positions, headings (pitch, roll, yaw), and eventually the horn and/or brake lights as well. What’s important to note is that the information about terrain and track tiles is completely MISSING from the Ghost file, which means that if you record a ghost, and then modify the track on which the ghost was recorded, the ghost may pass through obstacles (newly added tiles, raised terrain, etc.), or move through air (removed tiles, lowered terrain, etc.).

A Ghost can be recorded in two basic ways: By doing a standard run on a track, such as validating the track or playing it in solo mode, or by using the “Record a MediaTracker Ghost” function of the MT Editor first menu. In either case, after you successfully passed through all checkpoints and reached the finish, you will have the option (during the replay) to either Save the replay or Save the ghost.

Now, each Ghost file contains the car’s position/heading information from Start to about 5 seconds after Finishing, recorded at some “framerate”. When replaying a replay or ghost, the game tries to interpolate between the disjunct recorded positions to create a smooth movement illusion; however, if the load on the CPU is higher, you may (and probably will) notice certain jerkiness in the movement, or reduction of details on the ghost cars.

How do I create a ghost for … ?

The way in which you will record your ghosts for the use in MediaTracker clips is dependent on the purpose. What are you trying to achieve? Do you want to display the ghost as a “GPS” guidance? Or do you want it to suddenly drive in the opposite direction than the player is heading, scaring him? Or do you want the ghost to only show how to navigate the first 10 tiles of your tricky track, and then leave the player on his own?

There are probably dozens of possible ghost uses, each may require a different approach. But the general tips are:

1. The Ghost does not have to come from the same track the player will be racing. If you need a ghost just for one middle section of your track, then remove temporarily all checkpoints, place a start tile and a finish tile before/after the section, and record a ghost that “jumps” into the race mid-way, and exits soon after.
2. Swapping the start and finish tiles will allow you to create ghosts that run towards the player easily. There are other ways to achieve opposite driving, but this one may be the fastest/easiest.
3. To provide the player with 3 “buddy” ghosts (Gold, Silver and Bronze) that will seemingly race against him and will allow him to see how well he’s doing, you just drive the track with intentional errors and save each of those runs as a separate ghost.
4. You can use the same ghost several times in the same clip, so with clever planning, you may create an illusion of 50 car race with only 5 or 10 different ghosts. Each of the “clones” can have a different skin, and this can be changed during the MT work, you don’t need to re-skin your car every time you record a ghost.

A word of caution - Nadeo’s bugs strike again!

It wouldn’t be a TrackMania game if it was flawless Working with ghosts in the MediaTracker may be frustrating, because the MT editor may miscalculate the timing/position of the ghost. There are tricks that may reduce this to a minimum, but don’t be surprised if what you see in the MT editor is quite different from what you see in-game.

OK, enough theory, let’s do it!

For your first track using ghosts, I really recommend trying to provide a player with a virtual opponent on a simple track. By simple I mean a track that does not have any MT clips such as wallride cameras or loop cameras in it. Make a simple tech track with several chicanes and a jump or two, that should be enough.

After you have the track built, validated and saved, click on the mediatracker button (the camera symbol), and choose “Record MediaTracker ghost”. Race the track, and when you finish, click on “Save the ghost”, then type in the name for this ghost: “Virtual opponent”.

Next, exit the race (stay in the editor), click on the MT editor button, and chose “Edit in-game”. The first clip of the in-game MT should be pre-placed and you should be in the “Place trigger” mode. Place the trigger on the start tile - this will ensure that the clip gets run right when the “Go!” appears.

Next, exit from the “place trigger” mode (click on the cube frame icon in the lower left). Next, find the “Import ghosts…” button at the top left corner - it’s the “floppy disc” icon to the left from the small car symbol in the top row of icons. DON’T CONFUSE IT WITH “Import clip…”!

Choosing to import ghosts will open a “Open file” dialog. Locate the “Virtual opponent.Replay.Gbx” file. Click on it, then click Open.

Please notice that the Ghost has been imported into the Clip. As soon as this clip is triggered, the ghost will appear on Start* and will start moving along its recorded path.

*) notes: This is not actually generally correct; the ghost will appear at the position that is recorded in the ghost file as its starting location, so if you moved the start after recording the ghost, the ghost will still appear on its own starting location.

Since working in the in-game MT editor invalidates the track, you need to re-validate it to be able to race it in Solo mode. Exit the MT editor, validate the track (notice the opponent racing against you), then save it.

The next obvious step is to provide the racer with several opponents of different skill levels. This is especially great if different medals require significantly different paths and/or skills (shortcut jumps etc.).

The process is the same: You record the ghosts, save each of them under different name (”Virtual Opponent Gold/Silver/Bronze” may be a good naming, or just “[TrackName] G/S/B” will do as well), then enter the MT editor, select the clip that gets triggered as soon as the race starts, and import each of the ghosts (in any order) into the clip.

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

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.

The track editor got another face-lift, with fancier folder icons (those folders of track tiles); of course, the Objectives dialog box reflects the change of difficulty settings to colors, but that’s a cosmetic change.

A serious problem may arise to those who will import their United tracks. Because Forever now displays the track names on light background instead of United’s dark background, many color-enhanced track names became unreadable. This is one of those changes (like changing the car physics again) that I don’t really understand “why it was made”.

Those who only had TM Nations will now notice they can set the Mood (or daytime) of the track. In case you don’t know, if you already have a track and want to change its mood, hold Ctrl while selecting the track and click the Edit button - you will be offered to change the possible mood settings. You should also be aware that all the moods except Day are more demanding on graphical card power, because of the lighting.

MT editor

The MediaTracker editor has been changed slightly. Gone are the buttons that allowed us to change the speed in which the camera moved when pressing arrow keys (I miss them really!), while an option to switch between clip camera and free camera was added (this one allows you to move the camera freely even if you have a camera block in your clip that would otherwise fix your view). You can now also rename the clip’s tracks so that it’s easier to find the one you need to change (such as, if you have 10 text tracks in your clip, you can name them according to their contents (”GPS GO LEFT”, “RACE GO RIGHT”, “FLY-THROUGHS FORWARD”, or “Letter A”, “Letter L”, “Letter C”…) — this is an option that the organized minds might appreciate a lot.

The greatest addition to the MT editor, beyond any doubt, is however the option to import ghosts into MT clips. This of course enlarges the Challenge file significantly (7 ghosts added to ATP community track 15 have increased the track size from 34 KB to 400 KB), but this is hardly an issue. Soon, a tutorial about this function should be published on this blog, so I won’t go into detail about how it works, but this feature allows you to add a real-looking car that moves through the track and can be raced against, observed, the camera can be anchored to it (just imagine having a replay that shows the player car as observed from the (author-time-) ghost car!), and some other things can be done with these ghosts. What’s even cooler is that the ghost does not have to come from the same track, which may allow for some spooky stuff (passing through walls, moving through air…)

Last change to the MT editor that is worth noting is the “Condition” option at MT clips. You can now define conditions for the clip that have to be met in order for the clip to be triggered. Such as “Minimum car speed” or “Elapsed race time”. This means cars passing through triggering cubes may sometimes not trigger the clip. I’m going to explore this thing deeply and plan on writing a tutorial for it.

To wrap it up, the editor brings some useful new things, one amazing new feature
(ghosts), one possibly cool customizing thing (conditions), and keeps its functionality and friendliness.

Good work, Nadeo!

With Forever, I’ve started playing a lot more online (meaning I play an hour or two in the evening ). And I’ve realized that Stadium dirt is excellent for online play! I’ve always been on the “dirt is too random to be fun”-side, and avoided it online, but now I’ve changed my mind. A possible reason could be the fact that it’s now possible to play on Nations servers even if you log in to United. Thus, I’ve played on more “Stadium only” servers. Add to this the fact that Nations players can now use dirt.

Dirt isn’t all I play, though. Technical tracks have always been a personal favorite of mine, at least in Stadium. And it still is - it even beats dirt!

Now, my problem is that, since I usually play only in the evenings (23-01 local time, that would be 21-23 GMT, I believe), most of my online buddies are offline. I could solve this in numerous different ways: get more buddies, play earlier in the day (or later, not sure when people play, in fact), or perhaps I should point out a time and place (server) and invite all of you to come and play with me! (If that sounds like a good idea, please suggest servers and a suitable date and time - perhaps someone can even host a private server for us?).

For now, though, I’ll keep playing online with strangers, and perhaps meet a new friend or two. But for you guys, I have one final question: what’s your favorite type of online track?

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.

The installation correctly detected TM United on my computer and didn’t ask for any CD keys or stuff like that. It also asked whether to copy all the custom stuff from United, and when I confirmed that, it really copied everything. Here I have just a tiny complaint: perhaps this “Copy old stuff” function could be a bit more customizable, because:

1. I really don’t think copying videos shot in the editor makes sense (they might have offered copy/move/ignore). Videos are actually not a custom content of the game, they are custom PRODUCTS not usable within the game.
2. There should have been an “Ignore missing files” checkbox (I had to confirm about 100 files that the game “thought” should be in the United folders, but actually were not).

After installation, the game starts (if you keep the “Launch” checkbox ticked). The user interface has been reworked heavily, although some “bad timing” still occurs: If the game fails to connect to the internet, it still asks you to respond to it (instead of preloading challenges first and then asking for internet connection remedy - this way, if you go to the bathroom or to get a cup of coffee during the load time, you come back and have to sit through the loading process needlessly). Also, the problem of the loading screen “freezing” during the “Scanning challenges” persists from older version. I really can’t understand why programs like Total Commander CAN show you how many of the total they have already processed, and TrackMania can’t. Please please please, a simple “Scanning challenges: [Number of challenges found so far]” would be much better.

There are no longer those short videos playing in the background in the main menu. Don’t really know if this is good or bad, I think everyone saw them so many times already that they won’t be missed.

What I noticed by accident is that if you idle too long in the menus, a screensaver starts - a beautiful glass-like rotating Earth globe with luminosity and radiance on it. This globe has different color each time you launch the game.

Forever now unites Nations with United, so that players of both games can play on Stadium tracks together. The drawback is that the car physics has once again been changed, so neither United’ nor Nations’ PF tracks in Stadium are certain to work

Right after getting to the main menu, I went to the Solo mode area, where you’re presented with the choice of either the United campaign, Nations campaign, Custom campaign (you can now build your own campaigns inside the game, which is good), or the famous “Browse…” button for searching for custom tracks.

The campaigns have been changed significantly. Their difficulty is now reflected by colors (White - easiest, Green, Blue, Red, Black - hardest), and progression to harder tracks is limited by requiring you to finish the previous track(s) with some medal first: You need bronze medal to proceed to next track in Green difficulty, silver for Blue, and gold medal in Red. The black tracks only unlock after you gain gold on ALL the previous tracks.

Since I knew there are new tiles in some environments, I immediately looked at the small thumbnail images of the accessible tracks in hopes I would notice something new and try it. Desert was the obvious choice and I quickly tried the new water and “near water” sections, as well as the new majestic bridges. Have to say, desert became much smoother now, with those slightly banked turns and composite bridge slopes.

Alpine environment surprised me with castle walls and Rally got refined with some sort of small fields.

However, the greatest thrills came from the improved Stadium. At long last it’s possible to create big U-ramps, and the new blue-bordered platforms which allow the creation of ultra narrow tobogan-like rides are just awesome. This is the first time I’m really satisfied with Stadium - bravo, Nadeo!

This is all I managed to experience during day one. On day two, I focused on the in-game track editor, so stay tuned for part 2 of this review.

So, you’ve all had the time to test Forever thorughly now. Now let’s hear your thoughts! Will Forever really last… forever? Or is it just the news that is appealing, and then it will die out? And how good did Nadeo succeed anyway? Did Forever meet your expectations, or did it leave you wanting more? Would you say Nado listened to the community, or did they just add their own stuff?

Come on, let’s hear it

TM Forever is out, but you knew that already. Since most of you guys who read this blog know each other, both from here and from TMX, let’s add each other to the in-game buddy list. You can add me (Jozii), and write your in-game login in the comments if you wish, so others are able to add you to their lists

You can never have too many friends, at least not in a game that has a buddy list

We have plenty of screenshots laying around, but I’m not publishing any So, got any suggestions/thoughts about what do to with these? All in one post? A contest using these screenshots? Anything?

I’d love to hear your ideas on what we should do with the yet to be published screenshots