ROSS’S GAME DUNGEON: TRACKMANIA² CANYON

On 9/1/2019 at 2:30 PM, Ross Scott said:

I can look into it, this episode was 5GB, it will probably look better once Youtube processes more.  I need to do an archive re-encoding anyway, I noticed a tiny error I made I wanted to fix (I saw it yesterday, but that would have delayed release several hours and I really wanted this one out for August).

I'd be fine with a 10GB version like the the crew episode. I always watch that version now because it looks so clean.

4 hours ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

You can't hold the S key? Or the Arrow Key Down? He's probably using a controller, so like, L2 to reverse I think.

Nope. It doesn't do anything. There's actually no reverse option under key bindings either. Can't turn down the music either. No sliders. I am using the dx9 api version but so does Ross. I really don't know.

Driving off course, all the way through the endless desert, and eventually piercing the veil to fall into an endless abyss to burn as a supernova is a one-of-a-kind spiritual experience that only TrackMania can offer:

At one point you get so close to the clouds and the environment around you is so empty of objects that you get the odd sensation that you are driving vertically upwards rather than towards the horizon. And i wasn't even high.

I worked in New Mexico for a while and the old version is definitely more accurate.

You might want to see this, Ross.

 

Interesting! Most if not all of those map changes I would, again, put down to having to recompile map lighting every time they update something, and not having any standardized settings (which, by this point, they really should have; their internal structure was guaranteed to mean lots of turnover in any given game's team, so documenting "how we do things 'round here" for consistency's sake should have been a given).

 

One other thing I found interesting is that both versions of the grenade launcher feature fully-modeled bolts, whereas for most of the years I've been playing, it did not. To the point where, when they updated the model to include them, I almost immediately noticed. They must have been removed very early on, and I bet that's when most of the downgrades in this video happened.

 

Finally, they show actual real-time ripples being created when water is shot. I... wasn't aware the Source engine could even do that and now I'm wondering how. And why no subsequent games, even single-player ones, have had that feature. Maybe it was patched out for being glitchy and unreliable?

On 9/6/2019 at 1:17 AM, Steve the Pocket said:

Finally, they show actual real-time ripples being created when water is shot. I... wasn't aware the Source engine could even do that and now I'm wondering how. And why no subsequent games, even single-player ones, have had that feature. Maybe it was patched out for being glitchy and unreliable?

It was available in the original version of HL2 as well... Never understood why they removed it until I played a mod that allowed me to make custom grenades, and overwhelm the physics engine with the number of physics entities. Physics ripples reduced the maximum physics entities to somewhere around half.

Nice video. Coulda been neat to mention something about Canyon Platform, the classic TrackMania game mode which was added to Canyon in an update, and which Nadeo even later broke and never did anything to fix again.

 

I recall some fuss about the car handling in Canyon being revamped at one point, and people complained about it. I think I also preferred the original.

 

https://forum.maniaplanet.com/viewtopic.php?t=40834

 

 

Ross, you said in your video that you didn't play the original TM games and didn't find them visually attractive. TMO has some cool handling, but I recommend checking out TM Sunrise and also with the TMS Extreme expansion. Its graphics are a significant step up from the first TM game's, and still look beautiful. Plus, the sense of speed in TMS is greater than in any other game.

 

 

TM Sunrise also has what I think are the best music and menu presentation in the series, and a lot of the coolest tracks. It also has 3 game modes: Race, Platform, and Puzzle. In my opinion, a TM game isn't a TM game without all 3 modes - even if Nadeo has been making Race-only TM games for longer than they made them with the other modes included.

 

Platform is my favourite mode. It has no timer but presents challenging platform-based tracks with checkpoints that a car can be respawned to if something goes wrong. Gold, silver, and bronze awards are given based on how many times the player resets their car at the most-recent checkpoint (which they do whenever they fall off the track, turn upside down, or anything else that prevents progress).

 

 

And some of the Platform tracks get really crazy (timestamped video):

 

 

TM Sunrise is Nadeo's peak as a developer, IMO, and the studio has been putting out mediocre and half-baked releases since being bought by Ubisoft. And to anyone who would suggest playing TM United instead because it has samples of the same environments as TM Sunrise: TM United isn't comparable to TM Sunrise, it's a much worse package, worse music, worse stages, worse presentation. I think it also has less content. Even importing the TM Sunrise maps into TM United isn't nearly as great an experience as playing TM Sunrise.

 

Because of the horrible Starforce DRM Nadeo put into TM Sunrise, to get TM Sunrise to work on a modern PC, either a virtual machine of Windows XP, Vista, or maybe Windows 7 is needed, or some other method. I've seen people get it to work using various methods. I've also bugged Nadeo to release it without Starforce on GoG, but they seem to be pretty stubborn in not doing that, so far.

 

http://www.tm-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=24517

http://www.tm-forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=211090#p211090

 

 

Oops.  Forgot to link here.  Subs up!

Isn't this episode available for download yet?

On 8/31/2019 at 4:10 PM, Welfarewalrus said:

Has Ross heard about the theory that Apple updates their previous iPhones to be SLOWER after they release a new one?

I briefly worked for Apple's helpdesk call center and can answer this. Apple doesn't purposefully slow down their older iphones with the new updates. They just generally roll them out without giving any fucks as to whether the old hardware can handle it or not. This happened to the iphone6 during my first week out of training and iirc there was actually a post-update patch for it and I had to play damage control in the meantime. Granted the iphone6 was still pretty popular back then and I'm guessing they wouldn't do that for a lesser used phone.

This is a bit unrelated, but I don't know where else to put this, so uh.

 

Does Ross script his Game Dungeon episodes? Or are they all improv'd?

23 hours ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

Scripted.

Thanks. Sorry that I had to ask -- I just wanted to take notes on that kind of thing for my own hopefully upcoming game review series, inspired by GD.

In the Trackmania video there's a song during the credits that isn't listed in the credits. I've been looking for it on and off for months, checked the games OST, used half a dozen song finder apps, but nothing shows up. Maybe I'm missing the obvious, but I need my hand held to show me the source. Anything to help track this song down will put my mind at ease, please.

 

The song in question, timestamped for your pleasure:

 

Trackmania 2 Valley Soundtrack - Vast Veridian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYCQ_HJ5EgM

The Trackmania VALLEY OST. That I did not check, thank you very much