Dear nadeo team,
i just wanted to ask, if the bugfixing/improvements in the more "media-ish" part of ManiaPlanet, mostly dedicated to the mediatracker and the graphics of ManiaPlanet, has a priority for being acknowledged and fixed/improved in the future, maybe with the next big feature update.
I know that you guys have many things to do and working on something really big (especially hosting big competitions like the AirFrance TM Cup as the game that will be played as the first competition in a plane, or your own TrackMania Grand League), but i want to ensure that the media-creative part of trackmania is still a group that has a priority somewhere, since people like me and other mediamaker out there brings great content and gets some appearence to trackmania for people outside, that may not heard about trackmania, but like the edits and trailer we do, besides of the big amount of competitions. I discussed a problem with the MediaTracker in case of video rendering with Ozon a few weeks ago and i saw that he already submitted a list of bugs/submission for improving the mediatracker a lot in this topic here (viewtopic.php?f=647&t=44639). That is about 10 months ago and in that case not much visible to me happened or get acknowledged. I might not the only one who complains about it, but i just want to sum some issues/submission up here. It may get updated as soon as the bugs get fixed or there coming new bugs related to graphical issues and MediaTracker bugs.
These are the bugs, that i occur, that not only mediamaker, but also players ingame and mapper occur most of the time, even watchable in mediatracker renders (evidence recorded with the highest launcher settings possible):
- The mediatracker crashes randomly, if you confirm the render settings with both options (Screenshots and Videos), independent of the render settings. i already made a topic about it, it's this one: viewtopic.php?f=659&t=46047
- The day/night cycle goes not fluent into the next mood section "night/sunrise" or "evening/night", so it looks rather weird, besides the fact it can occur a freeze lag, if it change the mood, and causes general FPS drops. Besides of that shadows in this cycle will fade in/out instead of going flawless, like it should be. https://streamable.com/d1ffp
- The shadows looks either blurry or edged (like bad anti-aliasing) and even on the "High" and "Ultra" calculating it's not looking good, to be shown off, so shadow calculating above "standard" isn't recommended right now, even it takes a lot of time for the same result. But even on any other caluclation level, this bug occurs.https://streamable.com/t5m5e
- In Stadium, some weird visual bugs are visible, if you look onto the grass ground, especially 90 degrees down. https://streamable.com/t5m5e
- The geometry on blocks are thrown up on a certain distance and looks ugly, seems to be LoD. It is mostly visible in renders, where (at least for me) the LoD issue occurs on a mid distance on any camera settings, so an option to have no LoD in the render settings or even in the launcher settings would be much appreciated. https://streamable.com/t5m5e
- The wheat in valley are bugged, they disappear up to a certain distance. Other to the stadium grass, where it faded out on distance in a good way, there you can see a clear line of where the visible wheat distance ends. as i said above, an option to have no LoD in the render settings or even in the launcher settings would be much appreciated. https://streamable.com/ky70j
- The trails are only shown in the render where the editing cut/replay starts, even if the trails block is extended right before the actual shot. And it will play the whole time in the render, even the trails block ended already. https://streamable.com/o39p5
- As Ozon said it in the post already, FXCamerablend and FXCameramap are broken since ManiaPlanet 2.
- If i make a replay with custom skins for cars (like shown in the following clip link) and i save it, then leave the replay and enter it again, it resets most of the skins to the default skin. I can do that anytime in TrackMania One: Alpine, but not in official enviroment titlepacks, so it might be a custom titlepack issue. https://streamable.com/ruf81
- The RayCast reflections don't work properly. It's shows light sources on car reflections incorrectly (in comparison with Car reflects + Sub-sample reflects), for that it takes a tremendous amount of GPU usage (up to 17% more, at least for me) and render time (sometimes 4x the time with the other reflection methods activated).
- Sometimes the reflection settings are not even available. It happens randomly on any graphical/launcher settings. (picture by taxon, edited.)
- If a map has calculated shadows on "Ultra", any tunnel (or more "closed indoor areas", especially visible in canyon tunnels) has weird, crisp shadows and throw up the entire lightmap in this specific area. (picture by Ozon.)
Here are some suggestions that would be a nice addition to the creative community, to be seen in future feature updates:
- Make the most visible objects like the clouds and, for example, the trees in canyon, a 3D object (or at least give us the option to activate it in the launcher/MediaTracker/map editor). In the editing phase it's very hard to make some nice shots if you see in the MediaTracker and the rendered file as well, that the clouds and trees turning towards your camera. https://streamable.com/pmb8y
- Improving the ingame car painter by, for example, importing sticker as .png with a higher resolution instead of the quite bulky way with .dds and .tga export and import it into the maniaplanet folder in /Documents. Increase the base model's skindiffuse up to 8192x8192 pixels and give us the option if we want a high resolution skin in cost to a bigger file size. Otherwise, even on max settings, anything on a car painted ingame looks edged and blurry. https://streamable.com/nvvm6
- The ability of having a motion blur slider in the mediatracker render settings, like the one in the new graphic settings from MP4.1, or even in the old top bar settings from ManiaPlanet 3/4. It would make the control over the motion blur much easier.
- The option for the VehicleLight to be turned on for multiple cars instead of activate it for one car each block.
- The option to adjust, colorize and enable/disable exhaust flames on cars, even when not shifting/boosting.
- Since we have now a 64-bit executable for ManiaPlanet and Ozon suggested it already in the first topic mentioned here, give us the option to render a clip in the MediaTracker as one whole file, not splitted up into 1 GB segments. With that, the video work would be much easier since you no longer need to adjust any video clip in the editing program, with adding color corrections, clip size and position etc. for mostly up to 10 clips for one scene.
- The possibility to select and clone/delete multiple mediatracker tracks and blocks (Suggestion by Ozon.).
- Replace cubemap reflection with realtime reflections, especially on the stadium road reflections, the outside reflections of the stadium and the water reflections in stadium.
- Update the texture resolutions of the games (both TrackMania² and ShootMania) to 8K resolution in a ideal situation, so the game is prepared for the future, for people with overkill PCs going to play it and - of course - for top-of-the-notch video producing.
- Snapping option for tracks and blocks, snapping to the end/beginning of other existing blocks to make fluent mediatracker work, especially useful for Intro/Outro/In-race mediatracker. (Suggestion by Ozon.).
That's anything i can suggest and report about. The media-creative scene has seen not much care in the last months or even since the last MP4.1 update, so i hope, with that it'll get more attention. Maybe people can confirm my points or suggest their own ideas, as long as they're reachable and useful. Mostly all points have a streamable link, where i show the issues, or embed pictures where the problem is visible as well.
But besides of that ManiaPlanet has one of the most accessible, powerful and, packed with a almost infinite amount of potential, media creation tools in a game ever. Me and many others created great work with that already, since many years. So please don't let this be down. I love your work and hope you keep up with what you're doing up there in France.
cheers.
timania.
) implementing new features.