Trackmania Turbo will be available the 24th of March 2016

[Florenzius]

Hm. I'm curious. Would these block improvements also be brought to MP? Considering changing the blocks would likely result in invalidating most record times.

Excepted the Artistic direction, yes blocks improvements are ported to MP. (Canyon's District 25with TMT blocks costs 61764c instead of 73819c in MP3. The racing blocks being less expensive in MP than in TMT, this optimisation will be even lower in MP4. Valley has also more optimisations than canyon, so you can expect often 25% gain in Valley, sometimes 50% (and this copper cost is just one indicator, there are other gains such has better lightmap usage (better quality for the fixed block and all blocks around), lower fillrate (which can slow a lot as well), lower memory cost, lower collisions calculations.

The backward compatibility is a good question that stole a lot of my sleep hours.
Some blocks had really bad collisions (such as Valley or Canyon's Tunnels), so the bug fixes will have effects on record times here and there.
I consider the backward compatibility impossible or insanely expensive to maintain on the almost 5000 meshes of the 4 environments, after having tried to do it while making TMT.5yes we tried, and we tried hard, and we still do our best to keep stability when we have the choice).
MP3 tracks will have alterations when loaded in MP4.

Okay, sounds awesome

But will we get all new / changed objects or just some? Because I don't want to see MP4 as a "reduced" version of tmt with another menu and some more creative-features...

[jui]

I am also in favor of including improvements to blocks (and physics?) in MP4. I think its more important than maintaining 100% backwards compatibility. Sure for some players it might be annoying to know that some times can be beat easier or harder but maybe it also a incentive to play some maps again.

About breaking PF maps. Didn´t the MP3 update already break those?

Also yesterday i read some previews and the press seems very positive towards TMT. Seems Nadeo did a great job with art direction / style and polish the game.

Looking forward to playing TMT!

[Fix]

Thanks for clarifying that in advance, especially in the changelog you should mention all the changes once again to make it clear for everyone - just to avoid further confusion.

I will try, but the changelog being very long and complex, I can't list everything, nor spend too much time on it . I'll do a summarized version of the most important/significant changes.
...With a big full changelog maybe we can impress those who say it's the same ) But I prefer spending the time into fixing more bugs or adding more cool stuff to maniaplanet

I'm curios: was one of the block improvements the rammstein bug in stadium

Remaking the blocks without the rubber bumper may probably annihilate rammsteins, but this hasn't been part of the bugfixes, because it's been stated in the past that rammsteins are now part of Stadium and will stay.

But breaking press forwards makes me feel a bit sad for people who spend months over making amazing maps. We just have to face it - benefits have their cost.

It makes me sad too, I have a lot of respect for the crazy guys making PF.
Same for texture mods, some will have to be updated (anyway, as new blocks arrived, new textures too, so mods have to incorporate them and be updated).

[ElCharco]

It makes me sad too, I have a lot of respect for the crazy guys making PF.
Same for texture mods, some will have to be updated (anyway, as new blocks arrived, new textures too, so mods have to incorporate them and be updated).

Me as a (novice) mod creator I have no problem with the incorporation of newer textures, on the contrary, re-mading textures is the point why I bought TM2

[lukakas157]

Would be better retro-compatibility for those tracks (like to use old blocks) or a warning message to run Trackmania previous version.

[eyebo]

Canyon's District 25with TMT blocks costs 61764c instead of 73819c in MP3. The racing blocks being less expensive in MP than in TMT, this optimisation will be even lower in MP4. Valley has also more optimisations than canyon, so you can expect often 25% gain in Valley, sometimes 50% (and this copper cost is just one indicator, there are other gains such has better lightmap usage (better quality for the fixed block and all blocks around), lower fillrate (which can slow a lot as well), lower memory cost, lower collisions calculations.

I found this VERY interesting. That's a huge savings. District 25 also had very few "expensive" blocks, as I recall. It's mostly economical blocks... lights, platforms, roads, signs. So to see that much of a savings really shows the optimizations you guys have done.

I've been working on a revamped version of District 25 that's a lot lighter. Perhaps my work, plus the addition of these optimizations, the track will finally be able to be enjoyed by more people.

Looking forward to seeing Valley run faster too with MP4. I know it already runs faster in Turbo for me. So I'm looking forward to see those optimizations in ManiaPlanet.

Keep up the good work! And thanks for sharing the details.