Maniaplanet Forum

You severely underestimate the complexity of such a thing.

Rain comes together with wet roads, puddles and splashes, the computation should take for example blocks above you into account; of course no rain falls below a platform block. What makes it even more difficult is that blocks can be irregularly shaped, whilst e.g. Minecraft can compute this much much more easily. The computation is even more complex and heavy since the game allows dynamic maps, thus it can not be baked into files. Unless you introduce a system like the current shadow computation, which is obviously complex again. Let's not get started about objects. Doing it realtime, thus casting hundreds or thousands of rays every frame to compute every droplets destination is extremely taxing.
Those additional visual effects (wet roads, puddles...) require a huge amount of extra asset creation if you don't want to half-ass it. And again, for proper object support you'd need rain support (thus variation assets/layers) there too, which requires a lot of effort in just another development section.

Don't get me wrong, rain would be amazing, but really, it's not that simple to add a non-half-assed effect.

+1 and :

Weather options (ask many times by community members) could be fun and nice. But most of Cerovan arguments are strong...

My opinion :

If weather don't change change gameplay, MT effects are enough (even if Crusard's rain is very old now, around 2007 I guess).

Arcade doesn't mean no gameplay modification with surfaces (wet dirt for ex). It should change and it's not again TM philosophy if all players have the same car handling. A example of Hylis thinking :

Hylis wrote:I also would like to deal well the parameter of the materials, and have already designed a solution based on xml remapping or attribution for mods etc. It's something I would love to see that asphalt converted to snow can slide. It's also for trails etc. But it's just too long to make at the moment for all the impacts.

Source : viewtopic.php?f=9&t=28313&start=10

Nadeo philosophy is to let "space" to creators in Maniaplanet. That's one reason why some people love TM for years now. That's why TM Turbo have a strong personnality compare to Canyon or Valley which are more « neutral ».

I can understand people who only want « official » content. They prefer professionnal stuff than amateur one (even if some amateurs are so brilliant) or maybe they are too lazy to try community content... But TM spirit is to test community content. You ask for fog. It's already done ! In Raid Valley Jungle mod for example.

People want new game experience but how of us try to drive on Ice in Valley ? I understand we ask some stuff from Nadeo. For some parameters it's the only way. But I remember years ago when community was so active to discover creations. Creators are still here but players seems to only wait for official stuff... That's a pity to spend time and energy in this kind of topic. I would love to see topic about title packs (or cars from scratch, or items, or mods, or videos, etc) where people share the wonderful content they discover and like in creators community. We need you support !

To be back to weather options. Is it so important ? Remember :

eyebo wrote:Hylis once quoted Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who said "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". (Source)

I just love that quote, and it's that simplicity which has always drawn me to TM and kept me playing it. Keep doing what you know is best Hylis!

Changing the visuals without changing the handling would be very strange.
I like that one environment has only one gameplay.
To add some variety, Nadeo should just continue to add new environments.

meuh21 wrote:But I remember years ago when community was so active to discover creations.

It was easier before. You just had to join a server and you could discover new things. It was a great surprise when a new mod has just been loaded on a map.
Now you have to go to a store, buy something, load it...

For mods nothing change (except the size maybe because textures are bigger for better quality), so it could be the same as before without store, etc.

But I think Store and Title packs are just a pretext. It's more complicated to get another car model (need non official website) than to install a title pack from the store (inside the game). But Title Pack have no support. Cars, mods and items on Maniapark, Tracks on Maniaexchange, TM Tube and also some old (and closed) website like Screenmania, TMMod, Maniacreative. But nothing for Title packs. It's the same for video makers. The old french forum was incredebly active and helpful.

We need more activity but it's also the community responsability... For example, before asking for fog it could be better to create a topic and write : "I found a title pack (or a mod) with fog, test it !" Or "I found a map with Ice, try it !". How many topic like that ? But many topic to ask official content or to complain about this or this. Would be much more useful to create a positive circle where players share what they find (cars, mods, videos, tracks, title packs, items, etc). Then players will play more and creators will create more.

Fog (35'' and 50"") : https://youtu.be/MlMY79ZIcXw
Ice : https://youtu.be/XUamg1DHf-w

Title Packs are cool for a full customization of the game but not for a few blocks. I don't want to download 175 MB (Size of the SpeedBall TP update I made yesterday ^^) when I saw than the size of those blocks (http://www.maniapark.com/ressource.php?id=2566) is just 468KB !

SpeedBall TP Update ( 175 MB ) 15 minutes
Blocks ( 468 KB) 1 second

It would be great if Nadeo can create extension packs for servers that use 2 or 3 new weapons. I'm pretty sure that creative players will do new fun gamemodes

EDIT :

I'm also pretty sure that Title Packs would gain players if they do some events like the PMC's organizers do. The current playerbase is too small for claiming players to come everyday on our TP.

And some TP doesn't offer fun or competitive gamemodes. A Title Pack without fun or competitive gamemodes doesn't bring players.

meuh21 wrote: Fog (35'' and 50"") : https://youtu.be/MlMY79ZIcXw

I built a map with Fog mod : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o9l9TBh8M3Q

TheBigMiike wrote:I'm also pretty sure that Title Packs would gain players if they do some events like the PMC's organizers do. The current playerbase is too small for claiming players to come everyday on our TP.

And some TP doesn't offer fun or competitive gamemodes. A Title Pack without fun or competitive gamemodes doesn't bring players.

You're right. But i think it's maybe not creators role to organize events. TMPlus is great. At the beggining it's more an event title pack and now also it's also get a big items part.

Players aren't waiting for Nadeo to open servers or organise competition. But they expect from title pack creators to do this ! Strange

I can understand nobody like our title packs and don't want to play. But if at the same time people ask for stuff, like fog (or jungle, or dunes, etc), we get in our title it's weird...

It's true that it is not easy to add dynamic weather effects to a game. And that's too much for TrackMania anyway. I think of the weather effects as more of a visual gimmick to increase diversity of the tracks (such as the moods). I don't need the car to be pushed around by wind or slide over icy patches on the road, etc.

1) Fog
This should be the easiest to implement - nothing has to change with the textures.

2) Rain
Make it a light rain so that the trees don't have to move. Darken the environmental lighting and add more clouds to the sky. If you want to keep the texture effects to a minimum make the road a little more shiny than usual.

3) Snow
Snow doesn't make sense in most environments anyway so that shouldn't be needed.

About performance: racing games all the way back to the early '90s have had weather effects (e.g. NFS2 Special Edition). This really shouldn't be an issue. As I've said I don't need a perfectly simulated weather system - that's something for Project Cars but not for TM

For a start, think of a block based weather system, something like the forrest overlay block in Valley, but at higher altitude: weather layer, switch on off like mountain / underground view.
One could add rain, snow, frozen ground, rainbow, thunderstorm, etc. in the maps.
This should be relatively easy to do, because the weather would be constant for the block(s) below.

A dynamic weather system would be amazing, e.g. scriptable weather phenomens, or moving rain showers,
but also much more complex to implement.

Here, to begin, before implementing weather in a game, what I would first do is implement sound blocks as items. I recently explored the Action maker Files, in Audio folder, they have all what they need to start making sound blocks.

Here : For example, you want to make an RPG map on ShootMania, ex : Rain starts falling, later, it gets even more falling, much more like a Storm... Then, it calms down. ATM we can't do it cuz we are missing sound blocks as placeable items. Wich would make our maps greater, make us feel more "in the map's mood", and make us more "feeling in the game itself".

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Talking about weather system now. What we could do, instead of having annoying blocks trigger in MediaTracker, we could use a "Brush" and "Block trigger" to make it even more Precise! We gotta have to get somehow rid of the "Block-ish" system. This is getting old, it is keep restricting us and it feels like sometimes a waste of em. Example : a curve of 2x2x1 could be just the god damn curve itself while keeping the "connectors" Now, we can decide how long we want this curve, what is its inclination (Axis X, Axis Y, Axis Z) with manual handling plus text handling. If you don't have a clue of what the heck I am talking about, check this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exb9JYeYjtI.

This is gonna make the track making much more freedom than it was and give us even more possibilities. Even if it's hard, in the end, it's really worth it!

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What functions are missing to items ?

Personally, I really think that items could be physically animated, same for the blocks, (I know that in Valley there is the Windmill block wich is animated, I don't know if it's physically done or just simply aesthetically done).

Another thing, it could also be moving! Yes, you heard me, talking about this. Let make it just following path (example : Cows in a certain field can move. Yes again it's complicated but it adds so much more beauty to our works. And also, it's less pain in the *** for us.
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For the physics now

It all depends on the ENGINE(S) you decide to use!

Didn't NADEO and Ubisoft completely forgot about the Nvidia PhysX technology ?