The third envriroment

[Knutselmaaster]

How many games do you know, where the boss of the company that makes it takes the time to communicate directly with the community?

[hugocool]

Well, TrackMania is kind of an Indie game, and that's a common thing, sometimes actually.

[Xymph]

Well, TrackMania is kind of an Indie game

Hardly. The TM series was published in retail stores by various small/mid-sized publishers in Europe (Focus Home, Digital Jesters, Deep Silver) and elsewhere (e.g. Enlight). Nadeo is a company with a dozen+ employees (varies throughout the years I guess), with two long-running "franchises" under its belt: TrackMania and Virtual Skipper, both with at least half a dozen releases. They surpassed the "indie" stage long ago.

[hugocool]

Hm. I though that there was only like 6 people working in Nadeo

[occam]

Hm. I though that there was only like 6 people working in Nadeo

i think it is more like 18

One source of information could be the autograph card that was part of one of the TM United Editions,
or the entry in the French wikipedia (and although the wikipedia entry might not be absolutely accurate i think it is safe to say that Nadeo has more than six employees, maybe even three times the amount you estimated :->).

...Nadeo is a company with a dozen+ employees...

...and Xymph's number of more than twelve employees over the years sounds like a very reasonable estimate :- )


Developpeurs NADEO

Directeur

* Florent Castelnérac

Production

* Pascal Hérold
* Adrienne Péchère
* Cédric Lagarrigue

Artistes Graphique

* François-Xavier Delmotte
* Stéphane Sommer
* Stephen Magnardi
* Massimo Bongiorno

Programmeurs

* Xavier Bouchoux
* David Fallot
* Jean-Sébastien Luce
* Damien Quilot
* Olvier Torreilles

Programmation ultérieure

* Pierre Augeard
* Nicolas Maurer
* Michaël Ribaud
* Clément Viguier
* Gérald Grosrenaud

Effets Sonores

* Awess

Level design

* Amélie Castelnérac

 
source: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadeo

 

[Exkekx]

Really?
I haven't read that before, do you have a quote to that?
Not that I don't believe you, but it sounds really new to me.
And I'm not so sure if it's easy to create a single environment which fits to a fps, an rpg and a racing game at the same time...

No, it would be easy. Just modify it a bit for different games. The main part of environments is the look.

[haenry]

I heard they are around 22 people.

[fastforza]

Wow, off topic. Go discuss this somewhere else, this is for the 3rd environment discussions, not Nadeo.

[pjw]

No, it would be easy. Just modify it a bit for different games. The main part of environments is the look.

Sorry, but this is incorrect (unless Nadeo is doing something really unusual, or going for a very unrealistic low-res style in Shootmania). You could go for the same general aesthetic "look" for environments across different games, that's true, but there are a wide range of factors that make creating art for a racing game very, very different from creating art for a FPS game. You would have different texture density, poly density, different use of alpha and cards, based on the player's different PoV, and probably even different FOV for the game as a whole, and all of these things could affect performance and optimization.

IMO, if Nadeo is doing this right, then there will be significant differences in the art pipeline between all three games, unless Shootmania and Questmania both have a similar first-person perspective.

[RC-Scottyboy]

MJJ2011KG4 still doesnt know what the 3rd enviro is called in TM²
I thought it's called Arena. (same as stadium but higher quality and maybe other cars and handling)