Maniaplanet Forum

Miss wrote: 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.

Seems fair, records are made to be broken tho There are always new maps, new competitions... the older maps are quickly forgotten, so in my opinion fixing bugs to have better blocks and better game is nice

And we would communicate on this as HaagseSmurf said. It would probably be done alongside something else (Lagoon, Power Up or MP4) and would make the event noticeable anyway.

PS: good one: "Seems fair, records are made to be broken tho" ^_^

It's always a stress before deciding to break this type of thing as you can read from Fix, but we should be careful not to stop the evolution as well.

Those performance upgrades sound awesome
About changing/fixing the geometry of certain blocks, I definitely support that (as someone who will definitely be affected by these block changes XD). Only a fraction of tracks will probably be different (e.g. slower or faster) after the update, so maintaining good quality of blocks is much more important than keeping <0,01% of possibly affected records intact.
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.

Btw. At this page you can see all achievements of TMT: https://club.ubi.com/#!/de-DE/game/trackmania-turbo

ManiaDesign wrote:Btw. At this page you can see all achievements of TMT: https://club.ubi.com/#!/de-DE/game/trackmania-turbo

UbiSoft Club actions and rewards are not the same thing as achievements/trophies, although they can technically overlap in some cases.

PapyChampy wrote:

ManiaDesign wrote:Btw. At this page you can see all achievements of TMT: https://club.ubi.com/#!/de-DE/game/trackmania-turbo

UbiSoft Club actions and rewards are not the same thing as achievements/trophies, although they can technically overlap in some cases.

Okay, will be this ubi-club awards available at MP 4.0 and their games?

Fix wrote:

Miss wrote: 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.

Thanks for the detailed post!

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

I'm looking forward for the block changes. I'm not playing TM to just get best score possible, but rather for fun and creativity. I know there are people who care a lot about times, but it's rather predictable, that more players want the game to be more polished, accurate and bug-free, rather than keeping old physics just to save records.

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.