Serious issues of Maniaplanet/NADEO

[Alcator]

I consider the following things to be serious issues of Maniaplanet, and/or mistakes made by Nadeo, and I'm curious as to what others think about it.

1. Updating my game (Trackmania) with non-owned game (Shootmania) updates. I can, to some extent, understand the decision to have one codebase for all games, but there are other ways to update it than to tell someone "Sorry, you cannot play Trackmania right now, because there were bugs in Shootmania and we need to fix those".
Plus, the "Release notes" which get displayed during the download/patching thing are useless -- if they don't specify which game is being patched, then it only leads to confusion (such as when the release notes talked about Shootmania's gamemodes, which were completely unknown to me).

2. "BETA" status. Telling your customer "There is a mandatory beta update" is like saying "Hi there, customer, we've ran out of test subjects, so please, proceed to the nearest laboratory and let us make procedures on you". In general, let's get out of the endless BETA status.

3. Too many hoops to go through in order to play. When I launch the game, I get to the NEWS page, then I have to scroll to the side, click twice on the game I want to play, then wait for it to load (Why does it take so long to load, if it's the same codebase? Or, rather: Since the game menu is obviously running the game engine and has the game assets available, what is taking so long when I try loading a map? Couldn't some of these delays be reduced? Do we really have to watch some fly-by over empty desert?). In general, I'd like to be able to pre-define which game I want to play, and have Maniaplanet load directly that game.

Forzyy, one of the programmers behind ManiaExchange, which is the site to which you owe your popularity, recently went on record that the dedicated Maniaserver is the worst piece of software in existence. He mentioned memory leaks and the fact that each new minor version "breaks everything" as some of the reasons. Any reflections on that?
Links:
http://tm.mania-exchange.com/threads/1567?postid=22807
http://tm.mania-exchange.com/threads/1567?postid=23171

[Hylis]

We know that we have work to do. The sad part here is that it looks like we do not care or that we changed from good devs to bad devs. We are the same, but our ambition is to also help the Trackmania community by bringing new genres and players. Your quote from mania-exchange is a good illustration: they are going for Mania, and I think that it opens new doors with the same piece of software. I can quote them too about your post:

At the time "breaks everything" was an over exaggeration, it's much better and stable now.

But they also say that we still have issues. There are benefits as well to have games updated all together. As you can see, some features are shared between games: editor, video maker, title pack creation, object importer etc. The list is quite long even if it includes the dedicated servers. But these ones are used to host titles as well, or run scripts to enable custom modes etc. We switched from Trackmania 2 first, and then Shootmania only, to Maniaplanet altogether. It is more ambitious, but I think it is better for the community. We are going toward a release, which is there for more stability. It has been announced on the 23rd of January. I can not say that we are working faster to get there since I feel I am always at the fastest speed, but I wish it will be good by then.

Banjee, we get the message, but we already knew we have to work as good as possible. Finding the memory leaks is more difficult on remote places without debugger. We have made additional work to help us in that way recently and should be more capable of doing it in the future. First multiple titles environment stress our architecture and while we adapt it, some places are more tricky to clean up.

[banjee]

Banjee, we get the message, but we already knew we have to work as good as possible. Finding the memory leaks is more difficult on remote places without debugger. We have made additional work to help us in that way recently and should be more capable of doing it in the future. First multiple titles environment stress our architecture and while we adapt it, some places are more tricky to clean up.

I didn't mean that in a bad way, but it is very nice to hear such a quick and personal reply. I understand that you guys are working your butts off over there and i have a great respect for what you have done and what you are working on. (Programming has always been one of those things that will never fail to blow my mind). As always, I guess I (and the community) will just have to be patient and wait. It does make me very happy to hear that it is on the list and going to be worked on at some point.

[Alcator]

Today I was trying to achieve some things in the MT editor in Platform, and discovered to my dissapointment that things that worked well in TMUF suddenly stopped working.

> Condition "Already triggered clip X" only works if there are no other clips triggered between X and this one.
> For some unknown reason, the game keeps losing my recording MT ghost. This is what I did with my track, perhaps someone might enlighten me why the ghost keeps disappearing:
--> It's a Platform track.
--> I built a track, gave it name "AAAA"
--> Validated, saved.
--> Then, I renamed the track to "BBBB"
--> Recorded MT ghost from the MT menu
--> Edited part of the Replay MT using this ghost.
--> Saved the track, exited the game.
--> Restarted MP, loaded the track ("BBBB"), went into Replay MT editor - ghost is gone. I have to replay the track, then I can continue editing the Replay.
--> The same repeated 2 more times - whenever I exited the track, it seems the ghost disappears. I don't see any way to quickly "Load saved replay" into Replay MT editor to restore it.

Please keep in mind it's a 5+ minutes long track, so re-recording the ghost is not a simple task (especially in Platform mode, where I need "perfect" passage to tune the replay to it). The dissappearing of the ghost is very annoying.

Any word on whether you are aware of these problems and are doing something about it?