Maniaplanet Forum

Hi,

I was often confronted to this issue where i had some changes to do that don't impact the track and the ghosts but some decorations, MediaTracker elements, etc. And when you do, you normally need to revalidate your map, which mean you may never do the time your did before for instance. So here's a solution i found using OpenPlanet.

1. Open your map in the editor.
2. Do any changes you wanted to.
3. If not already done, press F3 (or the key you binded) to see the OpenPlanet menu.
4. Open the System menu and click on Nod Explorer.
5. Click on the arrow in front of "CTrackMania".
6. Search for "CGameCtnChallenge" and click on the arrow in front of it.
7. Search for the 4 lines with -1 (TMObjective_...). These are the times required to get the medals, you can change all of them or just the author time (TMObjective_AuthorTime). You need to put a time in milliseconds, e.g. 60000 for 1 minute. You can find the time of your best replay by opening the replay with a text editor (like Notepad++, etc.) and searching in the first few lines (header) something like that : "<times best="XXXXX" respawns="0" stuntscore="11" validable="1"/>".
8. Close the Nod Explorer and click on the validation icon.
9. You can press your ESC key to go back to the editor. Your map is validated (icon should be green). If you only changed the author time, you can then change the others times in the Advanced menu -> Change the map goals.

Hope it can be useful to many mappers. I had a hard time doing my best run so being able to set my author time to where it's supposed to be after scenery / MT updates is very appreciated. It can obviously be abused, but until you can provide a replay of the author time you set, that's just meaningless.

Nice find! This process could be simplified with an Openplanet plugin script, I might write one for this purpose later.

Just an observation: If this hack can be used with map files, I wonder if it could also be applied in some way to Replay files.
If that is possible, I see trouble ahead...

In a map it's just an objective time you set, nothing more. You definitely can't "craft" a replay file that easily. I don't know if it was even done one day properly or not. I heard some hacks exist but it'd not pass the replay validation test. There's a lot of stuff involved in a replay file, starting with all the inputs, physics data, etc.

^^ ^^

Thank you and posted as sticky

Not completely related to replays, but another concern - does this mean you could validate and publish impossible tracks? I must be getting it wrong because that's the impression I'm getting from this.

@Rexin99 : Technically yes, i assume you could. But there's little interest into publishing an impossible track. Except if you want to troll a friend or something. Otherwise without replay or else, nobody will believe you, or even try in case of a trial map for instance.