MT trigger conditions tutorial

The following article is written by sol666, an author who just recently tapped into the field of RPG with his first RPG-tracks Apocalyptic Hybrid, Orion Invasion and Ghouls. He was so kind to create a tutorial explaining a specific MT feature he used in these tracks, so many thanks sol666 for sharing this knowledge!

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Here is a short guide on how to use conditions in Trackmania's mediatracker.

I'm sure you all know how to place triggers in the mediatracker and how to make them do something, so I won't explain that.
What maybe not all of you know is that these triggers can have the following conditions, which you can change by simply clicking on it:

- none (standard)
- racing time <> x (does not work online!)
- already triggered x
- speed <> x
- not already triggered x

Now "already triggered" and "not already triggered" are those of interest. If you have ever wondered about the number behind that condition, the answer is very simple. It is the id of the trigger, which gives the condition. When placing a trigger in mediatracker, it automatically gets a unique id, starting from zero. So the first trigger you set gets id "0", second trigger gets id "1", ... really simple. And basically, that's all you need to know :)

Here is a short example how to use these conditions ingame, taken from my map Orion Invasion:

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Let's assume the following situation (you come from the cp in the middle of the pic and drive "north"): An area of the track is guided by a motion detector (red). You can't pass without having the code to deactivate it. This is how i did it:

First I set the following triggers:

1. id 1: contains the alert / blackscreen (red)
2. id 2: contains the message that you used your key (not really necessary, just information...) (yellow)
3. id 3: contains the key you need to pass (green)

Trigger 1 now should only be activated, if you haven't found the code (trigger 3) yet. So I set its condition to "not already triggered 3".

Driving there without having passed trigger 3, you get an alert. Having passed trigger 3, nothing happens.

Trigger 2 gives you the message, that you used the code and deactivated the motion detector. As this should only happen after you found the code, I set it to "already triggered 3".

Driving there without having passed trigger 3, nothing happens. Having passed trigger 3, you get the message.

Trigger 3 now doesn't need any conditions in this case. It simply informs you that you found the code you need to pass trigger 1.

And that's basically all. Surely it gets a bit more complicated when there are more CP's between the triggers. There are a lot of possibilities on how to use this, I think. It's just up to you / your creativity.
For the programmers of you: a big disadvantage of this method is, that it only allows "if-cases". There is no "else". And hell, I would have needed "else-cases" a couple of times.

A useful tip: name all triggers you place with the id it has, just as i did. It really helps a lot when you have pages full of conditions. On this very track I used 41 ingame triggers, and I would have been lost without knowing which id does what.

Hope I was able to bring some light into the darkness of mediatracker conditions ;)

Cheerz, sol666 / =RR= arian sunnO)))