A list of trackbuilding tips

The following list was compiled by Tecfan and me for the first RPG track building contest and it shows some of the building tips we had to offer, including things that we value and things we hate to see in RPG's. Because we think of it as a helpful resource, we decided to give the list it's own article. So here it is:

• Don't over-do the MT!
• MT can be wonderful for creating a good atmosphere. Enai Siaion's tracks are an example of that. But remember, forcing the player to drive with stupid cameras or making them sick by ever-changing colours is not a positive thing!


• Mods
• For an interesting atmosphere, use a mod that has not been used so much yet! You can even make your own. Have a look at our RPG mod overview. Also, follow this guide very closely. If you have made your own mod, you can just send me a message, and I will host the mod for you.


• Story
• A good story also shows that you can be creative, but we won't put much weight on this aspect. The important thing is that your track feels adventurous, even though there is no real "adventure" to go with.


• Avoid ring rooms
• Ever played Camateraz? For me and Hawk, that last room, with 1CP and 7-8 different rings which can not be taken in one "movement", is an instant turn-off. Ring rooms really ruin the flow of the track, so please avoid this. Of course, you can still use rings, just not make a room full of rings.


• Atmosphere - you need one
• This whole thing with atmospheres might confuse some. Basically, a track's atmosphere is the feeling you get when driving it. Try driving Cargo 714 or The day after, then you'll know what an atmosphere is. To create a good atmosphere, you need a mod and you need nicely built scenery.


• Go cut-hunting!
• Self-explanatory. A track's route can be ruined by cuts, so be sure to check for cuts when you make your map, and triple-check before validating it!


• Repetition
• Variate your tricks! Don't use the same building blocks all the time. For example, three wallride balancing parts in one track is just overkill.


• Avoid bugs
• With "avoid bugs" I mean two things: refrain from using Trackmania bugs as a part of your tricks, because most people don't know about them and will be stuck. The other thing, which is even more important, is the wall-balancing-2-CP-block bug. This is an extremely bothersome bug, which totally kills the flow of a track. Here's three screenshots of different versions of this bug: 1) Wallborder to CP block bug, 2) Wallborder to StadiumFabric bug (this is the block which makes a blue pattern on the ground), 3) Wallborder to wall border bug and 4) Wallborder to border block. Of course, this is only bad if the route goes on this. You can of course still decorate with wall borders on CP blocks, as long as we don't have to drive on them.


• Music and sounds
• ... are not taken much consideration, but! Great use of sounds and music can really make the atmosphere a lot better.


• Avoid confusion
• There should never be any confusion as for which CP you are going to take next. Make sure it is only possible to take one CP at a time, or at least make it very obvious which CP is correct to take first. But please, make it challenging to find the CP's, I didn't say that you have to make your track easy :).


• Avoid multilap starts
• Multi-lap start blocks is something I personally dislike, because when driving online, there will be no autoreplay saved.


• Beta test
• As a builder, you already know where to go and where not to go. We as players have no idea. Therefore it is very important for you to test your track with other people, so you can see where people have trouble finding the path, or take wrong CP's etc. You can win a free, online beta test if you win one of the RPG round races. Keep an eye on the blog so you know when the next race is.

GBXDump - An application to extract information of GBX files

GBXDump is a utility for Trackmania which reads the content of GBX files and displays them for the user. Potentially useful could this be in the field of RPG to check if all media files are properly linked with a locator. Now the media files won't have to be deleted locally anymore to see if they load ingame, the only thing to be done is to check if the url is specified in the gbx.
Here's the message from Electron which he posted in the RPG Forum:

Hi community,

I would like to introduce my MS-Windows utility GbxDump to you.
The tool indicates all interpretable contents of any GBX Challenge and Replay file.






Besides the usual track information, like times and scores, all external dependencies are indicated.
Especially RPG tracks contain many of such links to mods, pictures, sounds, etc. By means of GbxDump these can be inspect very fast and easy.

More details, a screenshot and the download link can be found on my website:
http://www.wolfgang-rolke.de/gbxdump/

3D models conversion tutorial - extending model sizes

This article is written by sol666, his second tutorial on the RPG blog. This time he explains how to "hack" Nadeo's Maxbox to create custom models larger than the standard maximum size. Understanding and reproducing this tutorial will require the possession of 3dsmax and prior knowledge of 3D modelling in TM. I made a short video to show some examples:

A short guide on how to convert 3d models bigger than Nadeo's maxbox

First of all, I assume you know how to create / import models for TM in general, so I leave this unexplained.

Step 1: import / build your model and finish it (position, size, object names, textures,...)

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Step 2: place all pivots at 0,0,0 (might not be necessary, but I prefer doing that for easier downscaling / not having to move the complete model after scaling. So this might not work for moving parts although I didn't try yet). Affect pivots only!
Press the image to see a larger version.

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Step 3: Reset xform to all objects of the oversized model.

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Step 4: re-convert all objects into editable mesh and export the complete model to *.3ds (export might not be necessary, but I sometimes had trouble when not doing that)

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Step 5: import the oversized model into a new empty scene.

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Step 6: switch to pivots mode, resize all objects to fit into Nadeo's maxbox (affect object only!). I always resize each object on its own, never all together. Having placed pivots at 0,0,0 is a big advantage then. You can simply scale each object down to xx percent. better scale it much too small than a little too big ;)
Press the image to see a larger version.

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Step 7: import a working 3d model (also helpful to see if the downscaled object fits into maxbox). Delete everything of it except one object. rename this object to some unused name (i always use sDummy).

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Step 8: switch to vertex mode and delete everything of that new object except a vertex ( you can also leave the complete object, but that might look strange ingame ;) )

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Step 9: mark all objects, switch to pivots mode and reset, transform and scale.
Press the image to see a larger version.

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Step 10: export as .3ds and convert with TM (remember you need MainBody.gbx and MainBodyHigh.gbx, so you might need to do this for two models...)

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That's all, hope I was able to help someone.

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

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)))

RPG Track building - techniques, features & resources

There are some features and techniques around track building that can only be learned by long enduring self-testing or by other's experience - and as information are sometimes hard to find, I'm trying to cover here some things that are especially related to RPG track building.

But first of all we would like to announce that we now offer a zip-archive with a collection of all mods we list in the 'Mods'-section. If you already have many mods saved in your "...skins/stadium/mod"-folder then it will be easier downloading the files individually from the mods section, but for newcomers this 900mb big file will be useful both for racing and track building.
Many thanks to fallen.soul for hosting the file:
www.vinummusik.de/Trackmania/RPG_Mods.zip

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The first thing I wanna show is how to control ColorFX-effects in the MediaTracker for far- and near settings, like Enai Siaion did on his track 'Ex Gehenna', creating a fog-like atmosphere. Hageldave already made a very complete video tutorial about this a few months ago, so I recommend watching this:

Advanced Color FX - Fog Tut from dave hagel on Vimeo.

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If you are familiar with RPG tracks, you probably already have seen Platform blocks that are cut off at their bottom end to form a gap one can drive through. In case you don't know how these can be created, here's the explanation:

The first step is to create a heightened dirt area and place the platform block ("StadiumCircuitBase") directly on the heightened dirt, which would look like this:

Save the track and open it in ChallengeEdit (Download CE). Search for the block "StadiumCircuitBase", click it and then increase the Z-value by your preferred amount (it will raise the block).Click on "save block modifications to memory" and then save the .Gbx-file. When having done everything correct, you should see a shortened platformblock as shown below.

An even easier way of achieving this effect is to place the platformblock at the actual designated area and change it's Variation2 in ChallengeEdit to 16. The platformblock will then be shortened even without being on the ground. If you don't know how to change a block's variation, read the tutorials below.

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Water blocks are very often used in RPG's but they have the negative side-effect that it's not possible to build under them and are hard to modify. I will detail a quite easy method of dealing with this.

Instead of taking the water blocks from a stadiumpool, we simply put other blocks on the exact same location we want the water to be and then transform the blocks into stadiumwater. Any block will work but I recommend picking one that you will later never use in your track, in my case the finishline-block.

Load the track now into ChallengeEdit and select the first "StadiumRoadMainFinishLine"-entry. The first block of one block type that has been placed in the editor (and is thus also shown first in the ChallengeEdit-block's list) is always the primary block for this specific block type which is marked with a "-P" before it's name (look picture below).
When having selected the primary block, you can now click the Unlock-Button below the block list and select a different block type (in our case StadiumWater). Pressing on "Save block modifications to memory" will then change all Finishline-Blocks to Stadiumwater.

With this result after having saved the .Gbx:

If you are now not pleased for example with the pipe that goes along under the water or want to add blocks under the water, you just have to reverse the process and turn the primary "StadiumWater" into "StadiumRoadMainFinishLine".

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This process of transforming blocks can also be used to create dirt areas in the air very effectively.
Here's how my example looks before and after some editing in ChallengeEdit.

The end result is a natural-looking dirt area consisting of some dirt hills and flat dirt. For the flat dirt I placed Finishline-blocks and transformed them in ChallengeEdit into "StadiumDirt". The dirt hills I created by putting "StadiumPlatformLoopStart"-blocks on their location and transformed them into "StadiumDirtHill".

The problem though is that the dirthill-block comes in three different shapes. Just transforming a primary block into dirthill will produce the same shape for all dirthills, as can be seen in my example:

For this problem ChallengeEdit also offers a solution, the variations.
When having selected a block, at the lower right side of ChallengeEdit will appear four boxes with the according texts "Variation 1", ..2 etc. By default, all values in the boxes are at zero.
Because in the previous picture the variations of the dirt hills haven't been changed yet, they are in the shape of Variation {0,0,0,0}. For block 109 this shape is already correct so we don't need to change it, only rotating the block is necessary. By changing Variation 1 to "9" and Variation 2 to "16", we get the curved shape of the dirthill which we need for the blocks 105 and 112. The third shape (not curved) can be created by changing Variation 1 to "5" and Variation 2 to "16" which we need for all the blocks that are left.

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The last thing I want to show also has something to do with the transform-feature of ChallengeEdit - but with the end result of mixing blocks ingame.

For this we first need a large area of blocks, all of the same type. In the example I'm going to use the FinishLine-Block again. The blocks need to cover the area completely without spaces. After having done that, save the track as a copy so you can later use it as a template. Start adding blocks over the area now. It looks like this in principle:

Change the primary FinishLine-Block now into some other block in ChallengeEdit ("StadiumSculptB" is probably best suited for this) the same way I already explained in the other tutorials. The StadiumScluptB-Blocks are mixed with the other blocks now and after deleting the Sculpture-Blocks, you can freely mix new blocks into the already existing blocks inside the editor. The blocks that were mixed with the Sculpture-Blocks always stay mixable, so even if you added new blocks to them, you can delete them and add different blocks.

This technique is mostly only useful for experimenting with blockmixes, not for making regular blockmixes in a track project as it is more time-consumptive. But the advantage when experimenting is that you can always test the mixes directly in the editor and can change them directly if needed.

For more detailed information about Blockmixing and ChallengeEdit, visit TM-Creative

Any questions left? Ask away in the comment section :-)