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The Beautiful Chaos of 1,000 Trackmania Racers
Mark Wallace writes "This 3-minute video of 1,000 runs of the same Trackmania Sunrise road course, overlaid on each other, turns the game into a gorgeous picture of an ordered system tending toward chaos. The pack starts out in perfect shape and becomes a glorious mess by the end of the course. Plus, it's just beautiful stuff." I'm normally not one for linking videos, but this is a great way to spend a few minutes on a Tuesday morning.
Some other links of the same video.... YouTube, Gametrailers hosted on another site
Luckily, I had just finished a session of this game, so I was on Windows. It's quite amazing, everyone follows a similar path at the beginning, but as you go further in, people miss jumps, flip over, take a different path, up until the end where everyone jumps into the ocean.
They use JavaScript to detect if you have flash or not, so you need to enable JS. I don't see why they can't just embed the flash directly and let the user click on it if they don't have flash, which will take them to the flash download site anyways.
I can't see the video cos all of the sites listed so far are blocked at work (I'll check it out when I get home). But the description sounds similar to the Gradius video that was posted here on Slashdot a while back.
This guy's the limit!
Check out the 3k volcano also.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Z-YxQ398Kjw&NR
Sometimes JS is used to detect if you actually have flash (and have alternate content replaced by flash if you don't), or to check for your flash version (and display alternate content if your version isn't high enough) or to be able to lay HTML elements on top of flash, or... and because it's much easier to just call a script and a pair of JS functions than to fill 6 or 7 redundant lines of object and embed
Two widely used Flash integration scripts are Unobtrusive Flash Objects and SWFObject, check them out if you're interrested in web stuff.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Trackmania is a real amazing game... I always think of it as what Hotwheels on the PC SHOULD be. Screw physicis and realism, driving upside down for about 3 seconds on some massive half pipe is like virtually racing those hotwheels people had/have as a kid.
Played a ton of it at a big lan party called Fragapalooza, got more then a few people walking up and asking what it was. One of those $20 games that I got more enjoyment out of then some $60 ones.
One of those $20 games that I got more enjoyment out of then some $60 ones.
... And in the case of Trackmania Nations, it's free. Done with sponsorship from NVidia and some gaming tournament, apparently - there's in-game advertising, yes, but it looks perfectly natural since it's inside a colossal stadium.
It's a strange multiplayer game, in that the lack of inter-car collisions means you can't actually interact with your opponents in a physical sense - but when I played it a few months ago, there's a great social aspect to it all.
One important factor is that despite being a free game, you can still design your own tracks - bolt together big sections of prefabricated track units, and share the results with your friends. It's great fun.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
When Ford Perfect says "you can still design your own tracks" he means "pretty much every track is made by a user" There are about 60 NADEO (game maker) tracks and probably well over 100K tracks on more than 300 worldwide servers (1.4 million players).
You have to actively search to find a server that plays the NADEO tracks if that's your thing but the user tracks can be amazing... they can also suck.
If you own one of the other games in the Trackmaina series (TM original or TM Sunrise) you can "activate" your account and use ingame skins that all players can see (if not activated you are the only one to see yours, but you still see others) Activation also has a few more perks but having your own car model is the main attraction.
The game has a pretty good ranking system according to points (you gain points for beating players better than you) and you can find out how you rank in the world, on a certain server, or in your country. For a free game this has many features that games costing $40+ don't even include.
It can be downloaded on many websites (google: Trackmania nations) and at around 220MBs is definetly worth it in my book. System requirements aren't that bad either.
As for the ads... well there are many ways of getting around them. But I just bought TM Sunrise from Overstock for $14. I figured NADEO deserved my money for putting out a game I enjoy so much for free.
Beware to those who care. Unless it's changed the free Trackmania Nations still installs Starforce even though it doesn't require cd checks for obvious reasons. Just a heads up for the people who hate Starforce.
"...driving upside down for about 3 seconds..."
I don't know how doing that is screwing physics. The Saleen, (I think it was '98 or '97, can't remember the year), has enough aerodynamic downforce at 120mph to literally fly. If you had this baby going that fast, you could theoretically drive upside-down, (through a tunnel or something I guess), until you slowed down below 120. I don't know how long the gas in the tank would last, or if it would still feed fuel in that position, but I'm betting it is more than three seconds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saleen_S7
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other" -John Ada
Funny, it reminded me of the film Rendesvous. Film director Claude Lelouch drives a Ferrari (275SWB?) across town. The town is Paris, and the trip across town takes nine minutes. Just. Fucking. Amazing.
Just junk food for thought...