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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
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?