Arcade Racing

[V17]

Hilarious Trackmania news. It's still a good game, but Nadeo, its developer, is truly one of the game companies of all time.

After more than two decades of having multiple environments, where each has its own physics and own car, they released Trackmania 2020 with only the Stadium physics and Stadium car, though they kept expanding the environment, adding new blocks and surfaces. In my opinion this was completely fine, as the Stadium environment was the most popular and complex, and it united the community into one game. But now: rejoice, for the time of stadium car is over! They released a new car and will keep releasing more! And the mappers can switch cars in real time in the middle of the tracks!

Only, they decided to add the snow car and snow-wood surface... Either from the original (2003) of from Trackmania United (2006), don't remember if they're the same or not, either way the racing physics is almost 20 years old. It is a) basic b) only playable on a good enough level with an analog controller. Since 2006 Nadeo released several successful games with interesting and more refined and modern physics, some of them playable with a keyboard as well, but instead of using those they decided to just take the oldest shit they had and drop it in the current game, which is a) much more refined, so it doesn't really fit b) repeatedly optimized to be playable with a keyboard even on a pro level, even at the cost of making the physics slightly less interesting. So this car's physics is the opposite of both.

Not just that, but they plan on releasing other environments and cars with their physics this year... All from Trackmania United (2006) as well. Someone managed to find a way to try the internal testing version of the cars and the physics is again the same as in the original and again mostly unplayable on a decent level without an analog controller.

(15:48, if it doesn't load in the right spot)



But wait! That's not all!

You see, Nadeo apparently doesn't learn. In 2006 and 2008 they released Trackmania Nations and Nations Forever, both as free games. Only, they didn't exactly think through their monetization model, people were happy enough with these free games and didn't care to buy the paid ones. So over time they had to do at least two big downgrades that removed significant features in order to convince players to either pay up or fuck off.

Naturally having to do these very unpopular steps twice already was not enough for them to learn, so they decided to do it again. Released Trackmania 2020 with a free tier, a 10 USD/year tier and 30 USD/year tier. Free tier gave you a new 25 track campaign every 3 months plus a way to play custom maps that you cannot choose, on autorotation. 10 USD version gave you almost everything except hosting your own community servers, joining bigger tournaments and custom car skins.

Well, apparently people were too happy with the free and cheap tier, so Nadeo had to gimp it. Now the free tier only gets the first 10 maps of a seasonal campaign, the cheap tier is removed completely and, to give them some credit, the full tier is 10 USD cheaper.



To be entirely honest, the core gameplay is still awesome and there's nothing else like it. But I am now firmly in the "meh, there are so many other games to play" mindset.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Never knew the ports of Road Rash were so good. Also that there was a Road Rash book

I've never understood the general praise for 3D0 Road Rash. I've always thought it was pretty weak, even considering that the original games on the MD/Genesis ran like ass. I preferred the original chiptunes as well, never cared for licensed music in most cases and the track BGMs themselves are atrocious, plus you can barely hear them at all.

These pedantic fuckers from Digital Foundry are always retconning everything 'oh, it PERFECTLY CAPTURED THE GRUNGE ERA', sod off with that shit.

 

[V17]

I've never understood the general praise for 3D0 Road Rash. I've always thought it was pretty weak, even considering that the original games on the MD/Genesis ran like ass. I preferred the original chiptunes as well, never cared for licensed music in most cases and the track BGMs themselves are atrocious, plus you can barely hear them at all.

These pedantic fuckers from Digital Foundry are always retconning everything 'oh, it PERFECTLY CAPTURED THE GRUNGE ERA', sod off with that shit.

With the disclaimer that I was literally a kid, I have to say I've had great fun with PC Road Rash. Really liked the environments and the not-exactly-3D engine, thought the combat was fun as hell and I still think that the weird psychedelic illustrations in menus and loading screens are straight up great. Didn't care about the soundtrack, I think it's possible that my pirated version didn't even include it. Purely gameplay-wise I thought it was the best of the whole series, but again, I was a kid and this was my first Road Rash, so that always plays a part. I've even met people who were not complete idiots and thought that Oblivion was a great game for this reason.

 

[adddeed]

Hilarious Trackmania news. It's still a good game, but Nadeo, its developer, is truly one of the game companies of all time.

After more than two decades of having multiple environments, where each has its own physics and own car, they released Trackmania 2020 with only the Stadium physics and Stadium car, though they kept expanding the environment, adding new blocks and surfaces. In my opinion this was completely fine, as the Stadium environment was the most popular and complex, and it united the community into one game. But now: rejoice, for the time of stadium car is over! They released a new car and will keep releasing more! And the mappers can switch cars in real time in the middle of the tracks!

Only, they decided to add the snow car and snow-wood surface... Either from the original (2003) of from Trackmania United (2006), don't remember if they're the same or not, either way the racing physics is almost 20 years old. It is a) basic b) only playable on a good enough level with an analog controller. Since 2006 Nadeo released several successful games with interesting and more refined and modern physics, some of them playable with a keyboard as well, but instead of using those they decided to just take the oldest shit they had and drop it in the current game, which is a) much more refined, so it doesn't really fit b) repeatedly optimized to be playable with a keyboard even on a pro level, even at the cost of making the physics slightly less interesting. So this car's physics is the opposite of both.

Not just that, but they plan on releasing other environments and cars with their physics this year... All from Trackmania United (2006) as well. Someone managed to find a way to try the internal testing version of the cars and the physics is again the same as in the original and again mostly unplayable on a decent level without an analog controller.

But wait! That's not all!

You see, Nadeo apparently doesn't learn. In 2006 and 2008 they released Trackmania Nations and Nations Forever, both as free games. Only, they didn't exactly think through their monetization model, people were happy enough with these free games and didn't care to buy the paid ones. So over time they had to do at least two big downgrades that removed significant features in order to convince players to either pay up or fuck off.

Naturally having to do these very unpopular steps twice already was not enough for them to learn, so they decided to do it again. Released Trackmania 2020 with a free tier, a 10 USD/year tier and 30 USD/year tier. Free tier gave you a new 25 track campaign every 3 months plus a way to play custom maps that you cannot choose, on autorotation. 10 USD version gave you almost everything except hosting your own community servers, joining bigger tournaments and custom car skins.

Well, apparently people were too happy with the free and cheap tier, so Nadeo had to gimp it. Now the free tier only gets the first 10 maps of a seasonal campaign, the cheap tier is removed completely and, to give them some credit, the full tier is 10 USD cheaper.



To be entirely honest, the core gameplay is still awesome and there's nothing else like it. But I am now firmly in the "meh, there are so many other games to play" mindset.

Interesting. My favorite is Trackmania Sunrise, following by Trackmania 1.
Ttracking United Forever was good though as it combines all envrinments into one, but i prefered the originals.

From the modern ones i have only played Trackmania Turbo on PS4, and that was pretty damn fun.

 

[Gerrard]

Never knew the ports of Road Rash were so good. Also that there was a Road Rash book

Wasn't there some spiritual sequel in the making not long ago? Did it even come out?

 

[Hellraiser]

Never knew the ports of Road Rash were so good. Also that there was a Road Rash book

Wasn't there some spiritual sequel in the making not long ago? Did it even come out?

You mean this?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/300380/Road_Redemption/

 

[Sukhāvatī]

It's... alright, but doesn't have a very long lifespan imo.

 

[V17]

Only, they decided to add the snow car and snow-wood surface... Either from the original (2003) of from Trackmania United (2006), don't remember if they're the same or not, either way the racing physics is almost 20 years old. It is a) basic b) only playable on a good enough level with an analog controller. Since 2006 Nadeo released several successful games with interesting and more refined and modern physics, some of them playable with a keyboard as well, but instead of using those they decided to just take the oldest shit they had and drop it in the current game, which is a) much more refined, so it doesn't really fit b) repeatedly optimized to be playable with a keyboard even on a pro level, even at the cost of making the physics slightly less interesting. So this car's physics is the opposite of both.

Another really funny context to that.

The snow car suffered from "landing bugs", where if you jump, you had a pretty big chance that upon landing you would lose a lot of speed for seemingly no reason and with no easy way to avoid it. This also happened in the original 2003 version, but at that time it was kind of forgivable, not so now. The game now also has loopings, curved blocks etc, where the car would also bug out for some reason, which did not happen in 2003 because those blocks did not exist or were not used in combination with this car.

Turns out that while Nadeo slightly modernized the car model itself, they used the exact same hitboxes as they did in Trackmania 1 in 2003. And in 2003 the physics computation was expensive, so the hitbox consists of spheres, which are the easiest to compute collisions for. The hitbox looks like this:

source of the image with more information and explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEb3REEg20g

The red arrow points to the middle sphere - it's just a centimeter or so above the level where wheels are at, and as soon as it touches the road, your car technically collided with something and gets slowed down. The car does have suspension, so the collision really happened all the fucking time. And Nadeo explicitly stated that they *knew* this was a problem when they decided to add it to the new game, but considered it unfixable without changing how the car behaves overall.

The dude in the linked video simply edited the hitbox (I think he just squashed the middle sphere in the Z axis because we don't need to just use spheres for collisions now), tested it and found out that it pretty much just works and fixes the issue without any obvious regression.

Only after that Nadeo said "yeah, okay, we'll fix it in the next update".

Truly some of the game developers of all time.

 

[Hag]

Truly some of the game developers of all time.

Considering the lengths Nadeo has gone to ruin such a beloved and successful franchise, I'm still surprised they managed to develop a working game in the first place. But knowing how industry works in France, probably all the original devs have left or changed position and now the company is 80% managers managing managers.

 

[V17]

Truly some of the game developers of all time.

Considering the lengths Nadeo has gone to ruin such a beloved and successful franchise, I'm still surprised they managed to develop a working game in the first place. But knowing how industry works in France, probably all the original devs have left or changed position and now the company is 80% managers managing managers.

Hylis is still there (or was until recently, I think he said last year that he's taking a break from leading for a while). In a decent company the founder leading it and having the last word through its whole existence would probably be a good thing. In this case, well...

There's a theory saying that the reason why they left the snow car unchanged even though they knew it was buggy as hell was that it was the first car Hylis implemented in the original game, so he didn't want anyone to change it for ego/nostalgia reasons. There's no proof for this afaik, but it would not surprise me.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

Finished Driver: San Francisco recently. It's great. There's so much variety and content, and the physics are so much fun while still being reasonably realistic and accessible. Can't buy it these days, presumably because of music licenses expiring, but you can get it from Magipack or Dodi repacks easily. My only real gripes are that the gearing is extremely short, and that there's a lot of downforce so cars just plummet into the ground on a jump.

 

[adddeed]

Nice i remember playing it years ago. Should replay it sometime.

 

[Reality]

I always had a soft spot for micro machines and the older top down Williams games (super off-road etc) that they were inspired by.

The better micromachines were great with the environments with driving on a pool table, chemistry lab, or kitchen.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

Finished NFS Underground and Underground 2 just recently. UG1 is pretty good for what it is, track designs are alright and progression is okay.
Underground 2 only really qualifies as 6/10 since the rubberbanding mechanics basically enforce you using garbage starter cars in a lot of races or it's a guaranteed loss, at least on hard difficulty. It's also so fucking long, like 5 or 10 hours too long after it has long since ran out of variety. I don't count but HLTB says 20 hours is average. Backtracking and driving to races on the other side of the map (especially in the mountains) is so bad too. You have a DVD cover on the top of the mountain you have to do to progress so you drive across the city for a minute and then drive up the mountains for 2 minutes, then do the same in reverse to get to the next race. Fuck that noise. Progression is really slow at the start too.

I will say that I have not seen cars just jump straight up randomly as much as I have in Underground 2.
https://files.catbox.moe/uvbeoi.mp4
https://files.catbox.moe/uxioso.mp4
https://files.catbox.moe/m7owlu.mp4
https://files.catbox.moe/kxntqc.mp4

 

[V17]

Hilarious Trackmania news. It's still a good game, but Nadeo, its developer, is truly one of the game companies of all time.

After more than two decades of having multiple environments, where each has its own physics and own car, they released Trackmania 2020 with only the Stadium physics and Stadium car, though they kept expanding the environment, adding new blocks and surfaces. In my opinion this was completely fine, as the Stadium environment was the most popular and complex, and it united the community into one game. But now: rejoice, for the time of stadium car is over! They released a new car and will keep releasing more! And the mappers can switch cars in real time in the middle of the tracks!

Only, they decided to add the snow car and snow-wood surface... Either from the original (2003) of from Trackmania United (2006), don't remember if they're the same or not, either way the racing physics is almost 20 years old. It is a) basic b) only playable on a good enough level with an analog controller. Since 2006 Nadeo released several successful games with interesting and more refined and modern physics, some of them playable with a keyboard as well, but instead of using those they decided to just take the oldest shit they had and drop it in the current game, which is a) much more refined, so it doesn't really fit b) repeatedly optimized to be playable with a keyboard even on a pro level, even at the cost of making the physics slightly less interesting. So this car's physics is the opposite of both.

Not just that, but they plan on releasing other environments and cars with their physics this year... All from Trackmania United (2006) as well. Someone managed to find a way to try the internal testing version of the cars and the physics is again the same as in the original and again mostly unplayable on a decent level without an analog controller.

(15:48, if it doesn't load in the right spot)



But wait! That's not all!

You see, Nadeo apparently doesn't learn. In 2006 and 2008 they released Trackmania Nations and Nations Forever, both as free games. Only, they didn't exactly think through their monetization model, people were happy enough with these free games and didn't care to buy the paid ones. So over time they had to do at least two big downgrades that removed significant features in order to convince players to either pay up or fuck off.

Naturally having to do these very unpopular steps twice already was not enough for them to learn, so they decided to do it again. Released Trackmania 2020 with a free tier, a 10 USD/year tier and 30 USD/year tier. Free tier gave you a new 25 track campaign every 3 months plus a way to play custom maps that you cannot choose, on autorotation. 10 USD version gave you almost everything except hosting your own community servers, joining bigger tournaments and custom car skins.

Well, apparently people were too happy with the free and cheap tier, so Nadeo had to gimp it. Now the free tier only gets the first 10 maps of a seasonal campaign, the cheap tier is removed completely and, to give them some credit, the full tier is 10 USD cheaper.



To be entirely honest, the core gameplay is still awesome and there's nothing else like it. But I am now firmly in the "meh, there are so many other games to play" mindset.

Don't know how many people even care about this, but I find it to be so stupid that I can't help but share an update.

Many competitive players of the older Trackmania games use DXTweak, a software that allows you to set the sensitivity of your analog controller, because one of the gimmics of cars in the old games is overly sensitive steering, so it's advantageous to set your sensitivity low. This is accepted. However there are other types of software that allow you to set up a specific sensitivity curve for your analog input, and Nadeo, the developer, is unable or unwilling to define rules that would clearly say what is allowed and what isn't in the new Trackmania game. Their default position was leaning towards prohibiting similar tweaks, but there was always vagueness leading to ambiguity.

So Wirtual, the no. 1 Trackmania streamer, decided to do a test to find the boundaries. Set up his analog sensitivity using his official controller software in a way that is clearly advantageous with the snow car mentioned in the cited post, and got a world record using it. The world record was removed and he received an official warning. Okay, thanks to that we got a slightly clearer (though not entirely clear) ruling on what's allowed.

About 3 months later, after explicitly prohibiting and punishing this (and generally vaguely speaking against it for longer), Nadeo decided to add a very slightly gimped version of this exact tweak as an official feature into the game.


-----------------


But wait, that's not all!

When starting Trackmania 2020, Nadeo decided to abandon all the Trackmania environments that were best played using a controller and instead unite the community under an expanded Stadium environment, the one that is the most popular, that was used in the free games, and that can be played equally well using a keyboard as using a controller. Having a physics system that is quite complex and has a very high skill ceiling and yet being completely usable even on a competitive level with just digital keyboard input is one of Trackmania's best achievements imo. Nadeo repeatedly stated that this is the goal, released some small tweaks to keep keyboard input viable and even made some of the physics slightly less interesting to keep it that way.

So naturally after adding one shitty car with 20 years old physics that is best driven not just using analog input, but even using analog input with disallowed sensitivity tweaks, they are adding a new car that also uses 20 years old physics and even more oversensitive steering, being even less suitable for keyboards. This is a baffling decision explained only by nostalgia and laziness, because they *could* create a car with new, more interesting physics, they did it in the past. But they decided not to.

Surely they would add some sort of gameplay tweak to make it more viable for keyboard players? Well, no, instead they implemented the change that I write about in the first half of my comment. It only applies to analog controllers and further expands the recently created viability gap, which alone went against their stated goals for the game.

It's baffling. Saying "you need an analog controller to play racing games" seems like an obvious statement. But they proved that they were able to get around this and create a complex and fun game where this is not true. Kept working on it for over 15 years and then I guess decided "nah, fuck it".

 

[Falksi]

Never knew the ports of Road Rash were so good. Also that there was a Road Rash book

I've never understood the general praise for 3D0 Road Rash. I've always thought it was pretty weak, even considering that the original games on the MD/Genesis ran like ass. I preferred the original chiptunes as well, never cared for licensed music in most cases and the track BGMs themselves are atrocious, plus you can barely hear them at all.

These pedantic fuckers from Digital Foundry are always retconning everything 'oh, it PERFECTLY CAPTURED THE GRUNGE ERA', sod off with that shit.

Part of me is wondering if they are specifically referring to the SEGA CD version with that, seeing as it includes the actual songs from Soundgarden, Therapy? Paw, Hammerbox etc.

I love a bit of old-school Road Rash for the chaos, and smashing heads in to Rusty Cage and Teethgrinder is lush. I make you right about those early chip-tunes regardless, they rock lovely too.

 

[Gostak]

This is nice.
Unity and resource intensive though (at least on my non-vulkan enabled and integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 it's a low FPS slideshow affair.
Gotta try it on my good desktop. Because it was showing this shall be good fun.
Looking better than F-Zero 99 with ease already.

EDIT: Yes, it's good (free demo). I have two nitpicks one being the pinball bouncyness of your machine when you crash into stuff and the other that it requires good hardware despite the looks.
Demo has five machines and quite some tracks and on the game's discord you can currently find seven more custom tracks that players made which you can add to it!
Five of 'em from this:

 

[Gostak]

Proper F-Zero (G)X-like online multiplayer with very good netcode is a thing now btw
(Godot based, it also is relatively light on sys-requirements):

 

[caffeine]

 

[HansDampf]

I was looking for AG racers since Nintendo won't make them F-Zeros anymore. After a bit of research (not including this thread) I settled on two candidates: Redout and BallisticNG.

Played Redout for a few hours, but it didn't grab me. The controls feel weird. It has shifting with L/R just like F-Zero, but the ship feels so heavy. Maybe it would be fine if I got used to it. But I watched some expert players to see how the game plays after you git gud. The most efficient way to get around many sharp corners is to deliberately bump into walls. That doesn't look appealing to me (highly subjective, I prefer clean driving). I also don't like the overall presentation, from menu to graphics. Even when I disable the smeary post-processing effects, I find it hard to focus on the track ahead with the chonky ship and narrow lanes.

Spoiler

(post-processing disabled)

And what's with the redout effect? Does that become relevant later? So far, it's only turning the screen red without consequences.

BallisticNG otoh assaulted me with 1001 options. I think it's best not to bother with them much, leave everything gameplay related on default, and play the campaign as intended. The ship felt a bit unwieldy at first. I was crashing into walls left and right. But I got used to it pretty quickly. Instead of shifting with L/R, you get airbrakes on each side which can turn the ship sideways to make sharp turns at the cost of speed. Not easy to control. There is also pitching up and down to align yourself with the track. Once again, I'm watching experts (the dev himself) and am surprised. You can actually get crazy good at this game, so that you don't touch any walls - or just scrape them. Looks fun.
Also, this is supposed to be like a love letter to the Wipeout series and borrows a lot from those games (never played them). This also includes the graphics which sort of emulate the PS1 look, just with more details and effects. And it looks great! Who cares about polygons? The textures, colors, and backgrounds all fit together nicely. And most importantly, the game looks sharp and clean, easy on the eyes.

Spoiler

Initially, I was also worried about the speed because the campaign begins on the lowest speed class which is kinda slow for my taste. I took a peek at some "Zen" speed events, and ...

Yeah, that seems about right. Think I'm going to play through the entire campaign and see if I can get platinum.
There are some issues and oddities I've noticed, mostly UI related:
- When you choose an event from the campaign menu, it doesn't show your best times. It only shows your best time while you are playing the event. It should really list your top 10 at least, and also what ships were used.
- When you finish a race, there is also a lack of detailed info. It shows your rank and your time, but not the times of the AI ships. And when you are playing a game mode with points score, it only shows the overall ranking but not how many points each player scored. I mean, these are just small details. But it's still odd for this type of racing game not to show them.
- A bigger issue for me is the lack of a replay funciton. That's a real bummer. Redout doesn't have one either. Imagine getting a WR (or just a really smooth personal best), and then you can't save it, show it, or never watch it again. Or even just for fun to replay your perfect race with cockpit view.
- While the soundtrack is nice, I would have preferred for each race track to have its own theme to give it a bit more character. The game could still allow customization.
- The campaign could have used some kind of story? I don't know... I just miss the campy shit from FZGX. It gives that game a unique flavor.

tl;dr BNG +1. I'm hooked.
(Maybe I will give Redout another chance some day.)

 

[Sukhāvatī]

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Might as well re-post this here:

Remembered to check out this thread after years...


The dev has taken the game to Kickstater and already gathered 118k of funding.
The game seems to try a few different things from F-Zero, like - "air tunnels" and higher maneuverability while in the air, making the rail grinding to boost speed an actual mechanic as opposed to the bug it was in GX, and most notably separating "Health" and "Boost" into 2 distinct bars instead of just 1 "Energy" bar (which IMO is a mistake since it massively undermines that sweet risk/reward factor from racing at higher speeds).




The dev has choosen a simple cel-shaded look for the game.
The game won't have online play, since the dev isn't knowledgeable in network implementations.
Here's the new demo.





Also to my surprise there's another indie F-Zero inspired project on the scene.



Honestly, this one peeks more my interest - if even for the fact that it looks good while also being a solo dev project (at least it seems to be)
It has a novel approach to boosting - though it does also separate "Energy" into "Hull" and "O2", it could still retain the risk/reward factor if higher boosts also mean higher hull damage - a bigger focus on stats than GX and a pretty cool idea for Outer Space Stages - basically the car continually uses the boost meter (here labeled "O2") to keep the engines running, but since there's no atmosphere your machine is constantly accelerating
There's also a demo for it on its Steam page and it can also be downloaded from the dev's google drive mirror link.

Finally tried both
They are both quite good
But as I expected, Extreme Formula is so far the more interesting one for me because it tries some pretty cool ideas - Aero GPX is trying too much to be a 1:1 match to GX, but it lacks the same edge
Again both good
Though in terms of technical polish and development progress, Aero GPX is in a better state than XF right now:
- mechanically the former is already in excellent condition, the dev now needs to add art, maps and modes
- the latter already has most maps and some mode, but mechanically there's still work to do (he needs to implement a way to go fast around sharp turns) ; also one thing I dislike is the fact you can't boost in outer space tracks (read quoted post), would make for some really good risk/reward tension

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Also
You niggas have sleeping on watch duty
Because this absolute banger released this year for free and there's not a single post in this entire website about it

 

[PulsatingBrain]

Installing Night-Runners now. Hadn't even heard of it.

 

[Outlander]

Damn, dicked around with that demo and it's incline.