Trackmania One – Alpine: Out now!
It’s finally time to release a new environment. It has been in development since June 2018 and during one year, a bunch of items became a whole collection of blocks and maps. Unbitn Studio is delighted to reveal our newest creation – TrackMania One – Alpine!
What’s Alpine?
TrackMania One – Alpine is the re-creation of the famous “Snow” environment from the TrackMania franchise. The community always wished to be able to play on the old environments in ManiaPlanet – we made it possible.
In September 2018, a first closed beta prototype of the titlepack was available to be played by select testers. During the successful 10 months of beta testing, the project has finally be finished and we are proud to present the result.
Features
The environment contains over 800 custom items (used as blocks to create own tracks), including updated and refreshed textures, exclusive blocks and variants as well as much more! Re-creating tracks from TrackMania United or earlier games has never been as easy before.
As always, we’ve included a full race campaign containing 50 timeattack tracks. The map-creation progress took us around 4 months and in total, 25 players worked on the campaign maps, the validation process and finally the mediatracker work. We’ve still planned the Platform- and Stunt-modes, and we will provide more information about that soon.
Of course, not just the thrilling campaign has been worked on. We’ve also given our main menu and scripts an update and added new features. A lot of reported bugs from the previous script versions have been fixed, the pack should run even more flawless now and also the campaign menus have been rewritten, giving the whole feature a new style and experience.
Last but not least, of course we added and used the original TrackMania Snow vehicle physics in our campaign maps. All maps created in Alpine will have the original physics, blocks and additional content.
To enhance the atmosphere during your stay, we also got the license to new music, which will be playing in the main menu. The exclusive Alpine soundtrack by woolookologie is back as well.
In Detail
As mentioned above, we’ve not just added all the original blocks from the previous game versions, but we also included own variants and completely new blocks, created exclusively for Alpine. Existing blocks got a huge overhaul in visuals and gameplay. You will notice the difference!
The following types of exclusive blocks can be found:
- Suggested blocks by players or unbitn
- Hidden blocks from TrackMania United Forever
- Deleted or planned blocks from early TrackMania versions
- Exclusive blocks from TrackMania Wii
The UI changes mainly affect the campaign and solo feature. As indicated, the track selection menu has been remade from scratch and you will now find a way more organized and advanced menu. The container on the bottom of the screen will show you a Top-14 ranking for each Zone you’re signed in, your SkillPoints, PB time and personal rank. Also an animated cinematic banner for each track is shown, to provide a first impression of what is waiting for you!
Alpine is a rough diamond. As the script changes are still pretty new, we appreciate any kind of input and feedback. We are aware of some ranking issues and we will provide a fix as soon as possible. Please make sure to report all bugs you stumble across and make suggestions! More script updates and menu features, such as a vehicle selection, will be introduced a few days after the release. Stay tuned!
Creating Maps
Creating maps in TrackMania One has never been so easy before. In case you played TrackMania One before, you might remember our struggling with pillars. Our outdated Alpine prototype from 2017 used up to 6 different pillars to decorate maps. Nobody understood how to use them and we finally changed that. One pillar (including a sub-variant used for special blocks) is available in the editor. Pillars essentially make your maps look more realistic after you’ve finished the route and scenery. In previous TrackMania games, they used to be automatically placed, which is not the case here unfortunately.
You can do pretty much everything using items. The map editor gives you a big freedom. However, to represent the pack in the TrackMania Channel program and on the Alpine server, we wish to have some maps which follow simple guidelines. After all, the environment has been remade to represent the original spirit you had in TrackMania United.
- Avoid blockmixing and overlapping of certain items
- When you place down a ground-block, make sure to remove the snow base block before
- Don’t rotate blocks against the 90° rotation standard (e.g. in the Ghostmode)
- Don’t use original Valley blocks, custom items or terrain
- Try to place pillars where it’s possible when everything else is done
Media
During the beta, some awesome wallpapers have been created by TMCharly and timania. Here’s how TrackMania One – Alpine looks.
Events
The Mania Exchange crew is going to host Knockouts on TrackMania One again. – This time on Alpine! More information about the upcoming knockouts and the schedule can be found in the official MX forum thread. More information about KO11 can be found in the Mappack information.
Special thanks
TrackMania One – Alpine is a big community project. We have to thank many players and people who helped us during the development phase. First of all, thanks to more than 30 beta testers. Without you, we would have never been able to create such an amazing project, including your ideas and suggestions. During the past year, also new people joined our unbitn studio team. Huge thanks to all skin creators, media artists, campaign mappers and team guests. Special thanks go to eyebo, who joined our team in early 2019 for organizing the campaign. Without his involvement in the campaign, bug-fixing progress and general support, the project would have never been released so early. There are surely more who contributed to this amazing adventure, and the whole team is grateful for your work.
You can find the full credits and special thanks section in the titlepack, including all names.
Download Alpine
In order to play TrackMania One – Alpine, either:
Visit the official TitlePack website or
Go to the in-game store and directly load the pack into your game.
Please note: The pack does currently have a file size of roughly 900mb and the base environment Valley is required to play.
Join the community
You’re invited to join us and our awesome community! We strongly recommend you to join our discord-server (with nearly 500 members as of now), to play and communicate with other players and the devs. This is also the place to report bugs, suggest things or become part of upcoming closed beta programs.
To run our servers and cover other costs such as licensing music or graphics, we’re accepting donations on Patreon. If you’re willing to support us a bit, we’ll be very grateful and add you to a special donators group on Discord.
Have fun!
If you want to find out more about the long story behind Alpine and the issues we had to struggle with, make sure to check out the short blog post adressing the making of Alpine!
Now we wish you a lot of fun in TrackMania One – Alpine! Make sure to tell us what you think about the pack.
Thanks for your attention.
– UNBITN, 2019
