Trackmania One – Speed: Out now!
Another summer – another classic environment! We are proud to present the work that has kept us busy for about one year. TrackMania One – Speed (the remaster of the remaster) is now live and playable on ManiaPlanet. Unbitn Studio is delighted to talk about their latest release in this blog post.
What’s Speed?
As we did with Alpine before, TrackMania One – Speed is the re-creation of TrackMania’s “Desert” environment. It has been present in most of the pre-TM2 games and is a classic and yet technical environment.
Our aim is to recreate the entire collection of environments, with Desert being the second one.
Our development on the environment began in June 2019, exactly one year ago. Beta testing and the campaign creation both began in November. After a long time of tweaks, adding – as well as removing – new content and an investment of much love, we are proud to finally unleash the beast.
Why a second time?
Some people might remember our initial “Speed” titlepack from 2018 and ask themselves why we decided to schedule a re-release.
In fact, we worked on a completely new titlepack, making everything from scratch.
This has several reasons which we will not address in detail right here. The quality of the new environment now allows us to have a consistent experience with our Alpine environment and allows us to provide a flawless conversion process of older tracks.
Features and Improvements
Back to the actual titlepack. The environment contains over 1000 custom items (used as blocks to create own tracks), including updated and refreshed textures, exclusive blocks and variants as well as much more! Re-building tracks from TrackMania United or earlier games has never been as easy before. We also provide an updated version of the converter for tracks; more details below.
With the help of dedicated community players, we built a full race campaign containing 50 race tracks again. The map-creation progress took us around 6 months and in total.
The next step for Speed is a full Platform campaign, which will be added in the near future.
We gave the track unlocking some touches – by lifting the difficulty of unlocking the next tracks. You will now unlock maps row-by-row and not one-by-one. Also, C-D tracks only require Silver medals on all previous flags now, while before you already needed Gold for D series tracks.
We also gave our main menu and scripts an update and added new features. Enjoy our completely new ingame-UI in the campaign for example!
The main page received a little facelift, adding an options button for better access to skins, links and more.
About 15 high-quality exclusive skins are waiting for you to be played in solo and multiplayer games.
Patreon-supporters now also receive a special reward by having access to a special selection of skins. This feature will be explained below as well.
Last but not least, of course we added and used the original TrackMania Desert Car physics in our campaign maps. All maps created in Speed will have the original physics, blocks and additional content.
Speed comes with 3 additional songs by woolookologie, being accompanied by the original Desert OST.
A full changelog for script changes will arrive with Alpine’s according update, coming in a few days.
The Editor
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 TrackMania One. 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
Skin Selector and Donation Rewards
Last December we introduced the Skin selector for Alpine with the Cranked Up! update. Of course, you can find this powerful tool again, in Speed. We have a collection of high quality skins by our talented designers, waiting for you to be tested.
This time we are also introducing special perks for our Patreon donators. Donations help us to keep up the server cost we have every year. As a special thank you and motivation for Donators (during the long waiting times between releases), some exclusive skins are unlocked as long as the support persists.
Players not donating still have access to the majority of skins, just without the special selection.
This is our way to thank our supporters. – You help us to keep everything running!
Our Patreon-Page can be viewed here
Creating Maps
Creating maps in TrackMania One – Speed is as simple as it is in Alpine. One pillar (including a sub-variant used for special blocks + one for signs only) 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 1.
- Avoid blockmixing and overlapping of certain items
- When you place down a ground-block, make sure to remove the sand 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
- Don’t forget to share your maps on our Discord-server!
The Converter is back!
The TMUF x TMOne track converter has been updated to support Speed maps! You can easily drag your favourite tracks on the tool and find the working TrackMania² maps in the defined directory.
All you need to do is calculating shadows and you are good to go!
You can download the tool here
Media
If you want to see the whole package, go check the beautiful screenshots below!
Events
The ManiaExchange crew is going to include Speed into the weekly Knockout events along with 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.
Thanks to the crew, players and supporters!
As always, this project was a big one, involving many great minds.
We have to thank many players and people who helped us during the development phase of this environment.
About 30 beta testers followed our journey and helped us to achieve the perfect result we are happy to present. Without you, we would have never been able to create such an amazing project, including your ideas and suggestions.
Huge thanks to all skin creators, media artists, campaign mappers and team guests for creating high-quality assets, assisting in designing the environment and being there for some fun chat. Special thanks go to eyebo, pastek and Sparkster, who were the dedicated people behind the campaign creation and polishing. Without eyebo’s involvement during the final days of the campaign progress, the campaign would not be as awesome as it is now.
There are more, unmentioned, people who contributed to this amazing adventure, and the whole team is grateful for your work.
Our Patreon-Supporters helped us to stay financially stable during these two years of our own independent system. Much love for you!
Last but not least; TrackMania One, and the whole recreation idea would not be a thing without you – our community. Thank you for trusting in our work and sharing your fun.
You can find the full credits and special thanks section in the titlepack, including all names of the involved people.
Get Speed now!
In order to play TrackMania One – Speed, 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 1300mb 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 about 600 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 and grant you other special perks!
Have fun!
Thanks for reading this far. Now you should know everything about our take on the Desert environment.
We wish you a lot of fun in TrackMania One – Speed! Make sure to tell us what you think about the pack.
– UNBITN, 2020
