Building on TrackMania

Eurogamer was the first to test TrackMania in UK and I remember concluding on the fact that TrackMania could be a 9/10 if the community was there. It was an interactive answer to this issue: how do you know a multiplayer game can succeed online? It was not surprising that a community raised from an original title with addictive gameplay, but that big was unpredicted! How could we imagine that so many teams, tracks, sites, skins, news, forums, developers, tournaments, videos etc would spring up? For Sunrise, it will be a bet as well. A lot of things are new to online gaming. But this time, maybe you can conclude with the fact that readers can substract one point if the community does not grow!

Our team developed building tools for games. Naturally we went in that direction. We first made a pure driving prototype with an original user editor. This looked as the best feature, so when Olivier from Nadeo came up with the idea of puzzle, he developed the first prototype of TrackMania based on fun and simplicity.

The number of items should be quite the same. There is much more work for each block because of the graphic quality and the different moods. We will certainly expand the game later like we did and we are doing with TrackMania original.

There will be more freeride blocks that enable free ride tracks. They are designed to enable the player to go on wide spaces like parking with obstacles. You should find a collection of very crazy blocks that will be designed to put a shame on looping.

Thanks for our star graphic engineer Jean-Sebastien. There are four PC graphic engines at Nadeo and we will continue to keep the old ones for Sunrise. This means that TrackMania Sunrise will run on low-end PCs as well. However, maybe the size of the track will start to affect the frame rate. Don't be afraid though, the shortest are the funniest.

This is mainly a team improvement. We have learned how to make a better use of the Nadeo engine with building blocks. It is not like common racing games where everything is fixed. The graphic engine continues to be improved.

It is still block oriented. But you can "skin" your blocks with different pictures or text. By night, the light of the blocks lightens some parts of your track.

The different moods that you can pick up are: sunrise, day, sunset and night. With three environments, this will generate twelve moods. Since there is already 12,000 tracks on TrackMania original, I think it is good to have different feelings.

In the original, we were maybe too serious with the level design. TrackMania enables a lot of tracks of different types. We want to include different style of tracks. With platform, the goal is not to go at the end quickly, it is only to go at the end without falling from the track.

Yes, there will be new multiplayer modes, but we have to test them with the community before. One mode is designed around the new multi-lap block, which enables common racing like Formula One.

As many as your graphics card and network can support. We did not limit it since the concept of TrackMania enables to play with network lags. You can easily find servers with fifteen cars but I already played with up to forty.

It is not scheduled. I don't think we will take the time to make it. So many games already bring you this fun to destroy you car or others. This is not our duty to make the same things as the others.

The customisation of car, avatar, blocks, replays etc. will be easier and sometimes integrated directly into the game for more people to use it. The peer-to-peer system integrated directly into the game will enable the fast transfer of all that custom stuff.

You should be able to combine the two games to have access to all environments. There will be an upgrade for the players of the original TrackMania to have access to new features.

Yes, we are on track! We have to do a long period of test with players until the release Q1 2005. Maybe some ideas will come up and we will delay it, but I would be really surprised.

An Xbox version is not scheduled. Console is not as modern as PC. That's a problem. On PC you have the forums, the painting tools, the email, the websites with all the tracks, teams, tournaments etc. But I agree, this could make a good Xbox game. TrackMania was designed to work on console or PC at the beginning.

To see what's happening and to react to this. Regarding its success, we will certainly continue to support it 200 per cent.

I am sure that some players acquired the game because of you. There are so many positive builders in the community and they are certainly reading Eurogamer on a regular basis. I am sure one of them will read this interview and make a Eurogamer car!