Trackmania has a pretty unusual release/upgrade path, where three games have become 1 game with a demo.
- It all started with Trackmania
- Then came the second game Trackmania Sunrise which ran on an improved engine
- Trackmania Sunrise got an free upgrade to Trackmania Sunrise eXtreme
- Then Trackmania got an free upgrade to Trackmania Original which ran on the same engine as Trackmania Sunrise
- As a promotion for the Trackmania games and the Electronic Sports World Cup TrackMania Nations gets released for free.
Now we have three different trackmania games, and here is where it gets unusual.
- a Fourth Trackmania game, Trackmania United gets released containing basically all content from the previous games.
- TrackMania Nations gets updated to the same codebase as Trackmania United, and forever get's added to the name, resulting in TrackMania Nations Forever and Trackmania United Forever
As the codebase, including the shared stages and the networking code between the games is now the same, TrackMania Nations Forever is now nothing more than a demo for TrackMania United Forever and TrackMania United Forever includes everything that is in TrackMania Nations Forever.
(afterwards, there was a contest and corresponding free update, which updated it to TrackMania United Forever: Star Edition )
So effectively, the trackmania now availble on steam, is an updated re-release of the previous trackmania games all together.
The free edition is what used to be a seperate game, updated to be a demo of the full game.
TrackMania Nations Forever consists of a single stage (Stadium), first seen in TrackMania Nations while TrackMania United Forever: Star Edition consists of all stages of all the previous Trackmania games.
- Stadium (TrackMania Nations)
- Desert (TrackMania)
- Rally (TrackMania)
- Snow (known in TrackMania as Alpine)
- Bay (TrackMania Sunrise)
- Coast (TrackMania Sunrise)
- Island (TrackMania Sunrise)
More information can be found in the Trackmania Wikipedia Article
I have had much better luck with Tunngle than Hamachi for games. Try it out!
If there is no channel for your game, just join another channel; it usually works.
The only bit of setup I've ever had to do with Tunngle (which I also had to do with Hamachi, along with many, many other things) is that some games (ex. Age of
Mythology) will view your internet connection as your primary adapter, even though Tunngle sets itself up as your primary adapter in Windows. To work around this, you
have to:
- Start up Tunngle
- Disable your primary internet adapter in the Network Connections settings
- Start up the game
- Reenable your primary internet connection
Best Answer
As has been covered in the comments, this appears to be a unique quirk of the Trackmania physics engine.
My theory is that when evaluating each frame for collisions, the four wheels of the car are not all considered at the same time, so the jolt received when hitting the sloped booster is registered a fraction of a second earlier on the front left wheel compared to the front right, resulting in a slight difference in imparted acceleration from the impact - which has the end result of the car veering slightly to the left after the impact.