Trackmania TAS - What Now? 

3:29 Riolu: 0% legit omegalul

Really well put together video, I hope TASing can enhance Trackmania rather than be a detriment to it, there are arguments for both cases. Even if I personally would like to see the tool released, part of me understands why people are hesitant. This "technology" is still relatively new compared to the long time Trackmania has been out there, so perhaps it would be too early to release it now and open Pandora's Box if you get the metaphor.

Thank you for this in detail explanation. The video showed that you would love to release your tool to the public, but that you are also very afraid of the potential abuse and the community's backlash. After all, the most qualified person to take the decision is yourself. The security measures you mentioned are great, I'm very impressed by your dedication and thoughts behind it. I believe that a public release is agreeable under those restrictions. My recommendation for you would be to make the tool as safe as possible and prevent any bypasses normal people could exploit. And that's where your responsability as a dev ends. In case a malicious hacker decides to reverse engineer your tool or make his own tool well... I don't think we should make you walk the plank for it.

I personally think a TAS tool for Trackmania would be able to elevate the skill-ceiling of the best players even further. Just like TAS in other games have led to new Techniques, Routes, Glitches and much more, i think the same could apply to Trackmania. TAS have been frowned upon in the speedrunning community for a long long time but nowadays they work hand-in-hand to reach the ultimate Speed for any game which i think is a good thing. As long as the TAS stay properly labeled i don't see an issue.

I think the standardization of one good secure tool, made by one good guy, is better than all other futures

I really hope your tool gets released. TASing is an important part of speedrunning culture and most games have separate leaderboards for TASing.

Very interesting video. Super well made, thanks a lot for your work dona. 9:10 drarker :(

Great video, glad you made this!

Thanks for all your work. Really cool to see the fruition of this tool coming through now.

The amount of work that has been put into this video is staggering... Thank you... I really enjoyed it. Keep up the good work. It's seriously well put together. Can't imagine how long it must've taken haha.

uff great video man, hope we see more videos like this and I hope also we see more about your really amazing tool. really well made man

Very interesting video, thx for sharing !

Also, very interesting video I came here to thank you for your work and doings, but the video is well-made and the narration captivates you :) good job on this one

Great video man, I have play Trackmania casually a helish long time ago but I still remember some of the maps. Thank you for bringing back some memories and teaching about TAS. Pozdrowienia z Polski

Great video, interesting topic and awesome editing, that's nice !

oh man what a nice video :o I really like the parts you made from beginning too the end

Thanks dona for the video. It's well explained. I think the community shifting to tm20 gives us all the more reason to release the tool. Personally, im really looking forward to playing around with it. It should crack open all new possibilities in the game!

3:53 "As of today this rule is being followed and there haven't been any cases of this type of records being passed on as real" welp, that statement aged like milk x)

Great vid, hope you release it one day!

Wirtual vid got me here. First vid I saw on that channel now in deep Nice TAS tool and release glad to see it

Fascinating video!

Great video and great work

First video for long time without " hit like and subscribe". Thanks for great video

All the tas runs out now are cool

Jesteś koxem, nie zmieniaj się

I want to see all the cool stuff that can be done with a Trackmania TAS.

you finally did what I've been wondering if possible for more than a decade. Congratulations.

Damn, i really don't want this to be abused, but i also wanna see what the limit is on so many maps. Anyway, gj on the tool

Great video, hope we someday reach a consensus where your tool can be made public

Nice vid !

Water goes brr when you fly over it. Thanks nadeo, very cool. Even tho almost everyone knew this

Great video, very well explained! Although I'd love to see what people can do with such a tool, I totally agree with you on not taking the responsibility for potential cheating. However, I'd still love to see a multi-environment mapping competition like the WirtualBot one! Also, that tool would be awesome to do some reverse engineering about each car's behaviour (for example the impact of the steering ratio on the acceleration and so on...)

Amazing job, very well done !

Great video man.

Nice video

Pozdrawiam

BRB going to make my own tool and release it

Hey, love the vid Have you thought about making a better interface for the inputs? Like, some kind of horizontal timeline where you zoom in & out, drag and drop inputs, change input press time etc? Something that would look like the timeline of a video editing software, but instead of video clips, it's the game inputs Taking it even further, why not have some kind of breakpoint feature, where the game is sped up until a specific timestamp, to speed up the input edition process

it should be released for sure. With those restrictions built into the application, there isn't really any room for abuse without deconstructing the software. And the people who have the know-how to do so probably also have the know-how to make their own TAS tools.

Very nice video. As someone who hunts nadeo WRs, especially those which are close to limits, it would be very tempting to use this tool and see what is possible. However it would be near impossible to TAS a better run then what human can do on envs like Snow where smoothness of steering matters much more then on Stadium. The only map I would TAS is A-0 to see if 4.38 is possible, my PB on that map is 4.390 so I am curious.

Pozdrawiam z Warszawy

I was looking for a way of tasing tm2020 but man it's hardcore to find something, maybe we'll get to it one time

I'm kind of desolated to see riolu did cheat, because even if I like him and all, you can't blindly say the rapport isn't concluding. Thanks for your work and for the efforts you put in. A cheater, even a loved streamer, is still a cheater at the end of the day. I would love to continue to follow riolu's career and streams, but I feel like I need him to admit and to stop. I don't know how it could be a trusted declaration but my hope's still there. Once again, thank you for fighting cheat and cheaters, and making this a better game and a better community.

I would like to see an AI optimizing the tracks to see the best theoretical time, and then players trying to reach it

I'd definitely try and do some TASes for Lagoon if it was possible, just for fun, but I see the tool isn't universal :c

How did you make the car skin at 13:13? It reminds me of a bug I experienced in TMNF (or was it TMO? Too much time went by, I can't remember), by which if I Alt-Tabbed out of the fullscreen game while painting the car, I would get a glitchy livery. I couldn't replicate the bug on my newer PC, and I hadn't saved the skins, unfortunately.

Your tool seems fine to release immo. With that said, thanks a lot for at least explaining how TASing in TM works :D Edit: Also, the vote has 69% of yes... Just sayin'

Looking back at this, I wonder if riolu and others involved in the scandal realised what could happen to them when you showed ability to extract and replay inputs and just hoped their cheating wouldn't be discovered.

TASes are cool as long as everyone is honest about what they used.

I think it's fine so long as there is a surefire way to detect a TAS run. Other games use TAS to great effect, both to find new strategy and push the limits of the game. I think TM could benefit from this so long as TAS runs are showcased separately from normal runs.

Bardzo dobry filmik jak na taki mały kanał

Would there be any way that the signature could be steganographically embedded in essential elements of the replay in such a way that both allow for the signature to be detected, and to either detect when the replay has been modified after signing or even outright makes the file not work (or just produce a bad run) if the file is modified after signed or if the signature is removed?

Hey, great video! Are you also planning to make one about TMTrackNN? I've been playing with it a lot recently (I'm the author of the only three issues in the repo) and I love how it works. Would be great to see more people experiment with it.

Would the details about how you do the signature be something that you could share, or would saying anything about the signature system allow people to remove the signature?

Nice video. Interesting facts about tools. And Sure, there is no fun with these abuses.

such a good video, never thought TAS was possible in TM (and i play for almost a decade..)

Very nice video, quite interesting Just wondering, can the steer values change to the milliseconds? For example, at 10:45 you show that a 0.01 second difference in a steer value can change the run completely, but can the TAS tool also reproduce steer values to, let's say, 0.001 seconds, since it also shows the 0's at the end of each value? I really don't know if I'm explaining myself correctly

Rly great work, just one question : Is your tool works online ? If yes, what happens with dedimania ?

I feel that sharing replay files for TAS runs should be encouraged, but only within their own forum's. I understand the hesitation to do so though, at least until there is a way to reliably filter them out of RTA runs to maintain the integrity of the leaderboards.

I'm interested, would it be possible to make ai assisted runs where an ai is allowed to change inputs to generate a faster run?

Which langage of programmation do you use to make the TAS playing the game ? I used python but it doesn't work on games

"Tschüss" (10:07) Hab mich totgelacht

The next logical step would be to train an artificial neural network that takes a mapfile as an input and calculates the best possible sequence of inputs by itself.

3:33 Riolu: 0% legit how the tables have turned

Could you use this for supervised machine learning ? I am thinking if you use the replays of the top 1% to make a ai it might get pretty good. But it seems like having map knowledge is crucial to brake some records. So it will probably only do the trained maps really well. Or the maps that can't be cheated on and you just have to drive fast.

you speak really good english for someone whose first language is not english, but when you talk about how something looks, you don't say HOW something looks LIKE you say WHAT it looks LIKE. if you say HOW you never end the phrase with LIKE. great vid

If the game can validate a run in seconds, this means it can run the physics engine internally much quicker than real time. This would be an amazing tool to train Neutral Networks to play the game, because they need many thousands of runs to learn a technique

So weird, that other videos talking about TAS Trackmania runs have millions of views, but the origin does not

please do the TAS in TMN race E-4

Do the physics run at, and synch with, the millisecond timer? I get the feeling if the input resolution is only 1 millisecond, desynchs would occur otherwise.

I'm not at all involved in the Trackmania community but it sounds like you need stronger verification standards (at least for top/WR runs) rather than private tools. If a closed group of people was able to make the existing tools, other tools could just as well be made by other people and either used for malicious purposes, or published without the community being able to do anything about it. This is especially true when no public tools exist, and making a new tool is the only way to TAS Trackmania in the first place; if your tool becomes public, there will be much less of an incentive to make a new one. But then again, it should never be ruled out that anyone can come in, reverse-engineer the game and/or the existing tools, and circumvent any security measures that aren't part of the game itself.

Try to watch this video without audio. Oh, you're leaving already? Bye.

Do u know how to fix game not compatible?

chaos theory in practice

*Hi,* all TASing is about TMNF but what about TM² Stadium ? I really want to begin TAS run in TM, but i prefer in stadium I believe that a TAS tool exist for lagoon or other TM game

So, basically, trackmania players are stuck in 2003, when everyone was freaking out over Morimoto's TAS of SMB3.

I knew physics in TM is deterministic, but can you explain why are there different results in my track - Art of Apex 3? A video from 2011 is in my channel.

The video is great, good job! But just one thing Donadigo "FAQ"(At 15:42 and 15:47)by my knowledge, is french and is said , in english "QNA"(Questions aNd Answers) Person through the screen reading this hope you have a great day

10:07 Tschüss!

Next steps: 1. Design a headless replay renderer that simulates the entire replay physics-wise but without graphics, just to quickly find the final time given a set of inputs. 2. Develop a genetic algorithm to evolve perfect replays for each track. 3. ???? 4. Profit!

what do you think of the riolu situation?

As a long time player I have mixed feelings about its direct release and thank you for not releasing it yet. As with deepfakes, there is serious R&D of the detection programs running alongside it. Once the TAS software is released it yearns for a counterpart and a battle ensues. In short its a disturbance best avoided if you're just a regular TM player. It would be an extra thing to keep in mind (it kind of already is a bit but not that much). IF..... released, it would make sense to release it as a tool behind a barrier. What I'd initially imagine would be that you'd upload a map or a replay file and only get to view the output replay, but not extract it. The TAS replay viewing environment ought to be functional enough to learn from the run (like rewind and replay speed adjustments). But technically even then you could run a separate timer along the replay and get the input data if one really wanted. To try and prevent that, you could add randomized minimally noticable accelerations and decelerations to the replay video. But even then you could probably tweak the inputs according to the location ques... I suppose the next thing would be to flag all TAS times generated this way, so if a submission of a wr is made on mania exchange, its compared to the TAS replay which had been requested in some past. This would require some data storage capacity and might create a target for hackers (but they could be stored encrypted). So much hassle tho :S Perhaps avoid release as long as possible. Or if bored, keep thinking of ways to supersecure its release format and use. The knowledge of someone having done a TAS for TM got me disinterested in making my own. So there is positive effect of you having made it and talking about it.

humans are aspiring to become TAS

TAS should be allowed - if people are afraid of cheaters then make better anticheat system - tases are art, tases are life

Though what app or mod do you run the script

how about demanding a hand cam for ppl that submit a nonTAS record?

3:29 “0% legit” ok riolu

I don't see what would stop people from changing the code of your tool and removing the safety features. Am i missing something? I like TAS but it difficult to use in TM safely.

So... what's stopping people from recording a drive with AutoHotKey, then tweaking the recording until it's perfect?

Totally would be awesome to see the tool at its limits for the classic maps. Would really suck to see the cheated runs on regular leaderboards though.. With more people building these tools it's only a matter of time before it's gonna be a required hand cam and a live stream or something other...

Great software! Could ideas from cheat detection in chess be used to catch cheating with TAS in trackmania? I tend to think TAS should not be released to the public but used by a handful of users known to Nadeo and each other. And have their results released to the public via RU-vid.

Can you read inputs for TM2 replays? Or only TMF?

Me and the bois using autohotkey to easily make it

Siema

Maybe an idea would be to release the tool not usable with TrackMania but with a copycat game (CloneMania ?) which has same physics but doesn't output a replay that could be uploaded to TMX, you could only get videos out of it. You might get some problems with Nadeo, but if you disable inputs like keyboard and controller so that CloneMania can only be played through an input script, you could argue it's a completely different game ? Clone Hero is a real game based on Guitar Hero after all (although there is no TAS)

When anyone willing to cheat can develop their own tool, screw what the community says, especially the top players, do what you want to do.

I have come to collect your cheese taxes. 10 pieces will do

So is it a computer driving or is it cheating on the possible values? Didn't get it.

Hmm making an AI to learn the best course on its own and perform it would be pretty doable. Would be an interesting project....

What it looks like not how it looks like.