Widescreen Gaming Forum

I'm working on "optimized" loading screens made from replay screenshots to replace the default (badly stretched) ones. Unfortunately the game uses 1024x1024 dds with black bars, leaving only a 1024x768 area for the actual image, which will then get stretched to fit your triple display... So quality of the actual image is not that great, and using some nice FX like the radial blur on the original pictures is a no-go (pixel soup warning). Still, even though the loading times in Trackmania are pretty short, they're quite frequent, so maybe you'll enjoy these 15:4 screens.

Each environment of United has its own loading screen, at the moment I only have the Stadium one ready, so hopefully a couple Nations players will give it a go :)

Here's a preview of the actual dds file : 3840x1024 screenshot resized to fit the 1024x768 usable area


And here's how it looks in game : 1024x768 stretched back to 3840x1024


Installation :
-download the new dds here
-open folder GameDataStadiumMediaTextureImage
-backup/rename the existing LoadScreen.dds
-place the newly downloaded LoadScreen.dds in there and you're done.

Hope you like it !

Maybe you think it's useless crap and/or you could do it yourself anyway ??
Or you wan't more choice (different maps and view angles, more cars, no cars at all...) ?
Any United players here interested in such "optimized" loading screens for the other environments ? (I'll do'em anyway, just curious) :P
Anyone else wanna add their own creations ?

If you'd like to host these here, please let me know.

Will do when I have a nice lil set of pictures ready, thanks ;)

Great idea.

If you say so... :) Thanks !

I've made various new screens and zipped'em with instructions and ingame preview pictures : Tm_TH2GLoadingScreens_Stadium.zip

Here are the screenies I used: (degraded jpeg versions - I used the original bmps)

CLOSEUP


CURVED


JUMP


LOOP


VERTIGO


It's pretty hard to work with the replay editor and its off-centered preview window for creating TripleHead screenshots. In the future I'll try to make my images more "bezel-aware" by sticking paper cues directly to my panels or sth... It's pretty time-consuming too but it's a lot of fun to quietly toy with replays after some exhausting crazy racing :)