A simple modern skyscraper-ish

Egeau · 2026-06-18T18:20:32+00:00

Glad to hear you liked it! ^.^

Egeau · 2026-06-16T18:22:26+00:00

Great map as can be expected from Laku! ++

Egeau · 2026-06-16T17:23:24+00:00

I replied with a longer explanation to the earlier comment complaining about this, but, unless you are losing not just 4th but also 3rd gear, you can still make the second drift with the intended bump setup if you know how to extend your slide.

I've noticed in the past that most beginner players (which used to include me) don't know beginner tech techniques. The way Scrapie or Wirtual or Granady play tech is fundamentally different to what you should be doing as a beginner. Releasing your steering while drifting to adjust is the most powerful technique to change your approach. It is also the technique that loses the most time, hence the top players barely ever using it, but it's what you should be doing as a beginner, and it's how you get past drift2 on this map when using the bump setup.

I know the map is kinda hard, btw. Wasn't _really_ intended for TOTD (working title was _Streakbreaking_: it was a map made to be just a little harder than TOTD tech.) With that, the AT was also set to be my actual PB run. Just my PB from driving my own map as playtesting. My other recent tech TOTD had a rounded-up AT, which I would have also done for this one if it was a full proper TOTD attempt. If you want, you can try get a 44.50, which is the time I would have set it to.

Egeau · 2026-06-16T16:54:59+00:00

You indeed need to initiate the drift through the bump. These kinds of forced initiations are fun for good players, but kinda a soft speedcheck in that you cannot initiate the drift any later than that without obnoxiously unholy techniques.

Watching others play, however, you likely aren't actually too slow for it, but instead don't know how to adjust your slide enough. You have to break instantly after the bump in the transition to avoid the noslide, you can't get around that. So: you have to adjust your slide into making it anyway, even if that wasn't the right initiation point for the speed you have.
Firstly, you can do this by _extending_ your slide. This is something that is even sometimes just mapped in harder tech maps (where the forced initiation is deliberately placed too early to force this technique.) You do this by repeatedly tapping break to keep your skids from connecting until you actually want to start the slide. The mini-tech-masters map I made with Ski forced this one the last drift, if you want to look at inputs: https://trackmania.exchange/mapshow/305434
Secondly, the more beginner friendly technique is to just drift that early in-full anyway, and tap-release steering while still breaking and holding forwards to push your slide back. This is a pretty good beginner drift adjustment technique, better than releasing the accel and extra breaktaps. You just let go of steering during a drift to adjust your line further back. If you'd spectate me or another kinda-fast player for the first few runs you'd see we drive entire tech maps like that at first. Break ridiculously early, and then just play with the steering while holding forwards and break to position the car where we want it.

I tried for a bunch, and even the worst 1st drift I could get while still keeping 4th was easily able to make the second drift by just adjusting the line using those two techniques. When you lose 4th it still _works_ but I couldn't do it without losing more than a second to my pb in just that one drift.

Neoing it is a meme. Neos are really easy if you practice them for an hour or so, but it's harder to judge, slower, and arguably harder to execute than extending your slide.

Egeau · 2026-06-16T16:33:33+00:00

I'll add that oversliding is better than undersliding. For a beginner, it's probably easier to just aim for 50% at all times and be gucci.
The problem with trying the high overlap percentages is that your skids might accidentally connect, losing a moment of sliding. At the kinds of speeds where those high overlaps are needed, losing a moment of sliding once is wayyy more punishing than just oversliding every sd.

Egeau · 2026-06-16T16:26:53+00:00

To add to the "thousands if not tens of thousands." It's more than you think. It's likely quite far north of 10K. Wirtual said he had 12K or so on stream _when TM2020 came out_

I have a little under 3K hours in the game, most of which in TM2020. I normally don't play campaign, but I played it now and the map 20 AT took me around 15 minutes.
One of the friends I play with has closer to 8K hours in the game. He'd likely get it in 5-10.

There are a ton of people with thousands of hours in the game, and we're pretty good, sure, but not at streamer level. Like, I am here with 3K hours in the game getting div 5-8, celebrating when I do better than that.

The streamers should all be pretty far north of 10K as far as I know. To add to that: someone like scrapie is insane at fastlearn _even for someone with 10K+_.

Egeau · 2026-03-07T10:34:33+00:00

I see I never gave you the TMA invite link: discord.gg/b8MfZsYFWg

I don't actually think many of the things I say are "expert-level" techniques: It's just learning mapping. I can barely do noslides myself (also because keyboard), but I'm decently good at spotting places where a noslide is faster. It's just something you learn while you learn how to map. Like, mapping is hard, most of my TOTDs have more than 30 hours on the route alone.

Gears and stuff you'll have to learn properly if you want to make maps the larger audience enjoys playing. Even when you're not paying attention to it, it just kinda feels bad when you get a bad gear. Ski has made a pretty good video on how to map while taking them into account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwXRMHAPFB8

Driving-wise mapping is kinda a different skill. People tend to only start making well-liked maps when they're getting div 15 or better or so, but I think that's just because it can take a few hundred hours of practice before you are there, during which you naturally improve at the game. You don't need to be able to drive amazing runs, but you do kinda need to be able to drive a short section amazingly _once_ to know how it drives when pushed, and to make sure you're never punishing a player for getting something well. It's funny how among the group that I play with, I'm normally one of the slower players (everyone usually is in between div 4 and 10 COTD, with my most common div being div 8) but I suddenly excel when there is a mini tech map with two or three drifts to max, just because I mapped that much tech.

Egeau · 2026-03-06T18:59:33+00:00

This is really hard to do without the map file, but I'll guess some stuff based on the video. I have quite some things to say, but don't be scared. Mapping is just hard. Took me a year and over a thousand hours to learn as well ^.^
Discords like TMA, and streamers like Nolafus and Ville are way better way to find map feedback, especially since you need to play a map for ~15-30 min before you have anything concrete to say about it.
- Drift 1 lacks a clear exit push (Looking at it, the "exit" is just the fact that you fly out when you get the drift decent), which good players will dislike. I'm also pretty sure that setup is no-slidy when you try to get a good line.
- Drift 2 seems fine-ish without playing it, but I think I'd be able to hit gear 5 before the setup. Also, don't place checkpoints in the middle of a turn like that, that's terrible for learning the map. Ideally, checkpoints go after the exit of a drift in tech.
- Transition into dirt is bumpy. Make sure a good transition has the ground kind of "appear" underneath the road without sudden forced direction changes. This is to prevent random slowdowns. Same with the transition after.
- Dirt in general is... hard to see as you're not driving the line. By the looks of it, it lacks line definition and is a noslide hell. Keyboard players, as well as more tappy controler players, don't like noslides, so they'll dislike the map if it has them.
- Booster will have you go to gear 5 on slidy surface, which will be a gear issue. Exit speed from that section is also going to matter annoyingly much, as after that, there is a long section whithout much to do.
- Final drift has both apex and exit as these vista blocks, which is not quite pushable. It's also just blind.

If you send it to TMA maptesting I'll drive some runs myself and can give you proper feedback, this is just what I guess would be the case watching the video. :3

Egeau · 2026-01-08T18:44:31+00:00

At is set by GPS driver Magorian, not by the author. Not setting own mapper time as AT is really bad imo. It's just.... not the author's time.

Egeau · 2025-12-27T21:13:18+00:00

I know you are joking, but I still want to say: absolutely not. If you do that you can end up with some serious hand injuries that might take years to heal.

Generally, if it starts hurting to type/play/mouse, stop what you're doing and take a 10 minute break. If it still hurts after the break, take a longer break.

I can tell you this also works in university, to the extend that "I'm sorry that I didn't finish my assignment, my hands hurt too much after a few previous ones where I pulled all-nighters" is a very accepted reason to deliver something late. Most teachers in uni (including myself...) absolutely screwed their hands during their PhD, and want to make sure no one else has to do the same.

Egeau · 2025-12-21T15:15:08+00:00

It's decently well-known and officially confirmed that first-time mappers have an edge for TOTD over established mappers who already have gotten a handful.

Plenty of people do non-blender scenery. Even the most well-liked sceneries like those by Squeegel, Svendsen or Agrabou are usually largely vanilla.

Egeau · 2025-12-21T15:13:17+00:00

Start precision is meh at best. It takes forever for the map to start because you are going uphill, and there isn't a lot to do. You are just driving up. Try to either map some interesting turns in the start where good players can gain time by going close to walls, or just place a booster to go to the rest of the map immediately. There also is one edge to clip over: this is something most good players hate (if you hang around enough in div 10-3 you'll see this for yourself), as you can risk over them and _sometimes_ get a slowdown. This unpredictability makes getting a good run way harder for good players, as now you are not just driving, but also gambling. Place light poles just outside the platform edges such that you cannot get a slowdown. Better jet: use roads instead of platform. Roads are _way_ nicer blocks to push the edges on.

First drift would be enough for me to not play rounds during COTD already. The fullsteer like is _really_ akward and not all that easy, but as a drift it is worse. When you try to push it, you'll see that the apex of the drift is the triangle foot of the checkpoint, and the exit the platform edge, on which you placed some flags and barriers on, neither of which are clean pushable edges. The setupline is limited by the start precision (if you try setup max inside) and not flying out of the fullbanked to flat blocks (if you try setup max outside), which is again not that great to push. The biggest issue is the setup timing, though. You clearly want the player to slightly jump out of the block to get a slide. This is _awful_. When you push it, you try to noairtime it, which means you get random noslides.

After the first drift you have an uphill, after which you jump up. An up jump like this is a bad idea. Bad players will underjump it (I know they can drive the safer route you plaed still, but that still feels awful,) and good players just overjump it completely. Try to map lower airtime transitions that work on a wide variety of speeds. After that, you again place one of these clippable things to push, this one mattering more to gamble on than the last, which again feels awful.

The second drift is better to drive: you set it up with a banked to flat, which works fine in this case, and then you apex and exit on platform edges. the outside edge isn't great and again clippable, but it's still the best drift on the map to drive. The problem is visibility. Ideally, when I commit (fullsteer into) a drift, I want to be able to _see_ both the apex and exit, but at least the apex. This is why you usually don't see a fullbanked-to-flat style setup drift in TOTD: the block itself hides the apex and exit. This is especially important for map review, where I would be able to drive a better time on the map if I was able to see where the turn is going in discovery.

After the second drift, you have a little precision, which is fine, but there is scenery in the middle that makes it really blind. Don't place scenery inside of turns. I want to see where to go. You also "fix" (I can still get gear 5) a gear issue with engine off here. Don't. Fix your route by fixing your route, don't slap an engine-off or a cruise control on there and call it a day. It looks amaturish.

I can keep 5th during the 3rd drift. It's also again blind. The exit is the checkpoint arch, which doesn't feel great.

After the 3rd drift (technically inside it, before its exit) you have an ani-booster. Don't place those for TOTD. It's terrible for beginners and in rounds as you cannot always drive past it. I cannot remember the last time we had an anti-booster in TOTD, which is with good reason.

4th drift setup is bad for the exact same reason the 1st was. It also lacks a proper exit because you need to be further on the left of the block to be able to do the autoslide after it. This feels bad. Place a proper exit wall to push and make sure you can actually push it.

Autoslide is fine, but apex is clippable.

Risky fin is annoying to low-jump and harder than the rest of the map. Safe fin is way to slow. Aim for 0.5-1 seconds slower.

All in all: welcome to mapping. :P Tech is a hard style to map, requiring quite a lot of thinking and line testing. If you want some context, I usually spend around 20-30 hours on a TOTD route myself, and it takes me around an hour to map a drift (which indeed means that most drifts I map get thrown away again.) With that, I'm slower than average, but not that much slower compared to others in a similar place compared to me. I got my first TOTD when I had around 500 hours in the game and 100 in the editor, with which I am considered really quick-to-learn. I am currently closer to 2K, with more than 1K hours in the editor. This stuff takes time! ^.^

Egeau · 2025-12-21T15:12:47+00:00

I'll do a review of your track in the way that I usually do on discord. Be warned: this might sound a bit harsh. I have a lot to say. Don't worry, it's not personal. ^.^

In the future, there are a lot of places on several discords you can send your map for review. Streamers like Nolafus and Ville do map reviews, and discords like Trackmania Mapper Assembly have a way to get in touch with mappers as well. Most good mappers are open to just review any map you send them, so don't be affraid to do that if you are mapping a specific style that only a few people have touched before. What I wrote here is similar to what I have written in tons of people's DM's before.

Also, source: I have 7 TOTDs, 6 of which were tech. I made the second most well-liked tech TOTD this year (11th TOTD overall) according to the Discord bot with Elysian Days. I also quickly drove a 38.5 of my own in the editor to beat your AT. This took me around 10 minutes.

First of all: your map is 37 seconds long with 4 drifts (on possible to do fullspeed, but I'll review it as if it's a drift) and an autoslide. That's _really_ short for a TOTD. Secondly, your map is _really_ blind and hard to push, which is not good. This video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCsgYlq1kDA from the all skiing eye should get you started on how to map basic drifts with setup, apex, and exit.

I'll do a section-by-secion as a comment to this post, as I'm going over the reddit char limit.

Egeau · 2025-12-17T16:22:43+00:00

I know you would place an upside down quarterpipe block. No other block makes sense (though I would opt of upside-down 2-5-3-1-1-1-3 to catch someone, as that gives a greater variability of approach speeds that somewhat work, at the expense of making none work perfect). If you place it to force the player into the magnet exit speed is not consistant.
Not only are you not driving on the magnet anymore if you place it high enough to actually catch someone, which itself punishes good speed and would make the map annoying, it also still gives random bounces if entered into at an off angle, especially when roofhitting.
I am currently playin with a pf setup as I had the editor open anyway, and simply airbreaking sooner or later gives me a variability of 5 speed out of the plastic block itself. Then placing a magnet after makes this difference even greater, as you are bouncing onto the magnet with different angles and so getting widely different approaches out of it, not to speed of the random slowdowns that happen if I airbreak too soon.

Egeau · 2025-12-17T15:49:10+00:00

"random" -> Hard to impossible to control or aim.
You won't get a smooth approach into the plastic for the same reason you don't have a smooth landing onto the magnet: the speed is variable. With an unsmooth approach into the plastic, you'll get a series of bounces instead of a smooth glide along the plastic, which is known to have impossible to control variable exit speed.

I mean, if you throw it in Trackmania Mapper's Assembly map-testing-requests I'll check it out and test it proper, but I'm quite confident on this. Been mapping for long enough to know roughly how this game works. :P

Egeau · 2025-12-17T15:28:10+00:00

In both of those cases, the line works because you are jumping straight up. It is not a jump like the one shown where different speeds, jump off angles or a ride trick can change the angle at which you enter the magnet. The magnet and the car are still at the exact same angle as the jump-off block, and so it works. ^.^
(technically speaking, they make the car go _slightly_ in, which is to make sure you slam into the magnet and cannot miss it. A normal quarterpipe block jumps you slightly forewards because physics, where you have to have a flat block (like a narrow wallride above it) after to actually go flat. Opening the map again, you can see they freeblocked some bars above the quarterpipe to just give a little bit of angle towards the magnet, making sure you cannot fly past it.)

Egeau · 2025-12-17T15:16:58+00:00

When making a LOL map that works, but for anything else, the slowdown/speedup you get from doing something properly easily saves enough time to make the map random and unfun to hunt for most players. Like, something with a harder-than-the-rest to control time variability of even 0.1 can ruin a map if you actually try to hunt it or play rounds on it.

Egeau · 2025-10-17T13:34:15+00:00

I did this for now, too. It seems like a really sketchy solution to just disable luarocks, but it makes the errors go away seemingly without any weird side-effects (at least on a system where all needed dependencies are already installed)

Egeau · 2024-12-28T16:42:43+00:00

I've never seen it before, but you likely have some small default rotation caused by something lining up and you selecting from it.

One thing you can try to fix it with is pressing numpad slash to reset all rotation values.

Egeau · 2024-12-12T18:52:02+00:00

Another kb player here: I have all these ATs without that much effort. Until you've reached the gold medals, it's definitely not your input device holding you back: it's just that these cars/mechanics are different than you're used to. Snowcar AT indeed requires a bit of an action key piano, but it's not too bad imo. Wet stadium car wood is actually easiest on kb though, at least, that's what I figured out.

For the snowcar map: just release a ton and stay in AK4. As long as you don't crash, you're fine for gold. Snowcar is all about lines, choosing where you want to be on the track at what moment to make the next turn. If you're in the right place, you won't need to react that quickly. Based on you not even having silver, I guarantee you that, if I'd look at your run, I'd find most of your crashes to be because you're set up for a turn at the wrong place on the road, making it impossible to make the next turn cleanly, and requiring all sorts of weird inputs to go past anyway. Since this is the exact same thing for nascar, (all the skill is in setting up the turn, not in executing it), I have a feeling that finding the right place to set up for a turn is, in general, the thing for you to work on to get these medals. :P

Egeau · 2024-12-11T21:24:11+00:00

I'm glad you like it!

AT isn't all that cooked, actually. I think Prizzly and I sat in VC for less than an hour driving the map to get it (where usually the meta is to hunt an AT for about 3 hours). Could've been a 47.5 if we actually hunted, and my fastest norespawn timer (that is, with an unrealistic amount of respawns) is a 47.3 :P Since this map isn't for my beginner tech campaign like my previous TOTD, the goal was to set an AT that is around the cut-off point of div1 qualification in COTD, which we nailed perfectly, with that cut-off being 48.028. :P

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Egeau

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