This 20,000 Car Trackmania Video Is Creepy
I feel afraid
I will never get sick of Trackmania [official site] videos, whether it's of the Press Forward variety or the lots-of-replays-merged-into-one variety. The latter is what you'll find below: a video showing 22,000 Trackmania cars speeding, leaping, flipping around the same track, each one of which was originally controlled by a real player.
Here's the video first, since that's why you're here.
I love the way the cars look like a kind of fluid when they're all bunched together.
The video is the culmination of half a year of work by organiser L4Bomb4, who collected the replays recorded in Trackmania United Forever and Trackmania Nations Forever, then converted and rendered 12,000 of them in the newer Trackmania 2: Stadium. "Unfortunately, the skins of the cars got lost in the process, but I could render with 12k cars at a pretty high quality without the game crashing," writes L4Bomb4 on the video's YouTube page. Another person, Danixks, edited the video and used a compositing technique to include 8000 further replays that would crash the game if rendered at the same time. The result is 20,000 cars on a single track.
Kudos to them for putting in all that effort and the results, which I find fascinating and slightly creepy. I would watch an Avengers movie where they fought a phaseshifting swarm of 20,000 cars each containing a faceless, motionless driver.
Thanks, PC Gamer.