Sharing ROLLHILL with TrackMania's Fastest Way Only community, we expected to get some hardcore racers who'd understand the game in its entirety and with that, who'd provide us with valuable feedback.

Thanks to them and their game-breaking ways of setting WR's, a bug was exposed with how our GHOST playback behaved.

See, our game features a somewhat unique mechanic in the racing world, the RUNUP. Where we give the player a little room before starting the stopwatch to get their wheel rolling as fast as possible.

And it was exactly this mechanic, that was being abused and exposed a time synchronization issue with our GHOSTs. GHOST would just spawn and roll to its completion, not taking into account that time starts after spawn. With that, it was possible that for some RUNUP setups, you'd be reaching start gate later, but speed wise be on par or even grater than GHOST. This would cause a time-delay, as the GHOST would ignore when your stopwatch starts, making it possible that graphically your run is behind the GHOST, but time wise you could be ahead.

...enter Ghost Modes!

SELECT YOUR MODE

Go to PAUSE menu to select your GHOST MODE.

OLD

As described above, the "Classic" or "Old" GHOST behavior.

As run begins, GHOST gets spawned and runs to its completion without stopping at all.

START

As suggested by community, to fix the time-delay, in this mode, when you cross start gate in your current run, only then the GHOST gets launched (from its start gate entry as well).

In this mode, though, you lose the ability to see how your RUNUP performs.

SMART

To fix the hidden RUNUP section from START ghost mode, I developed a SMART mode, where:

1. As you start your run, GHOST start alongside with you, as in OLD mode.
2. Once GHOST crosses start gate, it stops and waits for you to reach start gate.
3. Or alternatively, if you're faster than GHOST, then as you reach start gate, GHOST behaves as in START mode (gets fast-forwarded to its start entry).

So here, you can compare your RUNUP as well as TIMED section.