From TM Wiki

An environment is a gaming and editing field in the TrackMania game series.

Gameplay, sceneries and blocks

Each environment is characterized by a distinct vehicle with which the player drives, with its own gameplay. Each of them are designed to be deeply different. In the same way, blocks with which the player can build his tracks are very different from each environment to another and can not be interchanged.

This difference between the different sets of blocks is so deep that the base size of a block differs according to the environment in TrackMania Sunrise: Island blocks are almost twice as big as those in Coast, whereas they are all of the same size in TrackMania Original.

Inside an environment, the player rides with the same gameplay whatever the car and the skin he choses to drive with. In this same way, if a map features a mod, the environment gameplay will not be changed, but it may alter the visibility of the surroundings depending on the colour or luminosity of the blocks.

List of environments

Here are all the actual environments :

• Speed (Original)
• Alpine (Original)
• Rally (Original)
• Island (Sunrise)
• Coast (Sunrise)
• Bay (Sunrise)
• Stadium (Nations)

Speed	Alpine	Rally	Island
Coast	Bay	Stadium

Folders, textures and mods

Environments are mainly made of textures that are saved in DDS format. You can find them in the subfolder GameData/(env) (env = environment name) of your TrackMania installation folder.

You can edit them provided that you respect their encoding and dimensions. Once they are modified, that aspect of the game changes but everything else, like the gameplay, remains identical.

This technique was used when the running version was Power-Up as zipped mods were not supported by the game. A few tools like NazguL's Mod'O'Matic allowed replacing all textures by a community-made set, in order to modify the whole environment, but they became obsolete with newer versions that featured zipped mod support. The mods are now directly linked with the maps they modify.

• TM-Wiki's article about mods will provide you further information about them.