Yesterday, Hylis from Nadeo posted a set of informative posts on the progress of development, the planned beta schedule, and some features of TM2. The key contents cover the following topics:

* TM2 beta will start next year, and begin as a closed beta (with invitations), which will grow and become more and more public (just as we know it from previous TM betas)
* Splitscreen mode and block import may not be part of the first TM2 release, as they're not finished enough. They're proceeded enough though to be sure they'll be added to the platform one day.
* The team is working on perfectioning the platform and creating more blocks at the moment, which require more work than the original blocks from previous TM editions.

Read the full quotes in the post appended to this news item.

UVME is a pack created by the TrackMania community, which goal is to improve its quality. It's a selfrunning executable, which allows you to select, which coponents to install and integrates a restoration system to uninstall the pack easily. In detail, the extension features:
* Improved menu icons
* More detailed and higher resoluted textures for all environments
* Corrected reflections on vehicles
* Higher resoluted sky textures
* HD vehicles for all environments, including basic grey skin
* TMO, TMS, TMN, and TMU original music
* HD loadscreens, also for wide-screen resolutions

So if you're bored, or would just like to get Trackmania onto the state of art, get the TMUF (460 MB) or TMNF (24 MB) version of the pack.

Get info here: http://uvme.strangeplanet.fr/

Have fun!

PS: You can choose to install only a subset of the features aswell, instead of all of them.