Tips for making tracks

Use time and energy to finish your tracks before giving them to anyone. It is easy to make an otherwise good track bad if you forget some basic rules.

Requirements for a good track

Using the the editor may seem a bit awkward. Before you actually release any tracks, it would be good if you first made some test tracks to see what kind of difficulties you will have. Here are some simple requirements for good tracks.

1) Make sure that your track looks good in different zoom levels and/or screen modes.
Because of the nature of the track file format, tracks may look a bit different on different screen sizes and zoom levels. To remedy this, you must finish your track by looking it at different modes and trying to fix things that look bad. After having made a track in the default 1.0 zoom level, try other zoom levels (for example 0.8, 0.9, 1.1, 1.2, ...). Fix things that look bad. Check also the track with different screen modes (for example, 1024X768 and 800x600) and with fit-in-screen. This may be tedious but after all, it should not take that much time compared to what making a good track has already taken. Also check the pattern file (yourtrack-pat.png). See that there are not any small areas of grass here there should be tarmac.

2) Make sure there are not any shortcuts
Place your control points so that there are not any shortcuts. Shortcutters are clever, think hard to see all possibilities. Try to make to control points such that it is not easy to accidentially miss a control point. For example, put a solid obstacle in the inner curve and make the line long enough so that it is not possible to go around it. Make sure that it is not allowed to go around a U turn driving the wrong direction. Also make sure that it is not possible to miss the finish line which is the first control line you insert. Make it wider than the road.

3) Do not make your track too far out
It is possible to make very odd tracks. This may seem funny but no one probably wants to actually play such a track for a long time. Creativity is of course good, but try not to make the rules of your track too different from the other tracks.

4) Control points

Make sure that:

  • There is enough space for the starting grid (do not place any obstacles in it).
  • There are not any shortcuts.
  • You cannot accidentially miss a control line by going off-road or driving curves too tightly.
  • Remember this especially with the starting line. Make it much wider than the road and/or place obstacles near the road.

Normally, a track is made in five phases.

  1. Make background with different terrains.
  2. Build the track itself.
  3. Add obstacles
  4. Set lightmap
  5. Set checkpoints
  • Check the track in different screen modes and view the pattern file after each phase to detect problems early.
  • Make background terrains and the track tiles overlap slightly. This way, different screen modes do not cause so much problems.
  • To get curves look better, first add a curve tile, then add straight track tiles below the curve tile by using spacebar.
  • Use Alt key for help to put tiles on the same line.