Danielsson

Ok, this is the facts, we have quite many good tracks. Most of the good tracks takes just a sec to load, but still, becuse you've driven all the tracks so many times, they're booring. That gave me an idea.

Now I'm talking like we got all the permissions we needed, just to get that problem out of the question.

Let's say we all have a poll on which tracks to choose. Then we go together a few modellers/texturers, just to make things easier.

Let's say we chosed these tracks:
Polish Roads Stage 2 (this track would sort of have to be in)
Early Fall in Norway
Mountain Pass
Akagi
Driftland 1.0
Weekend Drive
Any of the highwaytracks
Rubicon (just as an example of an offroad track, we need those too.)

After we've decided on the tracks, we all, in the thread, talk about how the layout should be, I've been thinkin of something like this(just speculating):

Polish roads as a base, you change the start position to the village, you know the one with the sweet little red car parked outside a gate.

Then at the big highway after the gas station, we could connect one of the highway tracks, just delete a segment and put this bit in there instead.

Where you can turn right and drive on the long straigt to get to the gas station, if you go just straight forward instead of turning right, you soon end up at a narrow road with a "treeline" at each side. This would be the perfect place to attach the start of akagi, so then you get a mountain road. Then at the bottom of akagi(was it ever finished? or is it just my track that ends abruptly!?) we attach Mountain Pass, the very long hill-climb.

So now we have mountainroads, highways, and causual rods. Now we need some offroad action. This could be solved by at the end of any of the small dirt roads at polish, prefferably the one you have to drive over the small little bridge to get to. You connect the rubicon, or any one of the offroad tracks.

Now we could attach early fall in norway at the very other end of polish roads, the end that's behind you if you start at the normal place. And on polish we could attach it to the part if you go "out from the parkingspace, over the bridge, down the long left-turn, then go right in the roundabout".

Now we need a race track, it's just to choose any of the other ending roads and connect a race track, or connect driftland at the small highway part, so that you haveto drive off the highway, down the smallroad and finally entering the track. It would be quite cool.

Then when you're finished, you could have, maybe two different starting points, one at the village I first talked about, then another at the other village, the one which is close to the church or whatever it is. For those who doesn't have the time to drive through all polish road to get to early fall and the track after that and so on..

(here I'm REALLY speculating, on how it could be done)
And then, you start assembling the tracks in zmodeler, importing polish roads, then hiding all of that mesh, then importing the next track, selecting the whole mesh and then dragging that out of the way, then unhiding the first track, now you can select the other one easily and drag it to the point where you want it. I have no idea on how to merge all the shaderfiles and renaming the dofs, becuse I believe quite many tracks name their trees trees.dof etc.. Maybe group the objects to one .dof or such. I don't know..

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Pros;
It would make driving so much funnier, becuse you feel more free, and that's what it's all about!

Cons;
Longer loadtimes (is that such a big deal if we have one giant track?)
FPS! (Could this be solved by trying to screen off the different tracks, escpecially the mountaintracks and those ones, with big sky-coloured planes(not aircrafts, duh), so that if you drive by them, you can't see the whole mountain, ie, the computer doesn't have to "load" that part.

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Let the conversation begin..

quetzalk

great idea... I'm dreaming of such big track since I know Racer !

my main regret is I cannot participate to this kind of work, given on Mac we do not have the tools for.

just about the wishlist, it would be a great point to integrate, as far as possible, Nick's Mountain Pass and the beta Swiss Mountain (not Swiss Stroll, the other one).

I'did like to insist that this kind of project needs a strong coordination, and regular beta releases : it will probably never be perfect enough (think to all the textures to adapt, FPS optimization, etc...), so it's much better for all to get an incomplete version rather than nice, promising screenshots and finally nothing to play with !

be sure you'll find friends to support this
cheers

quetzalk

Boomer541

I've been working on a 36 mile long track (bridge_highway) and added an island that is 4600 by 3500 meters. It takes over three minutes to drive to the island on the lake bed at 160 mph.

Therefore I would not recommend having a track made up of those tracks you describe but would rather see tracks like polish roads and mountain pass extended and made with more interesting roads to drive on.