- Year: 2007
- Game: TrackMania
This track constantly flips the driver left and right, using some of the steepest banked track pieces in the game. The use of these pieces is to control the player’s speed and timing to set them up for some of the next obstacles in the track.
Using this method of speed control, I could implement extreme hard turns that otherwise would not be achievable if the driver was at full speed. Most of them work and deliver the player to the next section with the car at the correct angle and pitch, so when the car lands they are ready to pick up the traction and accelerate onwards.
All the jumps work ok except one that I’m not too happy about, where a combination of the jump angle, players initial entry speed and the landing zone all work against the flow of the vehicle and it thuds into the floor, bounces around for a second and then you’re technically having to spool the engine up from nothing to re-gain momentum. (here)
The solution I now see to this “slowing down” effect would be to flip the track where the player’s vehicle lands to be in a forward facing, downward incline, to get the car to meet the track at a similar orientation, rather than perpendicular to the flow of traffic. Lesson learned for the future.