Greetings!
This track has been a product of on/off mapping over the course of 5-6 weeks because I wanted to build something for my own competition XDRace again. I thought the RallyCar would be a perfect fit for that because it's fitting surprisingly well to the TM2 environments due to its low speed and quick acceleration. Valley was the perfect environment to use since it resembles the old Rally environment from TrackMania and it's the environment that I feel most comfortable in while mapping.
The goal of this map was to have a rather technical map that uses all available assets in the environment except dirt surfaces. The RallyCar has little to no grip on dirt roads, making it pretty much unusable on it unless you go slower than 100 km/h. Unfortunate, but that's how it is. Other than that, there's a bit of everything in this map. Roads, platforms, castles, grass, sand and rails. Thanks to the usage of many custom blocks and items (and inherently exceeding the 1MB embed limit by a good bit, thanks to Openplanet for being a lifesaver
), I was able to unleash my creativity in many sectors of the track. That way I was able to implement a lot of tiny details that are a good driving aid and hopefully add some "Wow"-moments to the track.
I'm happy with how the map turned out even though there were some complains about the signage and the automatic respawn + a difficult CP respawn right after that. I kept the signage lightweight because otherwise it'd distract players too much from keeping focus on the car - since many XDRace participants are most likely not very familiar with the RallyCar. Also I feel like a heavy use of signage makes the map look unnatural and causes sign bleeding more often. Oh well.
Enjoy the map either way and I'm looking forward to seeing some fast runs on this!
More information regarding the XDRace:
https://XDrace.smurfen.net