Smooth Scriminal

Hey!

About a year ago I was asked to build a map for a scrim between Q, dac-SP and minipeace. For those who don't know : a scrim is a time attack match, all teams on the same server and the team with best local records after a set period of time (usually a week) is declared the winner. Instead of just whipping up a simple map in an hour, i started thinking: what would make a good scrimmap? I had to make sure people would still want to play my map after a week of nolifing. It also had to be hard, or we would end up fighting over .001. Then the map had to be decided by player skill and player skill only. And since it didn't have to be suitable for rounds, I had a little more leeway for bugs that screw over runs - after all, you're not losing points in ta if your run gets screwed over by a bug.

The result was this map: a 37 second long transitionless speedtech with a lot of tight, high risk high reward corners and interesting new (to my knowledge at least) turn combinations. I think i succeeded, considering that the dedi's are so far apart despite the fact that my map was played a lot more than any other map during that scrim.

But when i came across it on my pc a few weeks ago, i realized i had rushed the ending and made a really awkward last drift. I figured i could do better than that and decided to turn it into a proper, 1 minute long speedtech. I tried to continue it in the same style as i had built the original map in, tight, fast and corners where taking risks like driving far over the rammstein actually wins you a lot of time. I was quite rusty in stadium building though, so it took a lot of tries till i found something i was happy with. One thing i'm still not happy with is that I did had to add a drop, i kind of build myself stuck and it was either adding a drop or adding a straight in the middle of a map, and straights are boring. I don't think the drop ruins it though, tried to make it as bugfree as possible while still allowing some different lines.

Now, one thing i have to add is that this track won't appeal to everyone. It's easy to finish as it only has 1 (2 if you count the finish jump) transition, but this track doesn't shine until you start hunting it. It's hard, tight and only gets harder and tighter as you get the hang of it and start driving faster. There's also some corners with buggy rammsteins for reasons mentioned before. But i know there are some 'hardcore' speedtech lovers on here who love pushing their limits on tracks like this one.

And to give those players something to hunt for, i decided to host a little competion: 15,000 planets and a video made by Andriv showcasing your run go to whoever has the fastest time after a week. That means you have until Friday 19 September, 23:59 CEST to upload your run!

Also, much thanks to the players who gave me feedback during various phases of this track, and thanks to   Andriv in particular for the work done in mediatracker and this gorgeous screenshot.

So, enjoy this map and good luck hunting!