Is this thing on? *taptap*
I'm posting this because Course Maker is one of the things I looked forward to the most- and it's getting a lukewarm reception partly because you can't specify exact track layouts, or much of anything. This is deceptive- there's more to it than appearances would suggest. Plus, because it's totally procedural, the individual tracks are tiny in filesize, because they are just descriptions of what to seed the 'track maker' with. That means that it won't be a bandwidth hog for Polyphony to introduce online racing on user tracks.
I suspect they're holding back on it simply because ANY online activity is troublesome for them right now- but trust me on this one, it's not going to be difficult for them to bring it in. The raw data for the track files is extremely tiny. It's all in how you 'play' the instrument to produce original creations that are memorable and interesting for people to race, and that's what I'm going to cover here.
First off, before I even run over the details of each track style (from my rough notes, first day seriously digging into it), almost all of this comes down to controlling the track design against the background, and understanding this can save you a LOT of time digging through tracks. I need to introduce a concept some of you will be totally familiar with, and probably some won't know what it is yet, but it's so basic that everything depends on it.
Contour lines of topographic maps.
When you look at the overhead view of your track, the lines under it are not just decoration! They're a map of the terrain your track runs over, and this can tell you a huge amount about what it'll be like at a glance. ALL the little hills and valleys are represented in this map. If a track looks like it runs alongside a hill (parallel to the lines) and it's going up and down, check again- you'll find the contour line is wavy, and that shows the varying ground height along even a straight section of track.
There's a pretty wide range of terrains, all tied to their track style, and I'll get into those in individual posts- for now, let's just say that the contour lines show flat planes at different heights (if you drove along one, track is flat- if you drive across one, you're going up or down hill).
If the lines are real close together, that means STEEP, and that has immediate implications for the coolness of your track. You CAN hunt down tracks with angles in cool places, and more than that, using the corner sharpness control, you will sometimes be able to adjust the position of a corner relative to that terrain angle- for instance, moving a fall-away corner to where the inside apex drops like a rock falling off the Laguna Seca corkscrew, or picking 'complexity' settings in order to make the track go along, or across, a contour line area to do a cool thing. It's a procedural system, but there's a lot of room for fiddling, and you don't have to fiddle blindly.
Areas where the contour lines aren't showing means the EDGE of the map. You can't make a track past the edges, but you can go right up to them. Past the edges, there is no cool scenery and nothing happening. This can have uses- for instance it's very easy to make the top left corner of the Liege map look like the top of an incredibly tall mountain, because the track edges are high anyhow and if you're already at a high elevation and at the edge of the map, all there is around you is sky and it feels like being on a mountaintop.
The map will be the same terrain map, and I think it'll always be the same orientation (not rotated) but your track can land on any part of it, so keep an eye out for the features you want to use in your track.
On the topo map, DARK is HIGH altitude. LIGHT is LOW, or valleys and lowlying areas. Concentric circles getting darker and leading to a black spot means, mountain here!
The scale is very large, so remember if there's a mountaintop it's probably a bit large to jump over. Believe me, there are other opportunities for designing tracks with airtime... smaller features on the map are more likely to launch you than the big mountains.
Next, the track styles.
Toscana (Tarmac).
These tracks run about 4-5 miles, with very little change in elevation. It's rolling countryside, bucolic, kinda like Sarthe or something. The road's a 2 lane road, and it's on the narrower side. The landmarks are basically trees, the fields are golden- it's a nice vibey country drive. Because the terrain isn't very hilly, there isn't a lot specific to say about this style other than 'ooo pretty', and 'you can make narrow country roads here'.
Eifel (Circuit)
There's also a kart version that can be used for VERY tight little tracks, both for karts and for cars.
These run about 4-5 miles, 300-400 feet altitude change. The track is wide, and it's a little more hilly. On Eifel tracks, you can start to get into tricky corners and games with road camber and fall-off. The section markers are big girder things, which means you can use many sections and have a visual cue to tricky upcoming corners. Basically, the concept there is, it's fine to have an insanely difficult corner that hates you and all vehicles, but it should be easy to remember it's coming. Hard corner with a visual cue means trying to prepare your angle and speed for a section of road you can't see- that's challenge enough. Hard corner that looks just like anything else, is a whoopie cushion of track design, that will just annoy people. If they can easily recognize what's coming up, and know it is a doozy, that makes it much more interesting, especially if it's one of those demon corners that you can't see past and can barely get around with your life.
Eifel tracks tend to be wide, and there isn't a huge range of variance in the track width- not like some styles. It's worth paying attention to that but it's nothing like as huge a deal as it is with Liege.
Eifel also has another trick- you can set the weather to rainy. When you do that, the distance basically goes away, and everything becomes very vibey mists and greys, whatever the time of day. It's a very, very cool look that begs 'make tracks of me!'.
Mt Aso (Tarmac)
Welcome to your hilly playpen!
Aso tracks run about 2-3 miles, 400-500 feet altitude change, but that's seriously not conveying the full madness you can unleash. This is basically a mountainous terrain you throw tracks across, and small decisions for where the track goes can have HUGE play effects, because of the sheer steepness of the terrain. GT5 will happily lay track into all sorts of places here, and the mayhem you can wreak is outrageous, especially in terms of evil technical stuff.
There's a wind farm. If you want your track to go up near it, the track has to extend down and over to the right edge of the overall map, more downward. If you go right over to the right edge farther up on the map, you'll get a great view pointing at the wind farm. I now have an ambition, which is to make the track go right under the wind farm- I don't think that's quite possible, but it's worth searching for.
Essentially, here you keep a sharp eye for how your track interacts with the contour lines, because small changes will have huge, huge effects on what happens to drivability. The terrain is crazy hilly. If you run straights across major contour lines in the right places, you can get outrageous airtime in pretty much any vehicle. If you do that coming into a corner, you will be engineering machines of death for hapless drivers.
I'm thinking this is going to be the most fun area for the dedicated track designer- the range of possible outcomes is just huge. For instance, I wonder if you can make a fairly flat and level track in this place, by following the contour lines, and end up with switchbacks where you can see a lot of the track you're driving on...
Liege (Gravel)
Rally time! These run 5 miles or so, maybe 300 feet altitude change. There are mountains at the top left, and the mid right, of the map.
There are several key points to remember in Liege maps. There's not a lot of elevation change, so sharp hills and drops are pretty hard to find. Also, because it's a rally style, the edges of the track are so high that it's nearly impossible to see any scenery apart from the track itself- so it's important to have recognizable landmarks built into the shapes of the track.
Your big tool there is the insane, insane, INSAAANE amount of range on the Track Width control. It'll go from ridiculously wide, to country-lane narrow, and it's great to exploit. There are some great tricks- for instance, on 'slide.' I have a section that's a huge straight, swooping downwards from the mountain. It starts wide and goes increasingly narrow towards the end. The visual effect is forced perspective- going into that section feels like Dottinger Hohe. It looks incredibly deep and long, helps the sense of speed, and the next thing you know you're doing 160 mph on the narrowest road Course Maker can produce. All done with track width. You can also put a lot of space around the outside of corners you want to give an open feel- the track edges are really so high that it's nice to open the track out in some places.
Another thing- high speed gravel tracks aren't as much fun if you have to run them real technical. You could certainly go the opposite way- have a huge wide straight with a little narrow kink at the end just to be annoying- which will result in cars speeding up and having to decelerate, a lot, before the track feels like it needs you to slow down. On gravel you can build up quite a clip, but the operative word is 'build'- momentum is key to making Liege tracks fun to drive on. My 'slide.' track is pathetically easy in some respects, but it does let you keep the momentum in a big, big way, and that was the point of making it. You can do interesting sliding arcs, but quick acceleration and braking on this surface isn't going to be an interesting challenge because it basically can't happen...
Alaska (Snow)
These run 4 miles or so, 300-500 feet altitude change, which like Aso is understating the case. You can make rollercoasters here. You can make toboggan runs. There are some real interesting possibilities in the contour lines.
To the top left of the map is big mountains. Also there's smaller mountains to the bottom right- and there's some crazy messed up contour lines in there for the attentive track designer to exploit. Especially on the snow surface, you can ask impossible things of drivers- though sometimes that will just mean getting them to inch around aiming for the right line.
The mountains are rock-capped, which is plain to see. Yes, you can route track across them, but there's a catch- the engine will build a 'snow bridge' and basically cover the rock. I've run track right over the highest peak, and you couldn't see rock on it when I was done. But it produced the biggest, most screamingly insane toboggan ride imaginable. At speeds like that can generate, there's no point having any section complexity, because you're pretty much designing the rollercoaster and slamming cars into the wall will only slow them down. Like Liege, think in terms of momentum, all the more if you're using the mountains as a bobsled ride for cars. They will be panicking just from flying high into the air off the jumps- if you throw a curve at them, all that happens is they hit an invisible wall and make the turn that way, fifty feet in the air and upside down.
I'm not making that up. I'm pretty sure my Audi was about fifty feet up when I tested that theory. And upside down. And on fire
well, not that last part.
Eifel (Kart)
This is over the same terrain as Eifel, I think, but it's much, much smaller. As a result, you don't get much altitude variation, and the generated tracks aren't the same as the large Eifel, they're entirely separate generations. One notable trick you can do here, though- the track can double back so aggressively that you see the back of the scenery of the returning track from where you're at. This adds depth to the scenery in a very natural way, and gives a cue to the location of the next section of track. It does a lot for making the track not seem like user-generated content, because you get the 3D effect of having a lot of specific geometry in the middle distance.
Tokyo Bay (Kart)
Flat! Incredibly flat- but incredibly well furnished with outrageous scenery. There's huge grandstands, massive PA systems and screens everywhere you look, and the starting line has a massive Sydney Opera House-like structure. It's very 'race track style', big budget- I could see drifting tracks and car technical tracks built here as well as kart tracks. Pretty simple to build on, since there is no terrain so you can do whatever you want without concern for fitting into the terrain- it's pretty much all about the scenery here, and adjusting corner tightness etc. to control your flow. Many little section adjustments cause alterations in themselves or in adjacent sections, so it's experiment time if you need a really specific layout.
That's the overview, so far! If I work out any of the underlying principles for why the complexity controls do what they do, or why they can go beyond complex back to simple again, I'll post about it. For now, that's the track types (and how the terrain works)
I'm posting this because Course Maker is one of the things I looked forward to the most- and it's getting a lukewarm reception partly because you can't specify exact track layouts, or much of anything. This is deceptive- there's more to it than appearances would suggest. Plus, because it's totally procedural, the individual tracks are tiny in filesize, because they are just descriptions of what to seed the 'track maker' with. That means that it won't be a bandwidth hog for Polyphony to introduce online racing on user tracks.
I suspect they're holding back on it simply because ANY online activity is troublesome for them right now- but trust me on this one, it's not going to be difficult for them to bring it in. The raw data for the track files is extremely tiny. It's all in how you 'play' the instrument to produce original creations that are memorable and interesting for people to race, and that's what I'm going to cover here.
First off, before I even run over the details of each track style (from my rough notes, first day seriously digging into it), almost all of this comes down to controlling the track design against the background, and understanding this can save you a LOT of time digging through tracks. I need to introduce a concept some of you will be totally familiar with, and probably some won't know what it is yet, but it's so basic that everything depends on it.
Contour lines of topographic maps.
When you look at the overhead view of your track, the lines under it are not just decoration! They're a map of the terrain your track runs over, and this can tell you a huge amount about what it'll be like at a glance. ALL the little hills and valleys are represented in this map. If a track looks like it runs alongside a hill (parallel to the lines) and it's going up and down, check again- you'll find the contour line is wavy, and that shows the varying ground height along even a straight section of track.
There's a pretty wide range of terrains, all tied to their track style, and I'll get into those in individual posts- for now, let's just say that the contour lines show flat planes at different heights (if you drove along one, track is flat- if you drive across one, you're going up or down hill).
If the lines are real close together, that means STEEP, and that has immediate implications for the coolness of your track. You CAN hunt down tracks with angles in cool places, and more than that, using the corner sharpness control, you will sometimes be able to adjust the position of a corner relative to that terrain angle- for instance, moving a fall-away corner to where the inside apex drops like a rock falling off the Laguna Seca corkscrew, or picking 'complexity' settings in order to make the track go along, or across, a contour line area to do a cool thing. It's a procedural system, but there's a lot of room for fiddling, and you don't have to fiddle blindly.
Areas where the contour lines aren't showing means the EDGE of the map. You can't make a track past the edges, but you can go right up to them. Past the edges, there is no cool scenery and nothing happening. This can have uses- for instance it's very easy to make the top left corner of the Liege map look like the top of an incredibly tall mountain, because the track edges are high anyhow and if you're already at a high elevation and at the edge of the map, all there is around you is sky and it feels like being on a mountaintop.
The map will be the same terrain map, and I think it'll always be the same orientation (not rotated) but your track can land on any part of it, so keep an eye out for the features you want to use in your track.
On the topo map, DARK is HIGH altitude. LIGHT is LOW, or valleys and lowlying areas. Concentric circles getting darker and leading to a black spot means, mountain here!
The scale is very large, so remember if there's a mountaintop it's probably a bit large to jump over. Believe me, there are other opportunities for designing tracks with airtime... smaller features on the map are more likely to launch you than the big mountains.
Next, the track styles.
Toscana (Tarmac).
These tracks run about 4-5 miles, with very little change in elevation. It's rolling countryside, bucolic, kinda like Sarthe or something. The road's a 2 lane road, and it's on the narrower side. The landmarks are basically trees, the fields are golden- it's a nice vibey country drive. Because the terrain isn't very hilly, there isn't a lot specific to say about this style other than 'ooo pretty', and 'you can make narrow country roads here'.
Eifel (Circuit)
There's also a kart version that can be used for VERY tight little tracks, both for karts and for cars.
These run about 4-5 miles, 300-400 feet altitude change. The track is wide, and it's a little more hilly. On Eifel tracks, you can start to get into tricky corners and games with road camber and fall-off. The section markers are big girder things, which means you can use many sections and have a visual cue to tricky upcoming corners. Basically, the concept there is, it's fine to have an insanely difficult corner that hates you and all vehicles, but it should be easy to remember it's coming. Hard corner with a visual cue means trying to prepare your angle and speed for a section of road you can't see- that's challenge enough. Hard corner that looks just like anything else, is a whoopie cushion of track design, that will just annoy people. If they can easily recognize what's coming up, and know it is a doozy, that makes it much more interesting, especially if it's one of those demon corners that you can't see past and can barely get around with your life.
Eifel tracks tend to be wide, and there isn't a huge range of variance in the track width- not like some styles. It's worth paying attention to that but it's nothing like as huge a deal as it is with Liege.
Eifel also has another trick- you can set the weather to rainy. When you do that, the distance basically goes away, and everything becomes very vibey mists and greys, whatever the time of day. It's a very, very cool look that begs 'make tracks of me!'.
Mt Aso (Tarmac)
Welcome to your hilly playpen!
Aso tracks run about 2-3 miles, 400-500 feet altitude change, but that's seriously not conveying the full madness you can unleash. This is basically a mountainous terrain you throw tracks across, and small decisions for where the track goes can have HUGE play effects, because of the sheer steepness of the terrain. GT5 will happily lay track into all sorts of places here, and the mayhem you can wreak is outrageous, especially in terms of evil technical stuff.
There's a wind farm. If you want your track to go up near it, the track has to extend down and over to the right edge of the overall map, more downward. If you go right over to the right edge farther up on the map, you'll get a great view pointing at the wind farm. I now have an ambition, which is to make the track go right under the wind farm- I don't think that's quite possible, but it's worth searching for.
Essentially, here you keep a sharp eye for how your track interacts with the contour lines, because small changes will have huge, huge effects on what happens to drivability. The terrain is crazy hilly. If you run straights across major contour lines in the right places, you can get outrageous airtime in pretty much any vehicle. If you do that coming into a corner, you will be engineering machines of death for hapless drivers.
I'm thinking this is going to be the most fun area for the dedicated track designer- the range of possible outcomes is just huge. For instance, I wonder if you can make a fairly flat and level track in this place, by following the contour lines, and end up with switchbacks where you can see a lot of the track you're driving on...
Liege (Gravel)
Rally time! These run 5 miles or so, maybe 300 feet altitude change. There are mountains at the top left, and the mid right, of the map.
There are several key points to remember in Liege maps. There's not a lot of elevation change, so sharp hills and drops are pretty hard to find. Also, because it's a rally style, the edges of the track are so high that it's nearly impossible to see any scenery apart from the track itself- so it's important to have recognizable landmarks built into the shapes of the track.
Your big tool there is the insane, insane, INSAAANE amount of range on the Track Width control. It'll go from ridiculously wide, to country-lane narrow, and it's great to exploit. There are some great tricks- for instance, on 'slide.' I have a section that's a huge straight, swooping downwards from the mountain. It starts wide and goes increasingly narrow towards the end. The visual effect is forced perspective- going into that section feels like Dottinger Hohe. It looks incredibly deep and long, helps the sense of speed, and the next thing you know you're doing 160 mph on the narrowest road Course Maker can produce. All done with track width. You can also put a lot of space around the outside of corners you want to give an open feel- the track edges are really so high that it's nice to open the track out in some places.
Another thing- high speed gravel tracks aren't as much fun if you have to run them real technical. You could certainly go the opposite way- have a huge wide straight with a little narrow kink at the end just to be annoying- which will result in cars speeding up and having to decelerate, a lot, before the track feels like it needs you to slow down. On gravel you can build up quite a clip, but the operative word is 'build'- momentum is key to making Liege tracks fun to drive on. My 'slide.' track is pathetically easy in some respects, but it does let you keep the momentum in a big, big way, and that was the point of making it. You can do interesting sliding arcs, but quick acceleration and braking on this surface isn't going to be an interesting challenge because it basically can't happen...
Alaska (Snow)
These run 4 miles or so, 300-500 feet altitude change, which like Aso is understating the case. You can make rollercoasters here. You can make toboggan runs. There are some real interesting possibilities in the contour lines.
To the top left of the map is big mountains. Also there's smaller mountains to the bottom right- and there's some crazy messed up contour lines in there for the attentive track designer to exploit. Especially on the snow surface, you can ask impossible things of drivers- though sometimes that will just mean getting them to inch around aiming for the right line.
The mountains are rock-capped, which is plain to see. Yes, you can route track across them, but there's a catch- the engine will build a 'snow bridge' and basically cover the rock. I've run track right over the highest peak, and you couldn't see rock on it when I was done. But it produced the biggest, most screamingly insane toboggan ride imaginable. At speeds like that can generate, there's no point having any section complexity, because you're pretty much designing the rollercoaster and slamming cars into the wall will only slow them down. Like Liege, think in terms of momentum, all the more if you're using the mountains as a bobsled ride for cars. They will be panicking just from flying high into the air off the jumps- if you throw a curve at them, all that happens is they hit an invisible wall and make the turn that way, fifty feet in the air and upside down.
I'm not making that up. I'm pretty sure my Audi was about fifty feet up when I tested that theory. And upside down. And on fire
well, not that last part.Eifel (Kart)
This is over the same terrain as Eifel, I think, but it's much, much smaller. As a result, you don't get much altitude variation, and the generated tracks aren't the same as the large Eifel, they're entirely separate generations. One notable trick you can do here, though- the track can double back so aggressively that you see the back of the scenery of the returning track from where you're at. This adds depth to the scenery in a very natural way, and gives a cue to the location of the next section of track. It does a lot for making the track not seem like user-generated content, because you get the 3D effect of having a lot of specific geometry in the middle distance.
Tokyo Bay (Kart)
Flat! Incredibly flat- but incredibly well furnished with outrageous scenery. There's huge grandstands, massive PA systems and screens everywhere you look, and the starting line has a massive Sydney Opera House-like structure. It's very 'race track style', big budget- I could see drifting tracks and car technical tracks built here as well as kart tracks. Pretty simple to build on, since there is no terrain so you can do whatever you want without concern for fitting into the terrain- it's pretty much all about the scenery here, and adjusting corner tightness etc. to control your flow. Many little section adjustments cause alterations in themselves or in adjacent sections, so it's experiment time if you need a really specific layout.
That's the overview, so far! If I work out any of the underlying principles for why the complexity controls do what they do, or why they can go beyond complex back to simple again, I'll post about it. For now, that's the track types (and how the terrain works)
Last edited:
