FreeGameDev

Hi,
In the last days I've been creating a new track situated in an underground factory. The track itself is pretty much finished, but the different rooms could still be filled with some more stuff and some other things could still improved to look better.
Just try it and give feedback

Hi,

nice start. I think the main issue is letting the player know where to go, I got lost a few times and once ended up going in the reverse direction.

WOW

1) You used lightmap (we are only 3 artists using them)
2) You used textures from our existing track
3) You made various cool animations

Congratulation, I love your track , I like the idea of a factory with machines etc. However as Auria saids you need to add some arrows to guide the player.

I will probably adapt some cool things in the future for our mine , like the green glowing liquid (maybe nolok grinds green glowing crystals to make a green glowing liquid). It can be interesting inside the mine to see an industrial process (An excavator drills the crystals, then they are ground into a liquid and mixed with lava ^^.

However you can improve your track.
Add a "water effect" to the green liquid (choose water shader in material option)
Avoid 100% black, you loose information.
Add some effects like billboard around lanterns, give them the illusion that they are emitting light .
Add an animation to the texture of the steam to give the illusion that the steam is coming from the pipe
You have a mine cart inside a wall it's unrealistic.

one small idea:

you can use emit to add a glow-effect to glowing surfaces like the orange one in your second image
how it works, you can see it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y9pQKKNYnU
then you have to bake lightmaps with this emit-material

or you also can add some colored lamps for this, if you don't want to use emit

This track is good but i agree with Auria. I got lost a few times.

I agree with samuncle for the light.

Thanks for this feedback.
Yes, I have already planned to add some kind of signs to guide the player.
The Minecart in the wall was a test to be animated on the railtrack, but it didn't workand iforgot to remove it from export. i thougt of something like the minecart coming out of a tunnel in the wall, falling down to the track and following the player through the tunnel. Well and now it got stuck in the wall. But i will fix that.
The steam is also supposed to be animated but for some reason it didn't work.
There are already some lamps around the glowing lava. But I think this emit technique is better in that place.
And I have to admit its a bit dark in the cave, but I couldn't think ofany realistic source of light exceptlava in the cave. Maybe torches would fit but the lamps are definitely not the right thing in there.
I also thoug about moving the crates around a little bit to give the illusion of stacks made by humans and not these artificial perfect stacks.

The steam should be working now, and I've also added the minecart to follow the railtrack. the lighting is optimised in some places, but could still be improved. At least there are no more completely black areas. All the Lanterns are fitted with halos now and another lava lake has been installed to guarantee lighting in the cave passage. Unfortunately the signs to guide the player are still missing as I couldn't think of any fitting theme to design them. You're welcome to post your own suggeestions for a nice guiding system.

You can make it a bit brighter, then it should be easier to see where you should drive, you can add some more lamps (like torches on the walls)

the room with the minecart is very bright compared to the rest

and i think that the floors could be a bit wider

when i drive near the green thing (see image), i "explode", i don't drive over it (i don't touch it with the kart)
i noticed that the ai had problem on some parts of the track

The problem you mentioned should be fixed now. And i rebaked all of the lightmaps, so the track is brighter now. In one place there is sign now to guide the player, because it was not quite clear which way to go in that place. I think the track is reaching a final stage now.

I tested this track today.
Honestly, it is absolutely beautiful. Magnificent. While coherent with the theme of the underground factory.
Also, it is challenging. ^^

Still, this track suffers IMO from 3 things : -something very easy to change : the item box just before the line can be taken by the last karts at start if enough players. Since it will often give things like cake or bowling ball, and you have everyone right in front of you... This item box should be replaced or deleted.
-maybe a little bit too much nitro (at least, that can be catched by one player). Still, we'll see how 0.8.1 and future version will exactly handle nitro : my test on 0.8 may give inaccurate feeling about it.
-and the main problem, the difference between the two paths in term of time.In tests in trial, I made a 27:28 lap with the right path while using 4 zipper (I would have done around 26" without error, but nitro + zipper is so fast than not doing error appears extremely challenging). And after, I made a 23:57 lap with the left path. I'm not sure if with zippers or not, say with. We have here 10% of time less per lap when choosing the left path !
Two paths should be always nearly equivalent in term of time, accounting than IA will choose the one to take randomly and than if one is clearly better, human won't have choice if he want to guarantee the win.

Also, a little short at my taste, but this is minor and it is veryyyyyyy long in comparison to Oliver's Math Class.

I changed the second path, now it is a bit longer (maybe a bit too long, but it's hard to find the right balance though) and I removed some nitro on the other path. Should be more balanced now.

I love your track. It's beautiful. As I said before I will merge many ideas from this track to the new mine.

Visually the track is pretty good. However, it's a bit difficult to drive in some places, and the level itself needs a bit more of light. Look at the 0.8.x version of Fort Magma, for example. Some more signalizations (such as arrows) in some places (for example, the box room or the entrance to the lava zone) would be welcome as well.

I placed the track in the tracks folder and it doesn't show up for some reason, I even created a folder and named it.

This track hasn't been updated for more than 2 years now. "Older" tracks (before 0.9) don't work with the current version of STK because the engine developed so deeply.
Unless someone has the time to update this track to the new engine there's no way of getting it running on STK 0.9.

The track was working for me in 0.9.3. Then I updated to 1.1. It still works, but all the textures look different. In particular, the walls are all now grey stone, like bricks - I don't recall what they were before, but it was different (I think black or brown, no texture; not completely sure).

However, today I found that part of the floor is invisible now. It wasn't yesterday. So not fully reliable in 1.1; not sure what to do about that. (It's the part right after the wooden tunnel, where the path curves to the right with some banana peels in the way and then there is a speedup arrow that launches your cart forward.)

Another thing, the wooden floors in one part of the level were smooth in 0.9.3 but in 1.1 they are EXTREMELY slow to drive over as the kart bumps up and down. Texture looks completely different; in 0.9.3 it was just gray and looked kind of like abstract art. In 1.1 they look like wooden crates. So I think it's something about how textures are handled that has changed.