When I first started building a broom racing track, I did it in a similar way to how you build a roller coaster in roller coaster tycoon. Which is building it out from one end until you connected to the other But this didn't feel right. It felt too constraining and made boring tracks, it was also hard to plan a more complex 3d route. I needed people to have an easy time building a track worth training their students, or racing students from other schools.
So I redid it, with the ability to place the tracks peice by peice, connected or not. It feels a lot nicer and it's easier to build complex routes. It also allows for the path to go separate ways, widen and shrink. This makes it feel less like a static ride, and allows for the AI riders to make decisions between paths, and control the possibility of a collision between riders. It also made me write some code for determining if an area is fenced in, which will be useful for the care of magical beasts class I want to work on at some future date.
So I'm working on adding uphill tracks, narrow tracks, hard turns and easy banks, tracks over water and through forest, bits of track with traps or challenges for the riders and adding them to the game. Kinda what I was working on a month before, but with a much nicer engine. It should produce great tracks for exciting races! So pretty good progress.
What do you guys think?
