Now that the car handling issues have been addressed I no longer have to compensate when designing the course. This will allow me to have more freedom in how the track is designed vertically - I want it to be interesting and all the most interesting racetracks in games I play have lots of hills in them. Maybe i'm just a hill person, I don't know.
Anyway, heres an initial sketch that was scribbled instead of paying attention in University a few weeks back:
I quite liked the feature of the viaducts in this, so I spent a little while refining the design after looking at Formula 1 courses online such as these. This is what I came up with:
The track is broken down into sections (for visual design later on), and the lighter sections of track are alternative routes that a player may take (the large grey lines that intersect the course are train tracks - only certain sections of which will be accessible). These may or may not be advantageous and will hopefully add a small amount of exploration in the game to increase longevity and variety while not detracting too much from the racing element.
I plan to use the above image as a reference in Maya, construct a rough track, export it to the UDK and test how the vehicle reacts to the slopes and turns of the course and adjust them accordingly before creating the final models.
