Conversion of maps to gravel and dirt

I've been working on a rally pacenote thing, and I've noticed that @el_ferrito's conversion of East Coast USA into a full dirt track (which I've written pacentoes for) is just fantastic for rallying. I'm also guessing, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that conversions of that type should be relatively low effort.

I have no idea how to do that or, most importantly, how to do that right. Also I'm working on my pacenotes mod anyway so, I guess I'm just asking if anyone's interested in doing the full gravel/dirt/snow rally versions of vanilla stages like Italy, JRI, or small island.

 

Oh it was definitely one of the most low-effort efforts I've done.

But all the maps are slightly different, so I couldn't just do the same across the board.

I will take another look at the others though as I've learnt a lot since then.

Any preferences as a starting one?

Also, I look forward to trying the pacenotes!

 

That's awesome!

For vanilla maps, I've already written pacenotes for tarmac rallies for Italy, small island, Utah, jungle rock island and East Coast USA (which you've converted already).

That means that if you convert any of those to gravel, I can simply slap the pacenotes on top of them with minimal changes, so, low effort all around!

I'd say JRI full gravel would be just awesome. If you want have fun with it and mix it up you could convert some of the big features like the port and the small villages to something you find more suitable for rally, like big rock formations, heavy mud zones (Kenya style), or whatever.

You can load up my prefab with the waypoints to see where my rallyes go, so you can concentrate whatever interesting feature you want to add along the Rally route. But a simple conversion with minimal change would be awesome regardless.

Maybe have a go at my rallyes in the vanilla maps and get an idea of which conversions you may want to do.

Cheers!

 

I've created the map. Plays well so far. I've done a bit of a more involved way of doing it, but nothing too major. The only issue I have at present is that the map is too large to upload to repository (by loads). I've made a direct copy of Jungle Rock Island so its the same size as that map. I could spend a bit of time making it loads smaller. Which I think I should do really... but at least the proof of concept is there.
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Also, I've gone fir dirt, as it already had all the relevant textures, etc. and you know... lazy...

 

Man, that's what I'm talking about! So awesome, I really hope you find a way to get some version of this into the repo.

Dirt is awesome! If you're feeling fancy you could add some muddy sections here and there but this is great regardless.

You could remove all guardrails and big concrete structures, maybe except bridges lol. I think it would be great for immersion and may help out with bringing the size down. Also, probably very low effort as you can probably just search "guardrail" in the scene tree hit delete, or something like that. You could also remove the guardrails from your East Coast map if you like the result.

Just in general, this is obviously not a map for exploration (it's a vanilla map lol, people know it already) so as far as I'm concerned you can ax a lot of stuff that people would never get to see anyway when rallying the main roads. For example you could remove the docks and that abandoned resort thing. Maybe convert the port into a sandy beach if you feel like it? Maybe It'll bring the size down a bit but I'm not sure by how much.

In any case, if you manage to upload it as-is (i heard mod have made exceptions in the past?), I'm still happy and will do pacenotes for it.

Thank you!

 

Ah yes. Car Killer is pretty much the sole reason my Somerset map ever made it out.

Absolute hero.

I'll see if I can get it uploaded this week, then start on the others.

 

Right. Took a bit of messing around, but I got the file down to around 300mb. I've submitted it, so if no issues, it should be live in a few days.

 

Can't wait to try it! Thanks!