RPG Track building - techniques, features & resources

There are some features and techniques around track building that can only be learned by long enduring self-testing or by other's experience - and as information are sometimes hard to find, I'm trying to cover here some things that are especially related to RPG track building.

But first of all we would like to announce that we now offer a zip-archive with a collection of all mods we list in the 'Mods'-section. If you already have many mods saved in your "...skins/stadium/mod"-folder then it will be easier downloading the files individually from the mods section, but for newcomers this 900mb big file will be useful both for racing and track building.
Many thanks to fallen.soul for hosting the file:
www.vinummusik.de/Trackmania/RPG_Mods.zip

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The first thing I wanna show is how to control ColorFX-effects in the MediaTracker for far- and near settings, like Enai Siaion did on his track 'Ex Gehenna', creating a fog-like atmosphere. Hageldave already made a very complete video tutorial about this a few months ago, so I recommend watching this:

Advanced Color FX - Fog Tut from dave hagel on Vimeo.

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If you are familiar with RPG tracks, you probably already have seen Platform blocks that are cut off at their bottom end to form a gap one can drive through. In case you don't know how these can be created, here's the explanation:

The first step is to create a heightened dirt area and place the platform block ("StadiumCircuitBase") directly on the heightened dirt, which would look like this:

Save the track and open it in ChallengeEdit (Download CE). Search for the block "StadiumCircuitBase", click it and then increase the Z-value by your preferred amount (it will raise the block).Click on "save block modifications to memory" and then save the .Gbx-file. When having done everything correct, you should see a shortened platformblock as shown below.

An even easier way of achieving this effect is to place the platformblock at the actual designated area and change it's Variation2 in ChallengeEdit to 16. The platformblock will then be shortened even without being on the ground. If you don't know how to change a block's variation, read the tutorials below.

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Water blocks are very often used in RPG's but they have the negative side-effect that it's not possible to build under them and are hard to modify. I will detail a quite easy method of dealing with this.

Instead of taking the water blocks from a stadiumpool, we simply put other blocks on the exact same location we want the water to be and then transform the blocks into stadiumwater. Any block will work but I recommend picking one that you will later never use in your track, in my case the finishline-block.

Load the track now into ChallengeEdit and select the first "StadiumRoadMainFinishLine"-entry. The first block of one block type that has been placed in the editor (and is thus also shown first in the ChallengeEdit-block's list) is always the primary block for this specific block type which is marked with a "-P" before it's name (look picture below).
When having selected the primary block, you can now click the Unlock-Button below the block list and select a different block type (in our case StadiumWater). Pressing on "Save block modifications to memory" will then change all Finishline-Blocks to Stadiumwater.

With this result after having saved the .Gbx:

If you are now not pleased for example with the pipe that goes along under the water or want to add blocks under the water, you just have to reverse the process and turn the primary "StadiumWater" into "StadiumRoadMainFinishLine".

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This process of transforming blocks can also be used to create dirt areas in the air very effectively.
Here's how my example looks before and after some editing in ChallengeEdit.

The end result is a natural-looking dirt area consisting of some dirt hills and flat dirt. For the flat dirt I placed Finishline-blocks and transformed them in ChallengeEdit into "StadiumDirt". The dirt hills I created by putting "StadiumPlatformLoopStart"-blocks on their location and transformed them into "StadiumDirtHill".

The problem though is that the dirthill-block comes in three different shapes. Just transforming a primary block into dirthill will produce the same shape for all dirthills, as can be seen in my example:

For this problem ChallengeEdit also offers a solution, the variations.
When having selected a block, at the lower right side of ChallengeEdit will appear four boxes with the according texts "Variation 1", ..2 etc. By default, all values in the boxes are at zero.
Because in the previous picture the variations of the dirt hills haven't been changed yet, they are in the shape of Variation {0,0,0,0}. For block 109 this shape is already correct so we don't need to change it, only rotating the block is necessary. By changing Variation 1 to "9" and Variation 2 to "16", we get the curved shape of the dirthill which we need for the blocks 105 and 112. The third shape (not curved) can be created by changing Variation 1 to "5" and Variation 2 to "16" which we need for all the blocks that are left.

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The last thing I want to show also has something to do with the transform-feature of ChallengeEdit - but with the end result of mixing blocks ingame.

For this we first need a large area of blocks, all of the same type. In the example I'm going to use the FinishLine-Block again. The blocks need to cover the area completely without spaces. After having done that, save the track as a copy so you can later use it as a template. Start adding blocks over the area now. It looks like this in principle:

Change the primary FinishLine-Block now into some other block in ChallengeEdit ("StadiumSculptB" is probably best suited for this) the same way I already explained in the other tutorials. The StadiumScluptB-Blocks are mixed with the other blocks now and after deleting the Sculpture-Blocks, you can freely mix new blocks into the already existing blocks inside the editor. The blocks that were mixed with the Sculpture-Blocks always stay mixable, so even if you added new blocks to them, you can delete them and add different blocks.

This technique is mostly only useful for experimenting with blockmixes, not for making regular blockmixes in a track project as it is more time-consumptive. But the advantage when experimenting is that you can always test the mixes directly in the editor and can change them directly if needed.

For more detailed information about Blockmixing and ChallengeEdit, visit TM-Creative

Any questions left? Ask away in the comment section :-)