How to build Custom Tracks

I’m not familiar with Bob’s Track Builder. Which values do you get from that?

besides, in your description you write that we should start with a straight piece of track.
when building the nardo oval i found that it works with a curve as well.
can i assume that its safe to use curves as the first piece of track or do you think it may cause any kind of bugs?
furthermore i’ve also found out we can use decimal fractions for example in the banking.
do you reckon they also safe to use?

thanks for your help!

I cannot guarantee that a curve at the beginning works, but usually it should. Just try it out, if it doesn’t, add a short straight, no one will notive that. :slight_smile:

Decimals for banking, corner radius and angle, straight length, tameness factor and slopes will work, yes.

So I was thinking about building the Nürburgring, but I see that you use whole numbers for pixel/meter. Is it possible to have the image be larger then 1280x720, or can you have pixel/meter be decimals? If not, any ideas on when you will be increasing the image size that can be loaded and generate it to fit to screen?

EDIT: I am an idiot, just looked over how you have it set in the script and realized you already have a fraction set. Starting my work on the Nürburgring now.

I haven’t tried anything else than 1280x720, maybe different sizes are scaled automatically to that size (?).

I hope you want to make the GP track of the Nürburgring and not the Nordschleife (that one already exists). :wink:

Well I was planning on doing the Nordschleife, I don’t see it on the forums although I haven’t dug through too much. I guess I’ll just be building the GP.

I’ve done the Nordschleife but called it “Green Hell”. It’s available for download in the test track sharing forum.

Wow that looks fantastic, Great work! and thank you. I’ll have to work on the GP.

how exactly does the rounding the track length to the nearest 0.2m work? Is the rounding applied on the 2D lengths and then the lengths are converted into 3D lengths which take into account their slope, or are the original 2D lengths converted into 3D lengths and then rounded to the nearest 0.2m?

edit
Also, do the distances to the split timers use the 2D length or the 3D length

[quote=“Reaper392”]how exactly does the rounding the track length to the nearest 0.2m work? Is the rounding applied on the 2D lengths and then the lengths are converted into 3D lengths which take into account their slope, or are the original 2D lengths converted into 3D lengths and then rounded to the nearest 0.2m?

edit
Also, do the distances to the split timers use the 2D length or the 3D length[/quote]

I can’t explain the .2m part, but the distances in the track editor use the 3D length. The 2D length is end-to-end regardless of height changes. The 3D length accounts for actual travel distance due to height changes.

[quote=“07CobaltGirl”]

[quote=“Reaper392”]how exactly does the rounding the track length to the nearest 0.2m work? Is the rounding applied on the 2D lengths and then the lengths are converted into 3D lengths which take into account their slope, or are the original 2D lengths converted into 3D lengths and then rounded to the nearest 0.2m?

edit
Also, do the distances to the split timers use the 2D length or the 3D length[/quote]

I can’t explain the .2m part, but the distances in the track editor use the 3D length. The 2D length is end-to-end regardless of height changes. The 3D length accounts for actual travel distance due to height changes.[/quote]

Thanks for that, but sadly it doesn’t really help me because I’m making my own track editor (just as a technical exercise, I almost certainly wont release it unless I can get one of my very ambitious ideas working). I need to know how the rounding works so I can incorporate the same rounding in my own program.

In Automation you define the 2D track map with the first 3 lines of the track definition. So if you say a straight is 100 meters long, it will be 100 meters in 2D projection, no matter if it is sloped or not. The simulation then calculates the actual length of the straight, so a 100 meter straight with a slope angle of 10% is 100.5 meters long. It then calculates the car’s position in 0.2 meter steps. So if it gets to 100.4 meters, it is still on the straight and will do another step on the straight before moving to the next track segment. So the car will be on the straight for 100.6 meters and then go to the next segment. It resets the distance counter at the beginning of the next segment (it starts counting from 0 again), so the 0.1 meters extra will not be carried over to the next segment and not be added to it’s length.
So if you make a program which plots the track map in 2D, the map will be very slightly different if you ignore the slopes. The Matlab file I sent you actually does that, but it’s usually not a big problem and can hardly be noticed. If you want to be 100% precise, you have to calculate the slopes in and make the 3D driving line and then only take the 2D projection.

Thanks, that’s exactly what I needed to know.

Is anyone else having issues with custom tracks not lining up correctly?

Ahh, is that still going on as of B1415? I’ll poke Caswal about it if so.

Yes. I did the adjusting it by 23px to make it work, but it makes it a chore to build tracks with the editor.

There is a new B1416 optional update ( viewtopic.php?f=13&t=4731 ). Should fix the issue, and has a couple of other little changes.

Track releases will resume over the next week. :smiley:

I wrote a small viewer so you can see your tracks path without having to load up automation. It’s not perfect, it doesn’t take into consideration automations turn angle error. If anyone has a nice algorithm for that, i’ll ad it in, otherwise that’s a lot of testing I would need to do.

Just drag your track folder, such as “Example Track” onto the TrackViewer.bat, and it’ll load up the preview. I noticed some minor (yet unsolved) glitches where the path might disappear for a short ways, and there might be small gaps between the end of a curve and the start of the next bit of track (I can fix that later). I can post the source if anyone wants it, it’s all java code. I may consider redoing it in C/SDL later on. But I want to get all the bugs figured out first.


AutomationTrackViewer.zip (310 KB)

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Awesome! That will be a MASSIVE help. This is a particularly valuable service you’ve done, especially for more complicated future efforts.