Celestial Speedway v1.0

After exactly 251 days of work (or 8 months and 8 days), Celestial Speedway has finally been released.

My first ideas for what would eventually become this track happened when I was playing Halogen Highway. In my opinion, Halogen Highway is one of the most beautiful tracks to be released, but there are definitely a few places where the visuals could be updated. My idea was to make a mostly visual update to it, including updating lighting and some other details, however I eventually decided I would be better off using the theme as inspiration for a different layout, since I don't like the gameplay of Halogen that much. I made sure to keep the theming elements of the rainbow road inspired sections interacting with real world sections.

Throughout the development process of the track many changes have been made. Some of the most notable changes have to do with the rainbow road geometry and the ending city section. Roughly a month into the development I realized that the rainbow road sections were too awkward with karts and outside drifting bikes, so I remake the geometry for almost all of those sections. This new geometry is much better, however, since it has dynamic, u-shaped banking and generally makes the whole track feel much faster paced and more satisfying. Interestingly, there's a good chance that the road I made here would be the best road I ever make with Sketchup, since by this point I've switched to using Blender for creating road. The other area with major changes is the city section. My original idea was to have 2 separate shortcuts at the end (a 1 shroom and 2 shroom cut), however I quickly realized that the 1 shroom saved considerably more time than the 2 shroom, which actually lost time in its initial state. I played around with many ideas for how to fix this, including nerfing the one shroom, turning the one shroom into 2 separate shortcuts, making the 2 shroom take a tighter line, adding a three shroom shortcut, using a volcano piece, and more, but by the end I decided to remove the 2 shroom cut entirely and use the nerfed version of the one shroom cut. I figured that more complexity in this section isn't needed, especially with the addition of the shroomless sidewalk route.

One of the areas that I'm most proud of with this track has got to be the lighting. I had the idea of making the rainbow road glow onto other surfaces quite early on in the development of the track, and I'm happy that I was successfully able to translate it in game. I also like what I did with the rainbow road texture in general, combining a few MK8 normal maps to make the texture, and adding custom mipmaps to make it appear to shift as you drive by. Unfortunately, the lightmap baking in the last few days of making the track did not go very well, mostly in the city section. I had to redo the lightmap a few times, including using texture paint in the end because there were some things I was unable to fix with different bake settings. Despite this, I still think that area's lighting looks pretty good.

As for what's next, I have a few plans. Firstly, I would like to release a version of GBA Luigi Circuit and make a visual update to 3DS Rainbow Road. I would also like to start work on a new remake, which I'm hoping to make entirely in Blender. Aside from those, it's also very likely that some sort of bugfix update for this track will be happening soon, although it probably won't change too much about the gameplay or theming.

Thanks for watching!

Wiki page: http://wiki.tockdom.com/wiki/Celestia...
Direct download: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachment...