Ah, Snowdust Valley. One of the launch tracks in ArcadePak v1.0's lineup back in December 2019, and one that I managed to see as years went by to become a beloved track with players despite being at relatively early phase of my mapping journey due to how I had made a simple yet pretty effective track in fun factor. I currently don't have at hand screenshots of when I was porting the track to Ring Racers, so I offer you a video of me long ago playing the track with Kart playerbots - so you can see how the track looked back in SRB2Kart.
As a bonus fact from when it was being made back then, the track originally had started with the tentative name of "White Wonderland" to follow on this snow track likely if not being tentatively planned to use White Land music from F-Zero - but in retrospective it was good that I eventually thought a more unique name...and I found the song I use now from having played the DOOM mod Reelism :]
It was natural to want to bring it back to Ring Racers sooner or later, although at first I was approaching with a whole remake-from-scratch idea based off a 2021/2022 prototype I made with SRB2 and UDMF for the future Ring Racers release [two years later lmao], and while I initially tried porting the original track, at first it seemed like a lot of broken stuff to work around...unless I revisited the idea again and saw that there actually wasn't an awful lot of broken things- just the textures and having to use UZB sometimes to see the legacy vertex slopes to know where I had to tinker in that one big turn.
I ended up retexturing most of the entire track with Blizzard Peaks textures, as well as using a Blue Mountain offroad texture with brightness lowered to look darker [you can raise or lower a sector's texture brightness without affecting the sector's brightness itself- very handy] and ended up...quite damn impressive to be honest. A pretty simple job in theory, but in practice made the track turn into quite the looker compared to the original Kart version.
The track originally had kept almost all the geometry intact, including that one weird downward slope in the spiral before the final turn - at first I was taking the idea of another player to make it a drop for Triangle Dash, but eventually I thought that it would be easier for beginners and better for players overall to have the slope smoothed out instead. I had got briefly frustrated trying to smooth it out properly because the first attempt was also janky and ended up closing Discord to rollback to an older version, focus and try again.
Some minutes later cleaning up the sectors first and then doing a few more splits to have smoother slopes...eventually I got the smooth spiral downwards done and looking fantastic.
It's probably something you always hear in certain improvement videos and such, because it is very basic yet key advice [cause its obvious in hindisght], but it sure felt like unplugging from stormy clouds over your head, sit down and then let your ingenuity figure it out naturally works like a wonder to get things done.
shoutouts to eldog