Don't worry, the music is no longer as loud as...many have been telling me it used to be for some reason.
One of ArcadePak's first hits, and by that I mean a BIG HIT, this racetrack in a snowy valley with big turns and straights to catch up with tethering still has a lot to offer even after 5 years.
A track friendly with beginners, but with a lot of room for expert challengers to have head-to-head races.
If you get the First Blood boost, go wild and sliptide through that first big turn for advantage.
Got an Orbinaut or Jawz on the first item set? Wait and see if you can hit someone in the big sloped turn after the jump- you might send them straight into a pit :]
If you are playing normally, there's ring capsules and Orbi capsules over the fan area- note you can cancel the fastfall if doing it over the fan.
Go for a blue or rainbow drift in the final spiral
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.
So 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.
A weird tale is that at first, the harsh slope before the spiral at the end was pointed out to be...shoddy. 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. However, initially I was getting too worked up about the way I was triangulating things and getting asked about why it looked so weird until I said [okay screw it] and gave myself a timeout from the browser to rollback to an older version 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 a thing that 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.
Thanks for reading!
If you are here from the video version, then I'm glad that you checked this out :)
If this seems familiar to you, then it is because you might also have read the original version of SRB2Kart The Documentary on my old Wordpress site- what you just read is a considerably condensed version using the video version as a base (as I was working on it concurrently as I decided to move the article to this site).
There's already a video version of the Part 2 of this published [it should appear at the end of Part 1], so you can check that out if you want to follow on what's next already with visual reference and everything.
You can still read the old, longer but maybe outdated in some areas version of Part 2 in my Wordpress- although I hope that you have adblockers because I don't get a single penny from that site deciding to slap ads in a few places because of the free plan. I might eventually get to finishing a written version of Part 2 to share here though now that I have this new layout that makes me feel better about writing in this place.