MirrorWorld

Welcome TrackmaniaExchange,

today (12th September 2020) is my 🥳 25. birthday 🥳 and is there any better way to celebrate it other than with a new track? Of course not, so here is a new Track, a "sequel" of DreamWorld called:

MirrorWorld

However, I actually don't make sequels of maps...
, because making sequels that just take a theme and copy it with another route is something I dislike and that's why I never reuse themed scenery. However I still consider this as a sequel, but not directly from DreamWorld. More of an entire genre called: Abstract Worlds

This one is my 2nd creation of an abstract world, but this time with a huge "Mirror" and the entire map is mirrored around it. I personally think this idea is quite unique and stunning to look at and I hope you feel the same.

Now to some standard details about the track:

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Estimated building time:
If I would estimate the pure building time, I would say I spent around 50 hours. A huge part of the time I was spending on the trees, bc they also have to mirror. So I had to place them in Freemode and the 2nd one at the exacte same place on the mirror part.

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🎢 Track Deskription:
The track itself is ~40sec long with platform transitions in some tilted positions.
90% tarmac and 10% black support blocks
Some slight MediaTracker to give some atmosphere and ofc the usual GPS.

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🏅 Author Medal:
The Author medal is driven by me and I know that I have set a pretty decent time. I hunted it for like an hour because my goal was to get sub 40 and I made it. I wonder what else is possible on this track.

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📸 Screenshot:
So far I've done all my screenshots by my own and this time I thought to ask someone who has way more experience than me and made some super duper thumbnails for some tracks before. So I asked   Tuta to make this incredible stunning thumbnails you see here for me. A huge THANK YOU from my side.

Big Version: MirrorWorld Screenshot

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🚧 Signs:
The awesome signs I used for this track can be found here: Offical TMX Sign Pack

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🎶 Music:
Hollow Knight OST - White Palace
(Hollow Knight has such amazing soundtracks perfectly fitting for the theme imo)

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🎮 Testers and Feeback:
Another Huge thanks to my testers:   Whiskey.wp,   SkiFreak

This time I kept the map quite private (espacially the scenery, which has not be seen by the named testers)

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20 17.09.2022
40 05.11.2022

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I'm happy to announce that MirrorWorld just got Track of the Day 23.09.2022

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🏗 Building Difficulties:
Now we get to some techincal mapping specific part.

During building this track I got to some serious problems, resulting in a way longer building time as expected. Here I want to present you my solutions I got for each problem:

• Mirror plain:
  I had a big problem creating the actual mirror effect. The symmetric plain! Since there are some requirements I has to meet: Transparent, Non-Collideable and don't cast a shadow.
  
  
  
  • Idea 1: Creating the mirror plain with a transparent 3d Triangle, however as I found out 3d Triangle don't support transparency.
    
  • Idea 2: Create a custom block with glass texture, because you can see through glass. Work so far so good, but glass casted a shadow, which made the track completly dark. So it was a no-no. At this point I was quite desperate and ask for help. However I didn't get any satisfying solution, which was quite a downer for me. While talking with htimh about custom blocks, I got a brilliant Idea:
    
  • Idea 3: Rings do have a transparent plain for their effect trigger. With some modeller work on the slowmo-Ring I got a gray mirror plain, that satisfies all requirments. 🥳
    
  
  
  
• Freemode Mirroring:
  Trackmania2020 has some problems with Freemode and I already found while building Dreamworld: The Freemode can create rotation angles which are outside off the normal rotation steps. So DAMN! was that annoying espacially when you want to make a perfect symmetry of the track upsidedown. I was close to drop the hole project tbh, because whenever I tried to create the freemode track mirror I got some slight offset leading to very, very big differences on other parts. It was inaccaptable for me with the current utils I had, bc the illusion has to be perfect for me!
  
  So how did I solve this? After searching some OpenPlanet Plugins (I mean someone sure had made something for better roation steps) and found a buch of these plugin. The one I was able to work with was: Editor Helpers by   skybaxrider»UD(?)
  I was so happy to find this and after some tries a got a nearly perfect symmetry. (Still with this plugin it was quite hard to do, so it still took me like 3-4 times until it was 100% right)
  
  
• Trees:
  lol, but really. Trees are like the #1 troublemaker for freemode. You might know that, but some trees (not all of them) have the ability to get a random rotation around the vertical axis, when you load the map. No joke! I recognised this "bug" while building Hanging Gardens. So it is basically in the game since the beginning of Trackmania2020.
  The solution is to only build trees vertically, even if the ground isn't. I haven't found any other solution for that. ^^
  Additionally there is a mode where trees get nicely distributed around the ground, helping you a lot, bc you don't have to place all the trees by youself. Guess what I coudn't use... Exactly that feature, bc since I'm mirroring also the trees the pre-Defined trees differ when upside-down. So you probably already know what I have done. I've placed every single tree by my own and there also placed all mirrored version of it aswell. A lot of work, ngl.
  

Okey, the technical part is over. I hope these were some interesting problems for you to read and perhaps helps you overcome some problem.

(lol, my author comments are getting out of hand, I wonder if anyone even cares to read all of it. 🤡 )