New tracks and some balancing

There's now four tracks to be raced on, appearing in randomized order. And more importantly:

• each track can have its own environment (sky, terrain, decorations, etc)
• each track can have elevation, to simulate hills and stuff
• and the decorations themselves have been redrawn to fit the art style.

In addition to that, a lot of work was put on handling and balancing:

• tighter radius can be achieved at lower speed*
• impacts overall cause more damages*, and damages are only repaired up to a point between races
• in addition, you can now spend resources on a full rebuild.

*both of which make it much harder for the AI at the moment, with the player often finishing as the only one with a car in one piece. This will hopefully get fixed in a future update. (In the meantime, we could argue that it is somehow historically accurate to have only a few cars left at the end of the race...)

Making the circuits

In the previous version, the game was limited to only one small stretch of track that we'd race on, over and over. While that track felt strangely satisfying for the amount of work put into it, it was never intended to be the one and only track.

From there, I went on a journey of exploration into old tracks of the era, reading about unbelievable stories and discovering impossible circuits. Some of which I tried almost immediately to reproduce in the game. But there's a catch.

With the style of rendering I chose (super-scaler/pseudo-3d), I knew I had some limitations on the graphics side, but didn't foresee those on the design side. I quickly realized that airpins just don't work. They will at best look like a 90˚+ angle instead of the U-shape they should have. But less obvious are the chicanes. Most of which you'd generally cut through, but the way the camera works, it follows the road instead of the car. This means that the chicane, while technically feasible, will cause the camera to turn very rapidly, which just doesn't feel great. And doesn't feel like a chicane, at all.

And a last but not least: bankings. This one got me actually looking at every game of the genre just to see if someone, somewhere, had found a convincing hack for those. Without banking, it means no Monza, no Indianapolis, no Montlhéry, no Brooklands! The list goes on. As it turns out, every early purpose-built circuits had some sort of banking to promote speed. But this is also a game, and the layout of the track has to be fun, challenge the skills, and serve the upgrades. And the early ovals sadly don't fit that definition. To be fair, I'm pretty sure going over 130mph (209km/h) on the bankings of Brooklands must have been exhilarating, but then it's a highly physical experience I have no pretentions of being able to convey through sounds and graphics alone.