NAC - Pacenotes Not Included

Map built for North American Cup.

It was played in NAC on January 22nd 2022.

Thanks to   eyebo for the nice poster!

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So, story time!

Every now and then, I've run into interesting endurance maps, ones such as "LeRisQue is baCk (MTC)", "charcoal", and "Elear Sanctuary". What makes these maps interesting to me is that they are one cohesive, well-calculated and interesting package. And as I got better in mapping, an idea started to form to build my own endurance map. But I lacked the motivation to build such thing - after all, it is not a popular style, so how many people would actually play such map?

Then for completely unrelated reasons, I set out to build a map for North America Cup, as a kind of 'thank you' for their help in promoting the TMA campaign. For that reason, I was thinking of ways to make it special. Then I noticed, that the NAC had a category for maps 3-6 minutes long, and at that point it hit me. That was too perfect of an opportunity to pass. So, I opened the editor and got to work. And, well, chose to build a dirt map, as it's the style I am the most experienced in.

Turns out, there was a lot of work to do. Because, keeping route fresh without starting to repeat elements isn't that easy. On top of that, I wanted to build the map inside the stadium, had to keep the custom item usage moderate to stay within the 6MB limit for online play, and also had to consider the nature of the competition. The route had to be well-signed, easily readable, easy enough for the less-experienced players, fully respawnable, and also, preferably, fun to drive and offer the faster drivers some challenge as well!

In the end, I think I accomplished these goals well enough. I did not count the hours I spent on this map, but building this took a better part of a month. I am quite proud of the map and am extremely happy that it was approved for the NAC with only minimal changes requested. The route flows nicely and should be easy to finish, but there are a lot of places where you can push for better time. The scenery is mostly vanilla and on the lighter side (considering the size of the map) to avoid FPS issues. While I am obviously extremely biased, I find the map fun to play and nice to look at.

That's about it - thanks for reading, and I hope you have fun!

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Oh, and the name? It's because while building it, I started to think of this map as a rally stage... But I am not providing pacenotes