Background

I had plans to create a new track editor for MCM. As part of doing research for creating one. I manually went through the steps of converting an SX track to a National. I wrote a couple of utilities to help me. For my first effort I converted my StepUp 2 track, Joy Of SX. I think it came out quite well. I left it as a raw conversion so that people could compare the same track in an SX environment and the National environment.

As far as I know I am the first person to do something like this and one of the first things that I noticed was that the 250 in the National environment seemed to jump farther and go faster. Actually one can cause the other, so I wasn't sure what was going on. After tossing it around a bit I believe it's because the actual height (Z value) of the jumps is smaller for the same size jump in the National environment then it is in the SX environment. This would make the game engine have the bike lose less speed up the jump. That's my theory anyway.

Now my review/comments. This track is loosely based on the Houston 99 Supercross.

Pros

My favorite spot is the tight 135 degree left hander right after the start. This is the key place for a good lap time. I love the jump following the first right hander (turn 2). It is also key to making a good lap. You need to land on the saddle so that you can clear the zippers that are on the straight. I love the jump up over the double high table top. This is probably the neatest jump that they had in the 99 Supercross series and this is my attemp at duplicating it. The row of saddle jumps before the last set of whoops is a nice place for making up or losing time. The long set of whoops before the Finish line is a nice place to make or break a race. A good run through the whoops bar to bar with someone will make you really think about that last turn and how you will out smart the other guy.

Cons

The 135 degree left hander after the start. If you don't aim yourself straight down the track you will launch yourself way off the racing line losing a ton of time. The textures are terrible. To convert the textures you have to use the 62x62 SX TGA files instead of the 126x126 TGA files, because of that they are blurry. This track was not rendered and it shows. In a way though, it sort of is rendered, because it's using rendered tiles, but because of the resolution and resizing, the quality is lost. It was this aspect, that made me believe that making an editor that used tiled textures for Nationals would not be workable.

Summary

I believe that this track is an excellent SX track. There are very few National environment tracks that capture the Supercross style. I believe this is one of them.