Article – The Art of Wallrides

Written by Alcator. 

This article is accompanied with a demo track that shows most of the stuff mentioned here. Get the track here.

A wallride is a ride on a set of vertical tiles. These tiles may be either planar (straights) or curved (corners). In order to make a wallride “true”, there must be no ramp tiles beneath some parts of it, so that car that doesn’t keep on the vertical part of the wallride falls down.

A wallride may include breaks – some straight segments may be missing and the car flies for a short periods of time at these breaks.

Wallrides are currently buildable in Stadium, Bay and Island (these three environments have straight and corner tiles) and on Coast (only straight tiles). Desert only has the “ramp” tiles, which, although allowing driving at 90 degree roll, are not real wallrides (there’s not the risk of falling down).

Building wallrides

The wallride has 5 distinct parts: the approach road, the entry ramp, the wall segment, the exit ramp and the exit road. The way you connect these parts together (i.e., how much room for deviation from optimum trajectory you add, how well you show the optimum path, etc.) leads to the easiness or difficulty of the wallride. I’ll use Stadium as an example here.

The Stadium has one special tile (in two mirror versions) obviously meant as the approach road for wallrides – it’s the 2×1 square tile with a road connector on one shorter side and the dark metal connector on the longer side. If you drive through the center points of these two sides on your approach, your car position changes by [+1.0, +0.5] during it (1 tile in one direction, half a tile in another direction), which means the best tile that can precede this approach tile is the 2×1 chicane tile.

Note: “1.0, 0.5” means the car is moving twice as much in one direction than in the other; this ratio will be called “approach ratio” below.

However, if you want the car to go steeper (such as [+0.5, +0.5], it may be better to place a zig-zag block of normal road tiles (it looks like a saw or stairs when viewed from above).

OK, now that we have the approach 2×1 tile and the road before it, we must build the entry ramp. This is done using curved tiles. These tiles should be placed twice at the approach tile, and as many more times as is the approach ratio – so if the car is going at 2:1 approach angle, add two more ramp segment behind the first two (so four segments in total) – this way, the car is smoothly carried from horizontal to vertical position and can perform the wallride with ease.

Check the first wallride in the demonstrational track to see such approach.

Next comes the actual wall ride on straight and corner tiles. You have to understand that the corner is the only area where the car can steer effectively; on straight segments, steering is possible too, but it results in more like “sliding”, as the wheels have very low grip.

The car needs the speed of 220+ to be able to keep at the same height in corner, and speed of 250+ to be able to go up in corner. At speeds below 220, the car starts sliding down and falling. If you want to make a downwards going wallride, make sure the car goes 230 – 250 at the start – this way, the car will be naturally forced to go down very quickly. Similarly, if you want the car to go up in the wallride, a speed of 500+ is needed to provide enough speed for the upper parts of the wallride – keep in mind the car is losing speed in the wallride, it cannot accelerate or keep the speed.

Depending on the speed at the end of the wallride, the exit ramp needs or needs not to be long. If the exit speed is only 200 – 250, three or four tiles of ramp on the exit suffice, but if the speed is more like 500, you should provide 6 – 10 tiles; this of course makes it harder to continue smoothly after the exit ramp. Many authors simply put a platform next to the exit ramps so that no matter where the car leaves the ramp, it continues through the same space. However, you can just as well change the exit ramp into an exit U-ramp, so all cars are naturally led to the two tile wide exit point at its end. Still, this has a danger of giving the car a small rolling rotation (around the front-rear axis), unless it goes perfectly straight through the bottom of the U-ramp, and the deeper the next drop is, the higher the risk of flipping.

See the lengths of exit ramps of the wallrides in the demo track to see how higher speeds need more room.

Now, some cool tricks to make your wallrides special:

• Visualize the edges: at least on Stadium, you have a choice of multiple breadths of wall segments. Instead of using the wide ones to cover the whole breadth of your wallride, use smaller ones in the middle of the intended driving path, and add the narrowest ones around them as some “safety edges”. Not only does it help players knowing they are way too close to the edge, but it also looks more colorful due to the orange stripes on the tiles.
• Visualize entry and exit points: Create your own custom signs with diagonal arrows, but don’t draw the arrows at 45 degree angle. Instead, use 30 or 25 degrees as the angle, as that’s the real entry angle on wallrides. Put the signs so that the cars going on optimum path go across the center of the arrow – players will very quickly adapt to such confirmation of perfect path and will gladly use it in your future tracks. Also, such precision is a sort of “trademark” for a trackmaker and you will quickly get an audience of players who like it.
• Don’t overspeed it: At higher speeds, the risk of falling down get very small, but they also shorten the time you have to prepare for the wallride. Unless the wallride requires it, don’t needlessly place multitude of boosters (especially red ones) before it. Also, try to make it so that those drivers who maintained a higher speed in previous stages are rewarded by being able to take some harder but shorter path through the wallride (such as a shorter path that is positioned at the top edge of the wallride, so those who are slower can’t possibly reach it).
• In Stadium, there must be at least 1 straight segment before a break in the wallride; if you place a break immediately after a corner, the car will rotate, colliding with the “landing” straight segment. That’s not what you want.
• Carefully check wallrides for checkpoint respawning. If a checkpoint respawn makes a wallride undriveable, add an auxiliary road from the end of the approach ramp to the beginning of the exit ramp – or allow the car to gain the needed speed elsewhere.
• You can increase the challenge by placing obstacles that the car must avoid while at 90 degree bank angle at the end of the approach ramp.