Five Into One Competition, round 2

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Round 2 of the “Five Into One” competition!

First of all, what is FiO? FiO is a competition/cooperative map construction where each stage’s builder builds the stage at the same time, without knowing what the other stages will look like.

This is possible by limiting the building area for each builder so that the stages built can later be joined into a sequence.

In this round, round 2, the environment of choice is Stadium, and the building area is 6 x 16 squares, with Finish tile in the 7th row (or column, depending how you count it). Once joined, the track that comes out of this competition will be 31 (5×6 + 1 for finish) x 24 (due to offset) tiles large.

There are no artificial constraints on the height, just make sure that you bring the car back to the height in which the finish is. You can’t dig into the grass either.

Your stage must have an author time of 17.00 seconds or less. That means that submitting a stage in which the author time is 17.01 will result in automatic refusal, even if someone might be able to drive it in 17.00 or less. If YOU cannot make a 17.00 or better run on your stage, make it shorter.

Your stage can contain at most 1 checkpoint, but it is not required to add one; please note that the finish gate will be replaced with a checkpoint and joined with the next stage by this checkpoint.

About speeds: While on start, your car has the speed 0 mph, after joining the submitted stages, it is entirely possible that cars will be entering your stage at higher speeds; however, if they crash in your stage, they may respawn in the CP (start of your stage), in which case they again have the speed of 0. In the first round of this competition, all the builders were able to successfully deal with this aspect, so I believe you will be able to make your stage work for both “fast-enterees” and “slow-respawnees”

And now, the base track for this round!

http://united.tm-exchange.com/main.aspx?action=trackshow&id=950678#auto

The link above will bring you to “united.TMX” to the track page. Please download the track and if you wish to participate, follow these steps:

 

1. Open the track in the track editor.
2. Note the Start tile and the “oval track” that leads to the nearest finish.
3. Below this oval, there’s a rectangular road – this rectangular road below oval shows you YOUR building space’s horizontal limits. DON’T BUILD outside the space designated by this first rectangle. You can, however, remove any and all tiles of this rectangular marker, you can (and probably will) remove the oval track or any part of it as well.
4. Build a track that connects the start and finish tile of the original oval track. If you included any stunt parts such as wallrides or loops, you MAY add in-game MT (loop cameras) for them, but it is not required (if you don’t know how to make a loop cam, don’t bother). 
5. Validate your track and make ABSOLUTELY sure that your AUTHOR TIME is 17.00 seconds OR BETTER. That means, and I want to state it very clearly, that your author time can be between 00:00.00 and 00:17.00, but if you submit a track that has the author time 00:17.01 or more, your track will be rejected.
6. There can be at most 1 checkpoint in your stage. But you don’t have to place any checkpoints in it. 
7. You can’t add any “working” finish gates to your stage either (technically speaking, if you add a “fly-through” or “go-through” finish gate, you have to add a CP somewhere behind it so that the race doesn’t end in that gate. You have to do that even though after joining the track, the race wouldn’t end there).
8. Don’t bother with intro or outro – if you add them, there is no guarantee they will be used (as your part can be anywhere in the track, but even if it comes first, your intro and outro will probably be removed).
9. Improve your track as much as you want, make it challenging and exciting and cool and whatever. Decorate your part (but don’t leave your designated building area, which also means you have to make sure that the eventual addition of DIRT ground does not leave the building area; basically, if adding a decoration or tile or ground causes any part of the second rectangle to disappear, then you have ti undo that change, since you are entering forbidden territory  
10. Satisfied with your track? Is it 17.00 seconds or faster? GOOOD!
11. Save the track (MEGA ROTFL IMHO LOL) under the name (aha!) “FiO rnd2 – [Your name here]“; if I were allowed to participate, I would save it as “FiO rnd2 – Alcator”. Please, no colors or other styles in the track name, thank you.
12. (optional) ZIP the track file (ZIP files seem to be less prone to being caught by spam filters)
13. Send either the GBX file or (preferably) the ZIP file with it by e-mail to me [ alcator#seznam,cz - please replace the first strange sign with the "at" character, and the comma with a dot ]
14. Make a comment here that you submitted the track, so that I can make sure I received it; if I don’t (or if it got spamfiltered), I’ll contact you and we will find another solution.
15. Don’t post your track to TMX, otherwise people might copy your ideas.

Today it’s 5th of September. On the 4th of October, which should be a Saturday, the submission phase ends and the judging phase will begin.

During the judging phase, 5 of the submitted tracks will be picked – those which are “best”, although it is not easy to describe what makes a submission “best”.

Those 5 winning stages will then quickly be combined together (tile by tile copying) into one (hopefully) masterful track. Cool MT will be added and the track will be released, perhaps this time with more attention from the player community.

On this image, you see – on the left – the orange rectangular area in which you can build. The red circles mark start and finish that YOU will build between; the arrows indicate that you MUST exit the start towards right and you MUST enter the finish (generally) from the left.

The other four rectangular areas just show where the other 4 stages will be after joining.