- Have you given any thought to changing the lighting/skybox? I picture that map looking really neat with a sunset-ish looking skybox with lower light levels.

I originally had spawn points in between buildings and came accross a major problem. In some instances 2 tanks can spawn at the same point simultainiously, one would end up getting pushed over a building. Since TM dosn't do collision checks against on the top and bottom of meshes, you would fall through the roof and get trapped inside. The only way out is alt-k in 90% of the cases.
So I was forced to move the spawn points away from the buildings.

BTW, you can use it as a race map, but driving the waypoint pattern will make you crazy.

Side effect of having to remove and reposition spawn points. I should have deleted them and re-lay them out.

Live and learn

They next task I'm playing with is making the buildings take damage and blow up.
JVotex had an idea of making the buildings out of tanks. THis would work but it has a few problems:

1) Tanks only appear at spawn points
2) AI tanks may be buildings
3) Ultra high gravity makes them bounce
4) killing a building adds to you frag count

#1 can be fixed by positioning buildings using spawn points, but I'm not sure if you can limit a spawn point to spawn a type of tank-building (i.e. prevent a player from spawning on top of a building, not spawning weapons, ever see a building sporting a nuke?, and keeping multiple buildings from spawning on each other).

Not only that, but I'm pretty sure you can't define a custom explosion for racetank ent, so any building that you do blow up under that procedure would explode like a tank does, and that'd be just anticlimactic with the larger buildings.

The only class of ent that even comes close to doing destructable buildings is the Tree class. Unfortunately, there's some major problems with those:

Trees can only be sprites at this point. LDA's working on the whole 3d tree thing, but it doesn't look like we'll be getting that in a patch, but we'll have to wait for TM2. As is, you can only make a bitmap into a tree, which wouldn't work for buildings.

Not only that, but you can't define hitpoints for a tree, so as soon as a tank so much as bumped into one of your large towers, they'd crumble, which also just wouldn't be fun.

It had destructable boulders if I remember correctly.

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Tread Marks Ladders

While that does allow the user to destroy them, using them for buildings probably wouldn't work too well. For one, you can't destroy a projectile with another projectile, so making the buildings out of projectiles wouldn't allow you to nuke them away or anything.

Second, projectiles disappear on the slightest collision with another tank unless setcollisions = 0, in which case the tank will pass through the projectile (best demonstrated in Jvortex's Multi-Phasic Nuke). So, you'll either end up with buildings that you can drive through, or ones that blow up at the slightest knock by another tank.