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*                                *
*       DEAD MAN'S CANYON        *
*                                *
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*     An MTM2 track for the      *
*     Guitar Bill Expo 2008      *
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*         By Mat-Allum           *

Fourscore and seven years ago, I released a track called Rocky Canyons, a slightly treacherous trek through apparently the Grand Canyon.  The terrain was produced in Photoshop; the textures and models were stock for the most part.  So the map generally got good reviews.  

Dead Man's Canyon is the return of the dangerous canyon, but much more dangerous.  For experienced racers only!  The initial terrain edits were made in Photoshop, but then transferred to a terraformer called World Machine, which turned a fairly good bit of terrain into a great one.  I then modified it with Traxx to smooth out some areas, add some simple jumps, and turn the big gap after the start line into a canyon jump.  You'll notice the terrain is full of little bumps.  This is image dithering in action and is NOT a mistake.  I noticed this behavior a few years ago and attributed it to the conversion of the terrain to grayscale before sending to Traxx.  

Grayscale works with a brightness value from 0 to 100; RGB and palletized images use a brightness value from 0 to 255.  RGB makes shades of gray that grayscale can't make, so converting the image to grayscale tries to simulate the color by dithering the image.  This means it's one solid block of a valid color with little dots of a brighter or darker color scattered around it.  When the terrain bitmap is pasted into Traxx, the dithering becomes big bumps.  Normally this is a problem, but for a treacherous canyon of rock, it's perfect.

There are NO shortcuts on this track, despite very few checkpoints considering the size of the map.  This is because just outside the road is about a 170-foot drop into the great lake that carved the canyon.  There aren't many models to slow things down, and the road is quite wide to allow for lots of elbow room... except for a few tight spots that require lots of skill to navigate properly.  Heh heh.

I haven't perfected the Always Tileable Texture for rock yet (just grass and concrete) but when I do... perhaps Dead Man's Canyon 2 is in order... ;-)
