Go faster by design

I greeted the E-Type Designer with great excitement. Having exhausted myself zooming around the supplied tracks I was looking forward to creating my own. Double-clicking the Designer icon resulted in the standard E-Type loading screen appearing but with the words Track Designer in the corner.

There all similarity ends, as the next thing is a menu for loading, saving, starting a new track, editing an existing one or exiting the program.

Loading and saving gives you access to the five standard tracks - The Lakes, Antarctica, The Broads, The Sahara and Moonlighting - you can't alter the file names or the sprite graphics, only the lay out.

Having loaded a track you have the option - using new - to clear the track of sprites, straighten it, flatten it, change the length (from 5 to 35 miles) or all of these. Otherwise you can move straight to the edit screen.

A track is composed of sections each .005 miles long. One sprite, its position, ground colour on each side, height, curve and track width can be assigned to each section.

For each section you need to set whether the track should climb or descend, curve left or right - there are three degrees of curvature in each direction or none at all - the road width, which sprite should appear and where, and the side colours.

Having done this press the Select button of the mouse on the main bar in the middle and that piece of track is set. On a 35 mile track there are 7000 sections to be fixed, so the process can take a very long time.

There are a couple of built-in utilities to help you speed the process - auto-step which alternates the currently selected sprite with a blank for each position and auto-swap that changes the side the sprite appears. Additionally by using the Adjust button rather than Select a jump of several segments is made filling in colours, curve and height changes.

Using the keyboard you can press C, H or S to set the current curve, height or sprite without changing anything else. The up/down arrow keys in combination with Shift and Control can beused to jump up to a mile at a time which speeds up the process of finding your last position.

In use it's quite a time-consuming process and something that takes half an hour to do can take just five seconds to drive through at 250mph. But there's certainly a sense of achievement zooming through your own landscape.

Once you've mastered the tracks supplied with E-Type - or perhaps if you find them too hard - the Designer will certainly add more enjoyment to your driving.

Lazarus