Gone but not forgotten

My first racing experience was not long after I joined the game, in the days when most of the world was locked down due to Covid. I happened across an incredible place called Melanuma Speedway. It was a race track with extensive voxel work (in the days when there was no vertex editor and no way to align cores), its own pit lane and racer sales area, and a friendly advocate named Burble who was more than happy to show me the ropes. I purchased a GT racer (eventually two) and tried my best to get around the track at the kinds of speeds that he could.

I couldn’t, but that isn’t the point. Melanuma was where I realised there were people racing in DU and, from this, I ended up finding the racing community and getting involved. Sadly, Burble mostly left the game when Covid lockdowns lifted (he said this would happen in some of my discussions with him) and he handed it on to others who never quite integrated themselves into the mainstream DU Racing group, so I lost touch with the track for a time, only visiting every now and again.

Yesterday was one of those times when I thought to myself: “how is Melanuma doing, I should check it out”. So I did, and I found…

Yes, that’s it. A couple of intact static cores sitting disjointedly in the middle of the lake, a broken core, and a few dynamic constructs.

This loss hit me in the feels. Thinking about it, it doesn’t surprise me. Melanuma had a lot of terrain manipulation that included both excavations and significant built-up areas as borders to its tracks. As such, it would have been hit very hard by the terrain reset that occurred with the Demeter update. It also would have found things difficult in terms of the core limitations from the Panacea update. So I’m not surprised that it has mostly gone. On the up side, the territories around the track seem to still be owned by Burble, so I hope that the track and its structures were pillaged by those who created it, and not by looters intent on just salvage.

We are in the beta stage of this game, so casualties like this will inevitably happen as the game changes around us. In the racing community we undoubtedly have some of the most organised and structurally complex installations. We use a lot of cores and we develop lua that has to work in order for racing to happen. But this means we are extremely vulnerable to changes that continue to limit the creativity of the community. We saw another example of this when Demeter was released and there was a possibility that Anvilworks would be lost, but luckily we were able to contact the track owner and keep it maintained (albeit slightly changed).

As we move forward there will be more changes, we all know that. We in the racing community just hope that those changes help to build and reinforce our player-made content rather than limit or destroy it.

The Oily Rag is an Argent Galactic publication written and edited by SinDex66 (SinDex66#8766).

SinDex66

Categories

Archives