Approaches on 2D top-view racing game track design

Question

I've finished programming the car (acceleration, etc) and now I'll start developing a track editor of some sort. The thing is: I have no idea how I'm going to do that. How would you do it? Perhaps design the tracks on GIMP and use some sort of pixel collision detection, or perhaps use multidimensional arrays to store track data like walls and "dirt". I'm open to suggestions.

Answer 1

The way I would approach this is to create at least two tiles (dirt and road) on GIMP as you suggested (pixel size depending on the size of your car). Then I would keep track of the "board" of a certain size, where the number represents the number of tiles, using a matrix or a list of lists (IDK what engine/language/platform you are using so I'm keeping it vague). This would let me lay out the board pseudo-randomly with just a couple of for loops. By pseudo-random I am referring to the fact that the road must be connected. Maybe even consider laying out the road and then filling up the rest of the matrix with dirt.

for example an 10x10 board gives you 8x8 tiles to work with and it would look like this (s=start; e=end; d=dirt; r=road):
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
| d d d d d d d e |
| d d d d d d d r |
| d d d d d d r r |
| d d d d d d r d |
| d d d d r r r d |
| d d r r r d d d |
| d d r d d d d d |
| d s r d d d d d |
| _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |

This Unity 2D tutorial is where I got the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvvaqAbpPjc&t=321s

TBH I am pretty new to this myself... just started to learn recently, but i thought I could be helpful here.