yea that makes sense.
Could keep the road pathing system for walls, or zones similar to mario kart where something puts you back on course.
Could reduce speed based on clamp distance to not necessarily stop the players from going off course, but have no advantage for it.free roaming like wave racers was a lot of fun.
do you have any tutorials on doing water / changing textures on the d3d models?
Viewing post in Simple Racing Engine (3D + 2D) comments
Water is kinda tricky, doing waves the "regular" way (a dynamic 3D primitive that gets resubmitted every step) is slow - you can speed it up by having a special shader (the vertex shader moves each vertex up/down using a wave equation) but doing that means you need to make a lot of evenly spaced triangles instead of using a single 2-triangle plane with a repeated texture.
The gist of it is relatively simple, at least: each "corner" moves up and down using a sinewave function, whose argument is a sum of x coordinate * horizontal speed + y coordinate * vertical speed + time. For the texture you'd just add those speeds to the texture coordinate. Some games sample the water texture multiple times at different resolution (and different scroll speeds per resolution) and then add them together, to simulate there being multiple "layers" to the water.