Been playing around with Trials Basic and Trials PRO? Have you been tired of Trials Basic that you can do a 0-point run while doing fancy tricks throughout the course? Are you still cursing at the log of death in Trials PRO? I’ve been waiting for the next installment of Trials ever since I saw the preview screen shots from www.redlynx.com. They made me play more to practice my bike controls since the tracks seem quite difficult.

Anyway, so what’s new in Construction Yard? A lot, considerably. Here are the new stuff I’ve noticed:

• Redone bike and rider graphics. They are the same 6 bikes that PRO offered, but with a better and less cartoony look.
• Shadow effects. This really gives the Construction Yard setting a nice feel to it. Since the tracks are not in a stadium, lighting is mainly from a daytime setting. This was done via lightmap files. More on this later.
• Background music. Although there is only one BG track, at least there’s something to listen to other than the commentators and your bike’s revving.
• Additional crash sound effect. When you crash, you not only get that buzzer sound, you get that clowny “toyoyoyyng” sound too. Kinda insulting.
• Spawn point sound markers. You can hear a sound now when you pass by a spawn point.
• Rebuilt game/program structure. Construction Yard isn’t setup with batch files and .jar files anymore.
• Harder tracks. Or are they?

My first impressions

Looking at the transition from Basic to PRO, we only got 3 more bikes, and tougher tracks. Construction Yard also gives us the same 6 bikes, but the graphics were better. Here’s a quick look at how the bikes differed:

Nothing really changed from Basic to PRO though. But the Construction Yard redesign looks so much better doesn't it? I guess they really had to make them better to match the better background graphics and the shadow effects. One nasty thing though. I like how they added more detail to the bikes, like brake calipers and discs. But they’ve added the calipers to the wheel graphics. What does this mean? The calipers spin along with the discs. Maybe if they’ve put the calipers on the forks, it would look normal. This is very noticeable with the brown vintage bike, as the calipers are red.

New tracks. In my opinion, Construction Yard had tougher tracks than PRO. BUT! Construction Yard gave me the feeling that I can still run through the track with 0 points. PRO just frustrated me. It challenged me at first, but it just frustrated me. I didn’t see a jump at Construction Yard that resembles the frustration I got from PRO’s log of death. There’s this one jump though, the one with the giant spool of pink stuff. You’ll see it when you play. Heck I’ll just show you anyway.

Tip for this jump: Play snow_veil’s smooth trackset.

Anyway, that’s just my point of view. If you’re just starting out playing Trials, I would recommend playing Trials Basic first. Even though all 3 games have training courses, a lot, and I mean a lot of practice is necessary. With me playing Trials a bit too much, along with the user-created courses, I can say I’ve developed some skills and experience to say Construction Yard wasn’t that hard.

Extra stuff

Ok, now that we’ve got all the normal stuff taken cared of, let’s go in the messing around part. Of course, I started browsing through the Trials Construction Yard directory structure. Since there are no more .jar files to extract, all files used in the game are found in the directory structure so (almost) everything is exposed. Files like the tracks and sound effects are all there. So if you want your own BG music, just replace the right file. Since I wasn’t able to find those other .class files I’ve seen in Basic and PRO, I thought they’re all in the .exe file. Just for the heck of it, I extracted trials.exe with WinRAR. And what do you know, they’re all in there. In the vector folder, you’ll notice files named bike_01.lwo, bike_02.lwo up to bike_08.lwo. There are only 6 bikes playable in the game! bike_07 and bike_08? If you’re gonna use the keyboard, you would choose menus by typing '1', '2', and so on. When I was about to choose a bike to use, I tried pressing ‘7’, ‘8’, ‘9’, and ‘0’ but ‘7’-‘9’ only chose the last bike and ‘0’ only chose the first bike. I also saw some bike graphics in the “\pics\textures\” folder, making me think there are more secret bikes.

Ooh, i feel like jumping some pallets with a vespa.

I guess those are just test graphics the coders created that somehow never made it in the game, and forgot to be taken out. That and a menu screen that says something like “buy the full game to proceed”. Either they just never made it in the game or there are some secret stuff needed to be done. Also, in the track choice menu, you’ll choose between the Training tracks and Stage-1. In previous games, it went like Training-1 and Basic Track-2 (or Pro Track-2 in PRO. ‘1’ and ‘2’ being the keyboard commands you could use if you’re not using the mouse. Would that just be a mistake? But then when you see “Stage-1”, you would expect at least a Stage-2 right? I don’t know. It would seem that Trials Construction Yard was released prematurely. Or, they just decided not to continue with the other stuff they planned on adding, and forgetting to take out the other stuff in the process.

Tracks are still the same. .jpg background graphics, and two .gif track files. The lightmap files are a new thing though. Looking at the lightmap files, they seem to be easy enough to recreate. Dark parts create shadows, bright parts show light. Colored parts show lights with hues. Everything with varying intensities. This time though, there are 5 tracks to create, if you’re gonna make a custom trackset. I guess if you want to make a night setting trackset, you could play around with more shadows and spotlight effects.

Before I forget, the game plays in fullscreen. With this, there’s this known problem that the game plays really slow, while the music and the timer runs normal. There was no choice to run the game in full or windowed unlike in the previous games. This was done via two batch files that run the java game. So, looking at the batch file to run the game in a window, I tried making a shortcut to the Construction Yard trials.exe file, with “-window” on the end of the Target line. Pretty much like adding that parameter in your Counterstrike shortcut to enable the console. It works and it fixed the slowness problem. So if your game plays slow in fullscreen, your only hope is to play the game windowed. I play Trials windowed anyway so I’m used to it. To repeat, add “-window” (without the quotes) to a shortcut to your trials.exe file. Something like this:

"D:\Trials Construction Yard\trials.exe" –window

The “-window” parameter has to be outside the double quotes. Hopefully that helps people out there. That’s all for now. If you’ve found out anymore secret stuff with Trials Construction Yard, you know how to contact me. If you don’t, good.

You like this place? You should :)