Okay, So my forging skills are limited by my lack of creativeness, which means I can only build maps with a set design, eg puzzle maps, However, I know that there are great forges with limitless imagination and creation to make a brilliant Banshee race map. Bungie has made the banshee an available vehicle for the race gametype, so I think that someone should acknowledge that by building a race map for it... and not one that just has a couple of rings to fly through, I mean one that works as a race map as well as looking well thought out, designed and good looking. Someone please take up this challenge and make yourself proud.
I've tried and must say it sounds better than it actually plays. You see with racing ground vehicles you have hills, jumps and other cool things but when your racing a banshee there really isnt a great deal to do. You boost doesnt last too long and take a few secs to recharge. I left this idea alone and instead went for a rally map using the whole canyon and surrounding cliffs. Rally works better than race with banshees because if your killed you can jump straight back into the action and not be half a lap behind someone with no hope of catching up and killing them because you're essentialy moving the same speed.
But who says your map should just be an empty space with checkpoints? You could build "racetracks" for banshees too, like huge tubes or such, or just simply use different sized rings that you must fly through in order to get to the checpoint, and if you're concerned about taking shortcuts, you could just use soft kill/safe boundaries. You could also limit the flying space so that you must follow the shape of the terrain. You could also make the flyable space full of objects like pillars that you must dodge and find the fastest way through them. I'm planning on doing something like this in the future, at the moment i'm building a map that supports slayer and king of the hill with 8 banshees, as well as normal slayer and capture the flag wit banshees as airsupport.
I've been toying with the idea of banshee racing or rally racing, especially since you don't see flight exploited that much in online multiplayer. The problem I think is that the banshee is just so darned slow. I was hoping that the Falcon would have been an available race vehicle because while it's about as fast as the banshee, it's easier to control altitude and it's hover capabilities add an additional potential for race map design. It also would have been nice if the Sabre was an available vehicle and a space environment map was included as a Forge map. Alas, it's not to be. Another problem with flight racing is that if you build the course with checkpoints against a bright sky it's danmed near impossible to see the rings. You'd have to build it around terrain or build floating rings out of building stock in order to provide enough contrast for a target to fly to. I was hoping to see some map builders who have conquered these problems.
Well, a few things I can think of: If you build the track tight enough and make enough turns, so that you really have to pay attention to where you're flying , the banshee doesn't seem so slow at all, and you will be hoping that the banshee had brakes (banshees can't stop- unless you hop off them). Also, banshees too can move in vertical and horizontal directions using the "barrel roll" techniques, so you could build a track that requires using them. And I think if you used some of the special FX objects of forge, you could dim the brightness of the sky enough to see the HUD markers displaying the checkpoint location, special FX doesn't affect the HUD, right?