How to Create Custom Tracks in Diddy Kong Racing Recompiled | Track Lab Devlog

In this video, I’m showing the current state of Track Lab, the custom track creation tool I’ve been developing for the Diddy Kong Racing Recompiled project. The main goal of Track Lab is to make the process of creating, importing, testing, and iterating on custom tracks as fast as possible. You can bring an existing 3D racing track into Blender, convert it into something Diddy Kong Racing can understand, configure its gameplay properties, export it, and immediately test it in-game. I go through almost the entire workflow in this video: Importing and preparing an existing track in Blender Adjusting scale and track geometry Creating the starting grid Setting up checkpoints and AI racing paths Placing balloons, Silver Coins, zippers, and other gameplay objects Converting a regular mesh into DKR-compatible track geometry Replacing imported materials with original Diddy Kong Racing textures Defining surface properties such as grass, water, waterfalls, and boost pads Working with transparency and animated textures Creating the track header and metadata Exporting the track Installing HD textures Testing directly through Track Lab Going back to Blender, fixing problems, re-exporting, and testing again And, as you’ll see, not everything works on the first attempt. AI racers take shortcuts, zippers don’t behave as expected, geometry creates unexpected collisions, water transparency causes problems, and some imported geometry needs additional cleanup. But that is also the point of this video: showing what the actual development and testing process currently looks like. The workflow I’m trying to achieve is essentially: Blender → Track Lab → Diddy Kong Racing → Test → Fix → Repeat There is still a lot to investigate and improve before I consider Track Lab ready for proper distribution, particularly around imported geometry, AI behavior, surface properties, transparency, gameplay objects, and the other DKR game modes. For now, my priority is getting the complete race track pipeline working reliably. Eventually, I want this to support not only imported tracks from other racing games, but also completely original tracks built from scratch — which is probably the part I’m most excited about. This project is still experimental, so expect bugs, strange behavior, unfinished features, and plenty of testing. Let me know what you think about the current workflow and what you would like to see added to Track Lab.