I put forth a lot more effort this time, as I was trying to do something that would work well with YAAP's "No roads" option. There are two main problems with "no roads" that I had to address: the bottom half of the rings, and the cliffs. The cliffs especially can be a problem because they're so bright that they often obscure the blocks that are the same color as the cliffs - a big problem if you play Mono. The rings usually aren't a huge problem, but they can be distracting against certain color blocks if you're in a really dense tunnel - with "no roads", you can see the rings from underneath the track, so...
The rings were simple enough. So that they don't clash with the blocks, there's no upper or lower or side boundaries. The cliffs took the longest to work with. I really had to play around with them to figure out how they worked. Basically, you just overlay the two images, and where the white parts intersect is the lighted part of the cliff. ...more or less. My goal then was to greatly reduce the harshness of the light directly beneath the road but still keep the sides of the cliff bright enough. What I eventually ended up with, which I've grown to like, was a couple of stripes right below the ship. You can't see the sides of the cliffs from that angle - which ensures that the road straight ahead will be clear for you to see the blocks - but you CAN see them wherever the road curves ahead of you. It's especially cool-looking for songs with a lot of twists and turns, like in the screenshot (the red ribbon below the track as it banks to the left).
The particles didn't turn out too bad... I couldn't think of anything better so I used some different symbols that are used in circuit diagrams. The tiles aren't terrible, but I'm not all that happy with the way they turned out. PhotoShop wasn't cooperating with me and I gave up on them. If I feel up to it, I'll come back to them later.
