Some time ago, there was hope for a world for graveler (Gravel Mountain). Is there any information on what happened with that?
See here the preview of Gravel Mountain
Call it unbound world and release it as is, looks quite nice and keep all the gravel in one world where people will likely want to ride it. Load of potential and work going to waste…
Woah; I had genuinely no idea it actually existed as a fleshed out modeled world in Zwift.
I only assumed it was a non-graphical testbed for testing rolling resistance.
That’s a shame it never came out.
Would’ve been great for gravel/MTB specific races
As much as folks seem to hate having to go through 1.5 or now 4km of Jungle though I can kind of understand why; Zwift doesn’t like putting out roads that nobody wants to ride on; which is probably what happened here.
(Meanwhile we have roads that we literally aren’t allowed to ride on, staring at you Bologna)
I read somewhere it was a prototype of the latest Makuri expansion. It’s very similar to the route Island Outskirts.
Gravel Mountain is the code name for a new experiential event-only map developed by our game team as they explore new ways to build maps and worlds with greater efficiency. As an experiential map, Zwift will be hosting invite-only events to test this map for stability and eventually, new features. While we are unable to confirm when this map will be broadly available, we’re excited about what this new, faster, iterative approach means for Zwift and for map innovation in the future.
from Zwiftinsider
I watched the video preview of it a while back, and all I could think was “I want to run that”
I think they should release it so we can enjoy people whinging about their virtual rider moving slightly slower on a virtual road in a virtual world.
Zwift doesn´t communicate officialy with their clients about such things. So we still don´t know what will happen with Gravel Mountain.
I think it would have been a nice addition to the Tempus Fugit /Tick Tock laps with an additional gravel section for those. Also make those laps a bit longer and with gravel for all those folks who absolutely love gravel. 
And you could guarantee it would be well used too.
Is this ever coming back?
I hope so, besides the whacky feeling of racing that course with Benny Hill music playing in my head (the super speed of covering the terrain and having no real idea of where my race opponents were relative to me), it was a fun lightly rolling loop.
So far we’ve heard from Eric from Insider stating earlier this month or end of last month ish that testing it was or had been delayed (Paris expansion maybe culprit?).
James in a few places here on the forum has said it’s still coming but I guess there’ve been some issues and that there were still changes to be made.
I think people had forgotten already how much characters were clipping into scenery objects that day.
but the TLDR of it is, still no word or inkling of an idea of when it’ll return; these statements are over a month old now; and we’re coming up on 4 months since that day of the event.
If we’re being honest though, I hope one of those fixes being made is moving the origin of it. The poorest idea was slapping it physically on top of Crit City’s coordinates.
This isn’t likely to happen, at least not anytime soon.
I just need to check if the speed scaling changes have been made yet. We might be able to run some events once that has happened.
That’s massively unfortunate, as it causes all sorts of data analysis stuff on the back end for the … dozens of us, that process things.
For most end users though no it likely doesn’t matter one bit.
But it’s still weird that it was done that way at all.
I saw WTRL doing that already last night. They had their Duathlon event on the Red Rock Loop route …
Yeah that wasn’t planned.
Good thing there werent any accelerated views when they did it. So just normal speeds. Hope it stays that way. I really didnt like those accelerated views.
It’ll still be accelerated but not to the same level.
Since we didn’t get a chance to test the runners version before it went away, how will the acceleration affect runners?
I doubt it will.