BattleTech 4.11 · drawn from BTL4.RES

Every map,
seen from above

Each plan is drawn the way the cockpit draws it: every placement in the map's own stream, the outline its model carries, in the game's own palette. Nothing here is traced or redrawn — the buttes are circles because the game draws them as circles.

{cards}

A map stream is a run of Entity::MakeMessage records. Each carries its own length at +0, its class at +28, the resource it names at +40, its instance flags at +44 and its origin at +48 — and BT pads each record to the next four bytes, which Red Planet does not. The resource named is a Model List; the outline the display draws is the GaugeImage inside that list, so the join is direct rather than by name. A model with no GaugeImage is not drawn, which is why several streams place far more than they draw.

Colours are palette indices resolved through btspal.pcc, the palette L4GAUGE.CFG configures the secondary port with: configure(0,sec,270,0x003F,clut0,rgb,btspal.pcc). Unlike Red Planet, every primitive here carries an explicit colour — nothing falls back to a display default. Seen from above, +X runs right and +Z up.

Two of the eight playable maps, arena1 and arena2, place almost nothing: a sky and a pair of records too short to carry an origin. Their arena geometry is arenall, which is a stream of its own. adrop and pol4sfx are likewise supporting streams — drop points and wind emitters — rather than places you fight in.