VWE BattleTech · MUNGA / Tesla 4.10 · task #52
The translocation warp, restored.
The respawn effect from the 1995 arcade pod — a swirling energy vortex the pilot
dissolves into and reappears from. Reconstructed from BTL4OPT.EXE and matched,
frame by frame, to a photograph of the original cabinet.
// right panel is a live capture of btl4.exe — 30 frames, ~2s of the settled swirl
What was actually wrong
Texture-scroll precision collapse
The swirl scrolls its cloud texture by scrollDelta × time, where
time is absolute runtime. That product grows without bound, so within
seconds the UV offset is large enough that adding it per-pixel destroys float precision —
the coordinates quantize into coarse steps and a smooth cloud shatters into grainy radial
spokes. Wrapping the offset with fmodf(…, 1.0f) is identical under
REPEAT tiling but keeps full precision.
This same bug silently degraded every scrolling texture — beams, exhaust — over a long session. The warp just made it impossible to ignore.
And the look itself
- MESHBicone, on-axis. tsphere.bgf is a 45-vertex bicone viewed straight down its throat and spun in place — not an off-axis tornado.
- TEXCloud × wide lavender ramp. The
bintAcloud through a full-range dark→lavender ramp — no geometry “bands”, no twist. - METHODVerified offline first. Rendered the real mesh in a standalone rasterizer, matched capture.png, then ported the confirmed parameters.