The published artifact source now lives in docs/, and pack-dist emits it
as CONTROLS.html beside the plain-text CONTROLS.txt so players get the
diagrams without the repo.
The artifact source is a fragment - the publisher supplies the document
shell - so it is wrapped here with a doctype, charset and viewport.
Without those a browser opens it in quirks mode and renders the
typography as mojibake. Written without a BOM so the charset declaration
is the only thing speaking.
The map itself gains a section for the mouse: the button banks reach
under the glass, and the six displays are the players to size and the
radar to place. Verified the five radar-placement diagrams against the
layout they describe - box 16:9, radar 16.7x39.3% of it, centred flush
to the bottom edge, flush in either bottom corner, and 30/30 vertically
when halfway up a side.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Version string, zip name and README. This one is about the screen:
the cockpit scales both ways and re-fits on resize keeping 16:9, -fit
runs it borderless over the monitor at a matched render size, the six
secondary displays are the players to scale and the radar to place,
and the button banks reach under the glass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Button banks
The exploded diagnostic view was still display-only - it predates the
button work - so it now builds the same banks as the cockpit, with
the pod arrangement laid out from the panes measured sizes rather
than a hardcoded 640/480 grid (the banks make each window bigger than
its glass, and the bottom row hung off the work area otherwise).
The map side columns were spread height/6 from the top, but the maps
own legend grid is not sixths: measured off the bitmap it starts 13
rows down with six 102-tall cells on a 105 pitch. Every button sat
high of its label, worst at the bottom. Each buttons top and bottom
now come off that grid separately and are subtracted - scaling a
height directly would let rounding drift them back out of step on a
resized cockpit.
Depth 100 to 240: against the 480 glass the two banks meet in the
middle bar the strips, so practically the whole display is a press
target. This mattered most in the cockpit, where the panes are small
enough that the halfway clamp governs - at 100 the MFDs had a 110px
dead band straight through the middle of the glass.
-fit (also spelled -windowed-fullscreen)
Borderless over the whole monitor, with the render size chosen to
match. The cockpit presents the 3D into a viewscreen that fills its
canvas, so the right -res is that canvas at the scale the cockpit
will settle on; computing it with identical arithmetic makes the
stretch a copy. On the 3440x1440 panel that is 133% and -res 2553
1436, against 125% for the windowed path that pays for the taskbar.
The pick runs after the whole command line, so an explicit -res wins
from either side of -fit. Capped at 3840x2160. Cockpit mode only -
mode 0 has to stay playable on real pod hardware and mode 2 is a dev
view - so those get the resolution and keep their windows.
Display layout, in environ.ini
L4MFDSCALE sizes all five MFDs, L4MFDSCALE_UL and friends override
any one of them, L4RADARSCALE the radar, and L4RADARPOS puts the
radar bottom centre, in either bottom corner, or halfway up either
side. Scaling is applied in canvas units before the canvas is fitted
to the window, so a number means the same thing on every monitor.
Sizing each display separately let the clamps become exact rather
than one conservative rule for all five: what limits a display is its
actual neighbour. Which neighbour that is depends on the radar, so
the clamps follow it - on the bottom edge it clears the one MFD above
its column, but centred on a side it has one above AND below and
grows from the middle both ways, so it must clear the taller twice
over. Clamping shrinks uniformly; these are photographs of real
instruments and a one-axis clamp would squash them.
Verified on the ultrawide: all five radar positions, per-display and
group scaling with the clamps biting, -fit with and without an explicit
-res, and the button geometry measured back off the screen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The canvas was capped at 100%, so a bigger monitor got a 1920x1080
cockpit in the corner of the screen and maximising did nothing - the
layout only ran once at startup.
Now the fit is one uniform scale with no ceiling, recomputed whenever
the window changes size (maximise, restore, drag), and the canvas is
centred in whatever client area it gets. Uniform scale is what locks
the aspect: a wider-than-16:9 desktop letterboxes with even black bars
instead of stretching the cockpit. Panes gained Resize() so the glass
and its button banks re-scale with the canvas; the pixel buffers keep
their native source resolution.
Scaling up is free quality on the MFDs - their glass is a downscale of
a native 640x480 channel until about 200%.
Verified on the 3440x1392 ultrawide: opens at 125% (2400x1350) instead
of 100%, maximises to 126% centred with even bars, a 1884x661 window
fits 61% letterboxed left/right, 1084x961 fits 56% letterboxed top/
bottom, and a 2584x1461 client scales up to 134%.
The 3D still renders at -res and D3D stretches it to the canvas, so
raise -res to match a large screen for 1:1 pixels; start-windowed.bat
and the README say so.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
They were mapped to the config buttons (0x37/0x36), which the 9 and 0
keys already reach from the Upper Right MFD bank. Freeing them gives
players two pad buttons to assign; bindings.txt carries the mapping as
commented example lines so the way to re-enable it is in the file.
Docs and the dist README follow.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Written from the default bindings.txt so it matches what the game
actually writes. Covers the Xbox pad (ASCII diagram plus a table of
every button and its RIO address), the keyboard - numpad flight
cluster diagram, the Shift/Ctrl/Alt throttle and reverse modifiers,
Alt+Q abort - and the panel button banks, showing how the number and
letter rows map onto the five MFD clusters exactly as printed on the
pod board, with the G/B gap keys and the F-key Secondary/Screen
columns. Also notes the keypads being deliberately unbound, the RGB
lamp mirror, and how to rebind with worked examples.
pack-dist copies it to the dist as CONTROLS.txt, flattened to ASCII so
it reads correctly in Notepad while the markdown source keeps its
typography. README links it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Unpacking the zip anywhere now yields one self-contained RP412\
directory instead of scattering ~1000 files into the extraction
folder. The -Zip step stages a copy under the temp dir as RP412\ and
compresses that folder.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The packer wipes and rebuilds dist\, which silently discarded the
hand-made steam_appid.txt every repack - and without it SteamAPI_Init
fails and the game quietly falls back to TCP, which is the confusing
symptom testers hit. The dist now ships it (480, Spacewar) alongside
the RP412STEAM=1 environ.ini, so copying the folder to a machine with
Steam running is the whole setup. Test doc updated to match.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The setup menu gains a SCENARIO group. Picking Football relayouts the
menu live: the track list swaps to the football-legal set (drops
Paingod Passage and the race build of Freezemoon Freeway, adds the
football build headmf - RPConfig per-scenario invalid lists), the
COLOR and BADGE columns become TEAM and POSITION, and the title
reads MARTIAN FOOTBALL.
The egg builder was restructured around one flat pilot table so both
scenarios share it. Football emits scenario=football, per-pilot team=
and position= entries, and the [teams] / [team::X] / [pilots::X] /
[teambitmap] blocks in RPFootballMission layout (team name bitmaps
generated by the same GDI plasma renderer as pilot names). Colors are
derived rather than chosen, as the arcade did it: the runner wears the
team runner color, crushers and blockers the team color. Multi-pod
games alternate pilots across two teams and give each team exactly one
runner, honoring the host own position pick.
Verified end to end: Football launches from the menu, the engine loads
the football mission (the cockpit shows the RUNNER - GO FOR POINTS
panel), the console marshals it to a scored finish, and the Death Race
path still passes its regression unchanged.
Known gap: lobby members cannot pick their own team or position yet -
the host pick seeds a deterministic assignment.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Carries the worldwide lobby-search filter for cross-region internet
testing (the only change since 4.12.1 besides the README rewrite).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The environ.ini reader now skips comments (# or ;), blank lines, and
anything that is not KEY=VALUE, so the shipped file documents the
whole configuration surface: the core settings as-shipped (controls,
renderer, gauge canvas, plasma, single-window cockpit, frame rate,
Steam networking), the optional toggles (keyboard lighting, stick
flip, AA, particles, plasma scale/position, fixed seed), LAN hosting
without Steam, the developer/testing switches (RP412DEVKEYS,
L4CONSOLELEN, the Steam self-test), and the arcade multi-monitor
heritage variables. Stale L4MFDSCALE reference dropped from the
README.
Verified: the game boots on the commented file with values applied
(controls line honored, Steam transport up from the in-file switch).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Per the user: the game never reads the pilot keypad, so the numpad
becomes the flight cluster - 8/2/4/6 stick, 7/9 pedals, 0 trigger -
with Shift/Ctrl as throttle up/down and Alt as reverse thrust. That
frees the entire letter board: W/A/S/D/Q/E return to their printed
MFD bank positions and B goes back to being the gap key, so the
default profile now carries the complete unmodified vRIO bank layout.
The keypad addresses stay bindable (arcade key events) but ship
unbound.
Alt as a held flight control meant every release popped the window
menu and stole focus - WndProc now eats SC_KEYMENU. Shift/Ctrl/Alt
key-name aliases added to the parser alongside the .NET names.
Profile parses clean (59 key buttons, 8 key axes); single-player
cycle and key-bomb tests green (Alt+Q abort unaffected).
Machines with an existing bindings.txt keep their old map - delete
the file to take the new defaults.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PadRIO now loads bindings.txt (vRIO profile grammar: key/pad/padaxis
lines with toggle, deflect/rate, invert/deadzone options) written
self-documenting with the full default layout on first run. The
default is vRIO board-complete map - number and letter rows are the
MFD banks as printed on the panel, F-keys the secondary/screen
columns, numpad the pilot keypad (0x50-0x5F delivered as arcade RIO
KeyEvents, a new PadRIO capability), Space/arrows the joystick
column - with the desktop driving keys carved out: WASD stick, Q/E
pedals, PgUp/PgDn throttle, B reverse (vRIO gap key; R returns to
its bank). Pad bindings unchanged in spirit, plus Panic on LB and
config on Start/Back; axis signs are encoded in the profile now, so
L4PADFLIP flips on top of it.
Default profile parses with zero rejected lines (68 key buttons, 8
key axes, 12 pad buttons, 5 pad axes); single-player cycle and the
key-bomb tests stay green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Full input-surface audit of the PC keyboard channel. The arcade abort
was the typed ampersand character (0x26), but the Win32 port feeds
WM_KEYUP VIRTUAL-KEY codes into the same channel - and VK_UP is also
0x26. The hat look-up key aborted the mission: that was every mystery
abort across the multiplayer test rounds. Likewise the E key (0x45,
the right pedal!) dumped the event queue on every release.
Disarmed: plain 0x26 and E are swallowed at the L4 layer; the abort
answers only to the deliberate Alt+Q chord (translated to the legacy
engine code, so APP.cpp is untouched); the debug toggles (wireframe
Alt+W, predator vision Alt+V, frame dump Alt+F, perf stats, event
queue on Alt+E now) arm only with RP412DEVKEYS=1. The cheat-string
manager has no PC-keyboard strings and the trace-log keys are
compiled out of release - both inert.
Verified live: a volley of VK_UP releases mid-race leaves the mission
running; Alt+Q aborts on demand. Docs and the dist README updated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reproduced A/B on the dev box: with RP412STEAM=1 the wired pad
disappears from XInput because Steam Input intercepts Xbox controllers
for AppID 480. One-time client setting fixes it (disable Steam Input
for Spacewar, or globally for Xbox controllers); PadRIO hot-connects
within 3s once released. Our own AppID will configure this
server-side.
environ.ini in the dist now ships RP412STEAM=1 (the packer regenerates
the file, which was wiping the hand edit each round); machines without
Steam credentials fall back to TCP cleanly.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Steamworks SDK 1.64 vendored at extern/steamworks_sdk_164 (headers +
win32 redistributables only; .gitignore trims the rest). Both projects
build with RP412_STEAM; activation stays behind the RP412STEAM=1
environment switch, so plain desktop runs never touch Steam.
L4STEAMTRANSPORT.cpp implements NetTransport on ISteamNetworkingSockets
with FakeIP: SteamNetTransport_Install brings up SteamAPI, relay
network access, and a two-port FakeIP identity (fake port 0 = console
channel, 1 = game mesh), then swaps the process wire; any failure logs
the reason and the game carries on over TCP. Addressing keeps the
engine untouched: all pods share the -net port convention, eggs carry
fakeip:engineport, and the transport alone translates engine ports to
Steam fake ports via the lobby-fed peer table (RegisterPeer). Connect
mirrors the TCP retry-while-refused loop; Receive normalizes message
lanes back into the stream semantics CheckBuffers expects.
Runtime verified on this box: RP412STEAM=1 under AppID 480 came up as
169.254.59.52 (fake ports 32256/32257); without Steam credentials it
falls back to TCP cleanly; default boot logs no Steam lines at all.
steam_api.dll ships in the dist.
Next: the lobby layer (ISteamMatchmaking member data -> RegisterPeer +
egg build + RPL4CONSOLE marshal), which needs a second account to test.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Starting without -egg, -net, or -mr now boots a race-setup screen
(RP_L4/RPL4FE.cpp) instead of aborting: track / vehicle / color / badge
/ time-of-day / weather / race length plus pilot name, populated from
TeslaConsole''s RPConfig.xml catalog (Death Race scenario). LAUNCH
builds the egg exactly as the console did - the RPMission.ToEggString
port, including the pilot name pre-rendered to 1bpp plasma bitmaps
(128x32 + 64x16) via GDI with the console''s auto-shrink font logic and
the verbatim ordinal graphics - writes frontend.egg, and injects it
into the standard egg-load path (new L4Application::
SetEggNotationFileName).
The menu is a GDI child of the main window (pod green-on-black, double
buffered, mouse driven, EDIT control for the name) running a modal loop
before engine init; closing the window exits cleanly. Found and fixed
along the way: the empty egg CString holds a NULL representation
(operator! is the safe emptiness test), and the modal loop needed a
queue nudge for launch clicks delivered via SendMessage.
Verified end to end: boot -> menu -> LAUNCH -> generated egg (7.5KB) ->
racing in the 1080p cockpit with score and mission clock running.
start-windowed.bat now boots into the front end.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Playtest direction on the canvas layout: all five MFDs at the compact
320x240 glass size - upper pair pushed to the top corners, score glass
top-center, lower pair in the bottom corners, map bottom-center - and
the viewscreen now fills the entire 1920x1080 canvas. Launched with
-res 1920 1080 the 3D renders native 1:1 (the 2007 D3D9 path takes the
1080p backbuffer and 16:9 aspect without complaint). start-windowed.bat
updated accordingly.
Verified live: full-screen native 3D with the cockpit floating over its
edges, mission running, preset lamp lit on the map column.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Remove-Item raced a live playtest session and gutted the folder around
the locked files. Detect a running rpl4opt.exe under dist and abort
before deleting anything.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The main game window becomes the cockpit shell (enlarged, clipping
children); every display folds in as a chrome-less child pane in the
pod interior arrangement:
[ MFD UL ] [ MFD UC ] [ MFD UR ]
[ plasma (reduced) ][ viewscreen (centered) ]
[ MFD LL ] [ Map ] [ MFD LR ]
The 3D scene presents into a black STATIC viewscreen child via
Present's hDestWindowOverride (new gMainPresentWindow global) - no
swap-chain changes, and STATIC's transparent hit-testing keeps mouse
input over the 3D view flowing to the game window. MFDSplitView gains a
parent/child mode; PlasmaScreen::Position reparents the glass into the
shell. Main window class background goes black for the cockpit gaps.
Verified by screenshot: live green gauges (LIFT CUT / BOOST / CHUTE /
trigger-program screens) with their red button strips, the 3D canyon in
the centered viewscreen, plasma score glass at its left, map with lit
amber preset lamps - one window, 976x1132 client at 50% scale.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Each MFDSplitView window now carries its display's physical button bank,
placed as in the pod (addresses per vRIO CockpitLayout): a 4x2 red
cluster around each MFD glass (anchors 0x2F/0x27/0x37 upper, 0x0F/0x07
lower, addresses descending row-major) and 6 amber buttons down each
side of the map - Secondary 0x10-0x15 left, Screen 0x18-0x1D right; the
remaining column addresses are Tesla relays, per the pod wiring, so they
get no buttons.
Buttons light from the lamp state the game commands: PadRIO grows a
static active-instance hook (SetScreenButton/GetLampState); mouse
press/release feeds PadRIO's desired-state sampling alongside pad and
keyboard, and paint decodes the lamp byte (state1/state2 brightness,
solid/slow/med/fast flash animated by tick). With real serial hardware
(no PadRIO) the buttons draw dark and inert.
Verified: map flank buttons light per the game's preset lamps, aligned
with the labels the glass draws at its edges; MFD clusters render 4+4.
Roadmap: queued the vRIO Dynamic Lighting RGB-keyboard lamp mirror as a
polish-pass item. dist repacked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The pod drove five monochrome MFDs from the color channels of two video
outputs - SVGA16 packs bit-slices of the shared gauge canvas into R/G/B
of gauge window 3 (upper MFDs) and R/G of window 4 (lower MFDs), with the
map palettized on the secondary and physically mounted portrait. The
desktop reconstruction previously required an external BitBlt-mirror
wrapper.
With L4MFDSPLIT=1, SVGA16 renders each display into its own window
(MFDSplitView, plain GDI) straight from the canvas + port bit-masks:
five green-screen MFD windows and the 90CW-rotated Map, tiled in the pod
grid to the right of the main view (L4MFDSCALE percent, default 50). The
packed D3D windows stay hidden but keep presenting off-screen, leaving
the original path untouched. Handles spanning mode (2-window setups).
Also: the plasma glass now opens directly below the main view (clamped
to the work area; L4PLASMAPOS=x,y overrides) per playtest feedback.
Verified: window grid comes up as main + 5 MFDs + Map + plasma with the
packed windows hidden; screenshots confirm a green MFD score readout and
the portrait tactical map rendering correctly. dist packer and BUILD.md
updated; the launcher wrapper is obsolete for split-mode use.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Collects the Release exe (+pdb), the AUDIO/GAUGE/VIDEO data and INIs from
assets\RP411 (leaving the arcade launch scripts and old 4.10 exe behind),
libsndfile + the system OpenAL runtime (oalinst.exe as fallback), a
desktop environ.ini (PAD;KEYBOARD + on-screen plasma), start-windowed.bat
and a controls README. -Zip additionally produces a handoff zip. dist\ is
gitignored; verified by running the game from the packaged folder.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Fable 5