Nearly every track is one model repeated: cn3, a wall bar whose gauge
image is two closed 25x5 rectangles. Five metres of wall thickness is
finer than the plan can resolve, so each bar was landing as two parallel
lines plus two end caps - several hundred times over, which is the
hatching that swamped the arenas. Collapse a thin closed quad to the
centreline between its short edges: one stroke for one wall.
Walls stacked to build height coincide seen from above, so draw each
distinct wall once. And drop placements standing alone more than 200
units from any other - fourteen tracks park a single bar at (1200,0,0)
well off the course, and that one placement stretched the frame to
twelve times the width of the track. The four tracks without it are
exactly the four that always framed correctly. A real branch keeps its
neighbours and stays: Paingod's second canyon is sixty bars out at
x=-400.
The first version of these plans was a scatter of scenery positions - an
impression of a track rather than a picture of one. The game already draws
the real thing: the map screen in the pod renders the track from above every
race, so the plans now reconstruct that instead of approximating it.
NavDisplay::DrawStatic walks the static entities, looks up each one's
L4GaugeImage by resource id, and draws it through localToWorld x
worldToView. navmap.py does the same offline. The pieces that made it
possible:
- a map instance carries its model's GaugeImage id at +44, beside the
position at +48 and the quaternion at +60;
- a GaugeImage is a vertex array plus per-LOD polylines through it, in
world units - cn3 is an 89x5 wall segment, pit1 a 500x300 pit;
- a placement whose model has no gauge image is skipped here exactly as
DrawStatic skips it, which is why a card can report fewer placements
carrying map art than the track contains.
The difference is not subtle. Wiseguy's Wake and Paingod's Passage resolve
into twin canyon walls running their length, Brewer's Bane into an L-shaped
route through junction chambers, and both arenas into a lattice of obstacles
inside a boundary wall. What is still missing is the driving surface: the
map draws what lines the route, never the tarmac.
tools/pages/navmap.py carries the reader, and the README documents both the
instance record and the gauge image stream. Regenerating from the committed
generators reproduces the committed page byte for byte.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
docs/tracks.html joins the roster page: all 18 tracks with a plan view, what
the console calls them, which scenarios offer them, and how big they are.
There are no track maps in the game's files. The console had pictures of
them and those pictures did not survive - RPConfig.xml still points at
"images/red planet maps/Wiseguy's Wake.bmp" and the folder is gone. So the
plans are drawn from the tracks themselves. A map's instance stream places
its scenery: 76-byte records carrying a position at +48 and a unit
quaternion at +60, a few of them longer, so the reader resyncs on an
unexpected class id rather than trusting the stride. The quaternion doubles
as a checksum - a mis-read almost never yields a unit one - and 17 of the 18
decode every instance the header promises. Trough gives up 631 of 633 and
the card says so.
Seen this way the tracks have obvious shapes: Brewer's Bane turns two
corners, Tour De Mars is one 23,000-unit run, and both arenas are a regular
lattice of obstacles rather than a route at all.
The eras come from the resource-file archaeology rather than a guess: 9
tracks shipped in the 4.10 cabinets, headoff and headmf arrived with 4.11,
and 7 were built by the community afterwards. Scenario legality is read out
of the front end's own kMaps and kFootballMaps, so the page cannot claim a
track is offered when the menu does not offer it.
tools/pages carries the generators for both reference pages, with a README
covering the two formats they read and the id-alignment the listing is
needed for. They were scratch scripts until now, which made a committed
page harder to regenerate than to rebuild by hand.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Cyd
