They are palette variants of machines already in the list, so interleaved
they read as duplicates. The console's own name decides it - eleven of
the thirty-eight are called Black or Blacker something - so they sort
last within a hull tab as well as overall.
Blacker Broccoli's console picture is a Bug, but the game draws it on the
Mule hull like every other Broccoli: the console entry is simply wrong,
and saying so on the card raised a question the card could not answer.
Blacker Tarantula keeps its note, where the console and the game really
do disagree about the hull.
Thirty-eight cards in one run is a lot to read. The first letter of a
vehicle's two-letter art code is the hull the game actually draws it
with, and the console's class names are subdivisions of those five -
Bull and Roadblock are both 'b', Bug and Skeeter both 's' - so grouping
by the letter keeps kin together whatever the console called them.
Particles 6, Bugs 10, Mules 9, Bulls 8, Police 5, which is all of them.
The build prints a warning if any vehicle falls outside the five, so a
new hull cannot go missing from the page quietly. The tabs compose with
the armament filter and the search box rather than replacing them.
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
