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>
The roster page called vehicles by their resource key and hulls by their
two-letter art code - PUCK, "Hull PA". TeslaConsole's RPConfig.xml is the
only place either is named in words, so it now supplies both: the card says
ARMADILLO with the key beneath it, and the hull says "Armadillo hull" rather
than "Hull PA".
The class comes from the picture the console showed for each machine, so
vehicles sharing a picture share a class, and each hull is named by majority
vote of the vehicles drawn with it - one mis-set picture cannot rename a
whole class. Which matters, because two are mis-set: the console shows a Bug
picture for Blacker Broccoli and Blacker Tarantula, while the game draws
them on the Mule and Bull hulls. The page says so on those two cards instead
of quietly picking a side. Every other vehicle agrees.
RPConfig.xml and RPStrings.xml are copied into tools/console-config: the
front end's catalogs already came from them by hand, the roster page reads
them now, and they were only living inside the airlock archive.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
RPL4.RES is compiled from authored sources by RPL4TOOL -b, the original 1996
resource tool, which still builds in this tree. That pipeline did not work:
the tool aborted on the very first model, so the resource file could only be
consumed, never regenerated. Content could not be changed at all.
It died in PlugStream_FindEntryAndWriteObjectID resolving resource=
Translocation01 from AUDIO/PLYINT.SCP, a name defined in no file under
CONTENT/RP. The obvious suspect was the AWE32 soundbank path, since
AudioCard::LoadSBK is stubbed to return 1 by the Win32 port - but that is a
red herring. Supplying the banks changes nothing because nothing reads them
at build time. CreateStaticAudioStreamResource opens audio\static.scp, which
declares all 154 patch resources as plain text mapping each name to a bank
and patch number, and CONTENT/RP simply does not have that file. The sda4
developer drive does. Two more scripts included by 27 vehicles, VTVINT.SCP
and VTVEXT.SCP, were missing the same way. All three are kept in recovered/
because they are the keystone and are small.
No engine change was needed. The pipeline was missing content, not code.
build-res.ps1 assembles a build tree from the 4.10 content, those three
scripts, and the soundbanks and ~547 VIDEO files that RP412 ships complete
and the content tree does not. It never overwrites an authored file with a
shipped one, so archival content stays authoritative where it exists.
A model missing a skeleton is dropped SILENTLY - the tool logs and carries
on, producing a resource file with fewer models rather than failing. Check
the model count, which is why the script reports unresolved inputs.
-RestoreCutVehicles uncomments dark, blkspk and blktrn, three vehicles taken
out of the .bld after 4.10 shipped with their model ids left in place. All
three build clean and take the count from 42 to 45, exactly retail's, each
with its full subsystems, segments, damage zones and control mappings.
What this cannot do yet: eleven maps have no source. Five survive only on the
sda4 drive in a 1996 state older than retail, and otto, frstrm, burnt,
brewers, headoff and headmf are gone entirely - the .CAM cameras and .XST
existence boxes are here but the .MAP files are not. So a build from these
sources yields 45 models and zero maps against RP411's nine, and is not yet a
drop-in replacement for assets/RP411/RPL4.RES.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Red Planet's original AWE32 soundbanks are back in the tree, and the game's
sound effects are now generated from them instead of from an incomplete
one-off extraction.
AUDIO1.RES and AUDIO2.RES come from the 1996 release in the TeslaRel410
archive, hash-identical. AUDIO.INI has named them all along - they were
simply never carried into the port. tools/rp_sf2extract.py reads them and
regenerates both the WAV set and RP_L4/WTPresets.cpp, so the assets are
reproducible from the banks rather than hand-maintained.
Two things were wrong with the old set:
Pitch. Every shipped WAV was flat 44100 Hz with the banks' tuning discarded,
so 202 of the 219 zones played at the wrong speed - the worst by nine
semitones. The EMU8000's per-zone root key and tuning are now baked into
each file's declared sample rate, which is exact and needs no engine change.
Layers that were meant to be deep now are: a collision sub-thud that lasted
18 milliseconds at the wrong rate is a 0.66 second one at 1228 Hz.
Missing layers. 93 presets were short of zones and 176 were missing outright,
219 of 395. Nothing was lost recovering them - the 46 preset slots that
disappeared were all empty placeholders. The old files were also over-read,
running past the end of their sample into whatever PCM came next;
WellheadDrill02a was six seconds where the bank says eight hundred
milliseconds. Every one of the 395 files now matches its bank record exactly.
Also baked in: per-zone layer attenuation, and the static resonant low-pass
the EMU8000 applied in hardware.
Measured while doing it, and worth knowing: RP's banks contain no key-splits
at all - every multi-zone preset is a pure layer stack - and no preset has
more than four zones, which is what the engine's own "AWE appears to only
play 1st 4 voices" warning has been asserting since 1995.
Still to do: loop regions and the release fades, which 349 zones ask for and
which need new SAMPLEINFO fields. And voice demand per sound has gone from
about one zone to about two and a half, so the per-event alGenSources and
alDeleteSources churn roughly doubles - the BT tree measured pooling as the
fix for that, and a CPU win besides.
Builds clean. The extreme baked rates, 1228 Hz up to 88200, were checked
through the real path - libsndfile, alBufferData, alSourcePlay - and all
load. Not yet listened to on the pod.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
tools/two-pod-test.ps1 stands up two -net pods on loopback and
marshals them with a minimal console feeder speaking the Munga
protocol (TeslaSuite vendored Munga Net.dll): state polling, egg
chunk delivery with ACK-after-mesh, RunMission when both pods reach
WaitingForLaunch, StopMission(0) at time expiry, EndMission score
intake.
First run passed clean: pod A listened on its game port, pod B
connected from its bound port, both ACKed after the mesh completed,
raced the same 60s mission on Wiseguy's Wake, stopped on command,
and reported final scores. The deterministic TCP mesh works end to
end through the NetTransport seam - the feeder logic is exactly the
marshal the Steam lobby owner will run in-process.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Opus 5