Acceleration, top speed, impact speed, armor, boosts, chutes and each
tool's charges, decoded from the resource file rather than transcribed.
GameModel is a fixed 180-byte block: mass at +0, drag at +36, acceleration
at +64, impact speed at +100. Top speed is NOT stored - it is terminal
velocity, acceleration over drag, which is why it lands on the round
numbers the arcade quoted: 6.0/0.060 is Mule's 360 kph, 5.5/0.060 is
Bull's 330. Armor is a float in the DamageZones record past the "dz_vtv"
name, at +35.
Boosts and chutes come from the subsystem stream, which is now walked
properly: a record is name[32], a type id, its own length, and the charge
count sixteen bytes on. That replaces a regex that hunted for printable
names in the float tails and guessed where each one started - the new walk
matches every vehicle's declared subsystem count exactly.
Neutrino's two derived figures are withheld and the card says why. Its
drag is 0.008 against 0.052 on every other Lepton and its impact speed is
uninitialised, so the engine would give it a 2880 kph top speed. The data
is wrong, not the reading.
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
