They are not a fixed 76 bytes. The first int of each record is its length,
and while most placements are 76, every track also has eight of 140, two
of 80 and one of 336 - 560 on Paingod's. Striding a fixed 76 landed
mid-record on those, and hunting forward for the next plausible
quaternion then locked onto arbitrary bytes: that is where the impossible
class ids came from, and the "resource id" 1065353216, which is
0x3F800000 - float 1.0.
Reading the length instead, all eighteen tracks parse to exactly their
declared instance count with no bytes left over. That is the check that
was missing before.
It does not change what gets drawn, because the extra records were never
drawable anyway. It does mean the parse is no longer guessing.
It was drawing the map mirrored. The X flip came from the setup console's
picture of Brewer's Bane, which is an illustration and not a screenshot -
the game does not draw it that way round.
What the game does: L4GaugeImagePrimitive::Draw plots
MoveToAbsolute(dest->x, dest->z), so the screen axes are view-space X and
Z, and the graphics view's origin is bottom left with Y increasing upward
- BackgroundLine draws endpoints.bottomLeft to endpoints.topRight, and
the port's zero-degree blit is documented with the origin in the bottom
left corner. So +X runs right and +Z runs up.
Also added the heading the real display has. NavDisplay centres on the
vehicle and turns with it, inverting the viewer's transform and taking
yaw only unless rockAndRoll is set; the viewer defaults to heading 0,
which is the north-up case, and Q/E/R turn it. Panning and dragging now
work in what you see rather than in world axes, so up stays up when the
map is turned.
TRACKS.html is left following the console pictures on purpose: nine of
those cards are the console pictures, so the reconstructed nine have to
sit beside them consistently. The two disagree by a mirror and each is
right for what it is, which both READMEs now say.
Rewritten because build_mapview.py imports navmap. This is what tracking
a .pyc costs - it will churn whenever a tool that imports navmap runs,
without ever being a source change. One .gitignore line ends it.
Pan with the arrows, zoom with plus and minus, [ and ] for the next
track. Self-contained HTML with the track data and palette embedded;
nothing here ships, and pack-dist.ps1 does not look at it.
It follows the engine rather than approximating it. NavDisplay derives
metersPerPixel from the zoom and sets LODIndex to it; L4GaugeImage::Draw
takes the first LOD whose scale is at least that value and draws nothing
once the value runs past the largest, so objects vanish rather than
simplify. Both map gauges are here because they disagree - nav is the
448x416 radar screen with LOD following zoom, gps the 125x203 panel whose
config pins LOD at 1.0. The HUD reports what is dropped, and is honest
that this content barely exercises it: every placement in every track is
cn3 with one LOD at scale 1000.
The map is not a phosphor screen. Primitives carry palette indices and
the palette is whichever the port was configured with - for the pod's
secondary port, configure(0,sec,270,0x00ff,clut0,rgb,secpal.pcc). PCC is
PCX, so the palette is the last 769 bytes. Walls are grey because index
51 is #4b4b4b; background is index 0, black; a primitive with colour 0
keeps the display's staticColor, 0x3C. Per-file palettes, not a global
one - 39 of 40 gauge PCCs differ - so the port's configured palette is
the one that counts.
Everything outstanding, uncurated: the bytecode cache Python wrote beside
navmap.py while building the pages. It is derived from a tracked source
and tagged to one interpreter (cpython-314), so it will go stale rather
than break anything - one .gitignore line drops it again if it becomes
noise.
RPConfig.xml has always named a picture for nine of the eighteen tracks.
The pictures exist after all, so the page reads the mapping straight out
of the config and uses them: score zones, drop zone, the chambers drawn
properly and labelled. No reconstruction beats the real thing. The other
nine keep the course traced from their gates, and each card now says
which of the two it is showing.
The pictures also check the reconstruction. Brewer's Bane is the one
track shaped distinctively enough to be obviously wrong, and it matches
the console picture turn for turn - long leg up one side to Score Zone 1,
the corner, the run out to Score Zone 2, junction chambers spaced along
it. It matched MIRRORED. Seen from above with +Z up the page the engine's
+X runs to the left, and every plan here had been drawn the other way
round. Fixed, so the nine tracks without a picture are drawn the same way
round as the nine with one.
Drawing what the map screen draws never was going to give a map. Nearly
every placement in every track is one piece, cn3, and its gauge image is
two 25x5 bars at x 19.5..44.5 and -44.5..-19.5 - not a wall along the
route but a wall across it with a 39 unit gate in the middle. The
collision solid agrees exactly. A few hundred of those is a row of ticks.
The gate is the point: cn3's origin sits in the opening, so every
placement marks somewhere the race passes through. Walking the gates
nearest to nearest, from the end furthest out, draws the track itself -
Brewer's Bane comes out as its L with the junction chambers, Zaxxis as a
circuit, and the small arena as the maze it always was.
Guarded, because chaining nearest neighbours across a regular grid
invents a maze-like path out of nothing but visit order. Each track is
tested first on how many neighbours a gate has within 1.6x the typical
spacing: a corridor gives 2, a floor of obstacles gives 4 or more. The
separation is not close - seventeen tracks score 1 or 2, the demolition
arena scores 8 on an exact 100 unit grid and keeps its wall blocks.
Most of the arcade tracks really are near-straight canyon runs, a few
hundred units wide and several thousand long. The plans say so now
rather than implying otherwise.
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.
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>
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>
Cyd
