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.
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>
Cyd
