The podium arrived as a hard cut: the race was still on screen one frame
and the stand was there the next. The race has its own fade-to-black
already, and it was being suppressed to keep the fade from blacking out
the podium behind it - which threw away the transition along with the
problem.
Now the two are sequenced. StopMission lets the race fade out as it
always did and posts the podium to itself for when that fade has landed
on black; the handler stands the finishers up behind the black and ramps
back in. The fade-in is the end-of-mission fade run backwards - the same
multiply on the fog colour and both fog distances, from nothing up to
what the Winners Circle asked for.
Timings: 0.7s of fade-out and black, then a 0.45s fade in. Both come out
of the 11 second hold, leaving about ten seconds of podium.
RP412PODIUMFADEIN sets the ramp.
Verified by measuring frame brightness across the transition. The race
falls away and the screen reaches black, then the stand comes up - and
with the ramp stretched to 3s to make it resolvable at a half-second
sampling interval, it climbs 71.8, 77, 78.7, 79.7, 80.5 rather than
stepping, so it is a real fade and not a cut arriving late.
The camera also comes down and tilts up across the tiers, which is how a
podium wants to be shot. It is a balance in both directions: drop it
further or tilt harder and the sky takes the top half while the winner's
spot slides off the bottom of the frame; tilt down instead and the shot
turns into a floor plan.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The pod hall stood the finishers on a numbered platform when the race
ended. All of it shipped in this repo and none of it ever ran here: the
stand geometry, the eight ranked dropzones win1-win8 in every one of the
11 maps, and the sequence that places the racers on them. The sequence
lived on RPL4PlaybackApplication - the mission-review build - behind a
spool file, so the app the pods actually race has never called it.
RPL4Application now has its own StopMission handler that ranks the
finishers, drops each onto their spot, freezes them, re-sorts the name
plates into finishing order and frames a camera on the stand. It fires
once: StopMission arrives twice, from the console at the buzzer and again
from the player when the ending fade expires, and only the first is the
end of the race.
Ranking works in football as well as a race. CalcFootballRanking ranks
only the RunnerPlayers group, which would have placed the runners and
stopped - but nothing calls it. What runs is Player::CalcRanking, every
frame, over every scoring player by score.
Three pieces of the original had been stubbed out in the D3D9 port and
are restored:
SetViewAngle was an empty function, so the 45 degrees the sequence asks
for did nothing. It now rebuilds the projection the way DPLReadINIPage
does and pushes it, and sets viewRatio, which nothing had written since
the DPL body was commented out.
winnersCircleFogStyle was an empty case. The stand sits far off the
track in open ground where the track's own fog leaves it dark; this is
the blue-violet the original used, with the fog pushed back to 100/1050
and the clip plane pulled to 1100.
The end-of-mission fade had to be told to stand down. It multiplies the
fog colour and both fog distances toward zero every frame - correct when
a race just ends, fatal to anything shown afterwards. That fade is what
made the podium a black screen, and it took a while to find because
every frame was being built and presented correctly the whole time.
The presentation camera overrides D3DTS_VIEW between the eye renderable
writing it and ExecuteImplementation reading it back for the draw calls,
so no CameraShip is needed. It builds with LookAt LH, not RH: the
projection is LH, and RH aims the camera the opposite way - ask to look
down at the stand and you get the sky behind you. The engine's own eye
renderable is right to use RH, because its forward and up come out of the
entity matrix already in that convention.
The mission is held open 11 seconds rather than 3. That fade timer is the
only thing keeping the simulation and the renderer alive once the race is
over, and it has no upper bound on the ending path.
Switches, all off-by-default behaviour aside: RP412PODIUM=0 skips it,
RP412PODIUMCAM=0 keeps the cockpit view, RP412PODIUMSTANDOFF/HEIGHT/AIM
frame the shot, RP412MISSIONSECONDS overrides the menu game length (the
shortest it offers is 3:00, a long wait when what you are testing is the
buzzer), and RP412RENDERDIAG=1 reports what a frame is made of.
Verified end to end on Wiseguy's Wake: the stand, its tiers, the blue 2
and 3, the red 4 through 8 and all eight name bays, held steady for the
full 11 seconds and then handing off to the results screen.
Known gaps: the name plates are blank, because the player1-8 textures are
runtime name bitmaps that do not resolve as files in this port, and your
own vehicle has no exterior model - you see the others, not yourself.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Imports the current Win32 source for the pod-racing game 'Red Planet',
built on the MUNGA engine and its L4 (Win32/DirectX) platform layer:
- MUNGA / MUNGA_L4: cross-platform engine core and Win32 backend
- RP / RP_L4: Red Planet game logic and Win32 application
- DivLoader, Setup1: asset loader and installer project
- lib, MUNGA_L4/openal, MUNGA_L4/sos: third-party audio dependencies
Removed stale Subversion metadata and added .gitignore/.gitattributes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Fable 5