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>
Cyd
