A tester still racing a two-week-old binary reports things that were
fixed a week ago, and the afternoon spent chasing them is gone. An
expired build now says so and stops: a dialog naming its version and
expiry date, pointing at the releases page, and an exit before anything
else runs. The log carries the same line, so a report from an expired
build identifies itself.
$expireDays at the top of stamp-version.ps1 is the shelf life, sitting
next to the product line it belongs with. It counts from the day a build
was MADE rather than the day the code was written - rebuilding an old
commit to chase something should hand back a usable binary, not one born
stale.
SET IT TO 0 FOR A REAL RELEASE. A shipped build that expires is a
catastrophe, and that one line decides it. It is called out in the
script, in the generated header and in BUILD.md, because it is the kind
of thing that gets noticed exactly once, too late.
The date is what makes rpl4build.h differ from one day to the next, so
the first build of each day recompiles RPL4.CPP and the rest do not.
This is a nudge, not a lock. The date comes from the machine's own clock
and anyone determined can wind it back; the point is to stop an honest
tester wasting a day, not to stop anybody at all. RP412NOEXPIRY=1 waives
it for us and logs that it did, so a waived build is never mistaken for
a current one. It is deliberately absent from environ.ini - a bypass
every tester can see is a bypass every tester will use, and then it never
goes stale for the one person it was meant to stop.
Verified all four ways by backdating the shelf life rather than touching
the clock, which is what a negative $expireDays is for: a fresh build
runs untouched; an expired one raises the dialog, exits 1, and logs
"Build expired on 4 August 2026 - refusing to run"; the same expired
build with RP412NOEXPIRY=1 runs and logs the waiver; and a build with two
days left runs and logs two days left.
Two things that only showed up by running it. Negative days first meant
"never" rather than "already expired", so the refusal path went untested
on the first pass - only 0 means never now. And the days-left count was
anchored at midday, reporting one day fewer than the build had; it is
anchored at the end of the expiry day, which is the rule the check
actually enforces.
The packaged README tells testers the build expires, where to get the
next one, and that unzipping it over the folder keeps their four files.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Packing one into every zip meant a tester who unzipped a new build over
their folder got their configuration replaced. bindings.txt has never had
that problem, because the exe carries the template and writes the file
only when it is absent. environ.ini now works the same way, so a new
build can land on an existing folder and every setting survives.
The 245-line template moves out of pack-dist.ps1 and into RPL4ENVIRON.cpp
as the exe's own literal, which also means the exe alone can produce a
working install. It was lifted mechanically rather than retyped, and the
file it writes is line-for-line identical to the one we have been
shipping - only the line endings changed, from a mongrel 243 LF plus one
stray CRLF that PowerShell's Set-Content left on the end, to the uniform
LF the game already writes bindings.txt with.
It cannot simply become optional. Without environ.ini, L4GAUGE is unset -
which disables the gauge renderer and takes every MFD with it - and
L4MFDSPLIT is unset, which is the packed-window arcade layout rather than
the glass cockpit. The shipped values ARE the desktop game; the built-in
getenv fallbacks are the 1995 pod. So the game writes the file rather
than tolerating its absence.
The cost of a file that is never overwritten is that a tester carrying
one across many builds stops being offered new options. Nothing breaks -
an option added later defaults to "behave as before" - but it goes
unnoticed, and "the podium does not work" is a confusing bug report when
the real answer is that their environ.ini predates RP412PODIUM. So the
load names every template key the player's file has never mentioned, and
says they are at built-in defaults and that deleting the file brings the
documented one back. A stale seven-line file lists all 40.
The file is read, never rewritten. The mention test is deliberately
generous - a key counts as known if it appears in any form, commented or
not - because the failure it guards against is worse than a missed
notice: environ.ini is applied line by line, so a second copy of a key
appearing later in the file would silently override the player's own.
The version line also moves to the top of WinMain. It used to print after
the environment was loaded, so the first thing in rpl4.log was a message
about environ.ini rather than which build wrote it.
Verified: the written file matches the old shipped one line for line; an
edited file with a hand-added comment survives another run untouched; a
seven-line file from an older build boots and names all 40 options it has
never heard of; and a full mission on a self-written file brings up the
glass cockpit at 125% with the virtual RIO active and nothing alarming in
the log.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A hand-maintained version says what somebody remembered to type. Pinning
it to the repository means a binary always names the commit it came from,
so a log from a test machine settles which changes are in it.
stamp-version.ps1 runs as RP_L4's pre-build step and writes the generated
RP_L4\rpl4build.h:
#define RP412_VERSION "4.12.96"
#define RP412_VERSION_LONG "4.12.96 (a1b2c3d)"
The hash beside the number names the commit exactly; a trailing '+' means
the tree had uncommitted changes to TRACKED files when it was built, which
is the state a puzzling bug report usually comes from. Untracked files do
not count - one scratch document in the tree would otherwise mark every
build dirty and the marker would stop meaning anything.
Generated rather than committed, and gitignored, because a hardcoded
number cannot work: the commit that records "4.12.96" is itself commit 96,
so the file is stale the moment it lands. The header is rewritten only
when the stamp changes, so ordinary rebuilds do not drag RPL4.CPP through
a recompile.
pack-dist.ps1 reads that header instead of asking git again - a commit
between building and packing would otherwise have the zip claiming a
version the binary inside it does not report - and warns when the build
it is packing came from a modified tree. The README banner, the zip name
and the shipped CONTROLS.html all take the same number.
Numbering stays ordered: 95 commits so far, so 4.12.95 follows 4.12.7 and
every future build sorts after it. Only the "4.12" line is set by hand,
at the top of the script.
Two things the wiring turned up:
Windows PowerShell turns a native command's stderr into ErrorRecords,
so with $ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop' git's routine "LF will be
replaced by CRLF" warning threw straight past the dirty check and
stamped a modified tree as clean. Every git call now goes through cmd,
which keeps stderr out of PowerShell's error stream entirely.
The script ended on "git diff --quiet", which exits 1 to mean "there
are changes" - as a pre-build step that failed the build on exactly
the tree a developer builds in. It exits 0 explicitly now.
Verified: deleting the header and building recreates it; a second build
reports "(unchanged)" and leaves the timestamp alone; a build on a
modified tree succeeds and stamps 4.12.95 (c1729e4+); and the packed game
logs "Red Planet 4.12.95 (c1729e4+)" on its first line while README.txt
and CONTROLS.html in the same package both read 4.12.95.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Playtest direction on the canvas layout: all five MFDs at the compact
320x240 glass size - upper pair pushed to the top corners, score glass
top-center, lower pair in the bottom corners, map bottom-center - and
the viewscreen now fills the entire 1920x1080 canvas. Launched with
-res 1920 1080 the 3D renders native 1:1 (the 2007 D3D9 path takes the
1080p backbuffer and 16:9 aspect without complaint). start-windowed.bat
updated accordingly.
Verified live: full-screen native 3D with the cockpit floating over its
edges, mission running, preset lamp lit on the map column.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The cockpit is now a fixed 1920x1080 canvas (uniformly scaled down on
smaller monitors, min 25%):
[ MFD UL 640 ][ MFD UC 640 ][ MFD UR 640 ] <- native glass, 1920 wide
[ viewscreen 800x600 centered ]
[ MFD LL ] [ Map ] [ MFD LR ] <- bottom edge
Playtest direction: the original pods MFDs partially occluded the main
display, and that is used here on purpose - the panes overlap the
viewscreen and render over it (viewscreen pinned to the bottom of the
sibling z-order, WS_CLIPSIBLINGS everywhere, so the 3D present clips
around every pane). Top-row glasses are gauge-canvas native 640x480 -
three across is exactly 1920. Red MFD buttons at half height; the amber
map columns stack contiguous like the pod strips. The auto-fit
scale/L4MFDSCALE machinery is gone - the canvas is the design space.
Verified live at 100% scale: contiguous native top row over the
centered viewscreen, bottom cluster overlapping its lower edge, map and
gauges updating (BOOST values moving, presets lit).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The assembled shell could exceed the work area (1291px tall at default
scale) - on a 1080p monitor the whole lower row, map included, hung off
the bottom of the screen, which read as the map not rendering, and the
lamp-reactive preset buttons were unreachable down there. (The render
and click paths themselves were verified fine: a synthetic press on a
map preset button lights it through the game lamp command.)
The layout now measures SPI_GETWORKAREA and fits: the pane scale steps
down (to 20% minimum) and the viewscreen takes the leftover height at
the 3D aspect, shrinking below native when needed - Present stretches,
so the scene scales cleanly. Rows and viewscreen center in the shell,
which is sized to the work area. Verified: at 70% panes in a 1392-high
work area the viewscreen reduced to 609x457 with everything on screen.
The plasma glass sits out of the cockpit for the moment
(PlasmaScreen::Hide) per playtest direction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The main game window becomes the cockpit shell (enlarged, clipping
children); every display folds in as a chrome-less child pane in the
pod interior arrangement:
[ MFD UL ] [ MFD UC ] [ MFD UR ]
[ plasma (reduced) ][ viewscreen (centered) ]
[ MFD LL ] [ Map ] [ MFD LR ]
The 3D scene presents into a black STATIC viewscreen child via
Present's hDestWindowOverride (new gMainPresentWindow global) - no
swap-chain changes, and STATIC's transparent hit-testing keeps mouse
input over the 3D view flowing to the game window. MFDSplitView gains a
parent/child mode; PlasmaScreen::Position reparents the glass into the
shell. Main window class background goes black for the cockpit gaps.
Verified by screenshot: live green gauges (LIFT CUT / BOOST / CHUTE /
trigger-program screens) with their red button strips, the 3D canyon in
the centered viewscreen, plasma score glass at its left, map with lit
amber preset lamps - one window, 976x1132 client at 50% scale.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Each MFDSplitView window now carries its display's physical button bank,
placed as in the pod (addresses per vRIO CockpitLayout): a 4x2 red
cluster around each MFD glass (anchors 0x2F/0x27/0x37 upper, 0x0F/0x07
lower, addresses descending row-major) and 6 amber buttons down each
side of the map - Secondary 0x10-0x15 left, Screen 0x18-0x1D right; the
remaining column addresses are Tesla relays, per the pod wiring, so they
get no buttons.
Buttons light from the lamp state the game commands: PadRIO grows a
static active-instance hook (SetScreenButton/GetLampState); mouse
press/release feeds PadRIO's desired-state sampling alongside pad and
keyboard, and paint decodes the lamp byte (state1/state2 brightness,
solid/slow/med/fast flash animated by tick). With real serial hardware
(no PadRIO) the buttons draw dark and inert.
Verified: map flank buttons light per the game's preset lamps, aligned
with the labels the glass draws at its edges; MFD clusters render 4+4.
Roadmap: queued the vRIO Dynamic Lighting RGB-keyboard lamp mirror as a
polish-pass item. dist repacked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The pod drove five monochrome MFDs from the color channels of two video
outputs - SVGA16 packs bit-slices of the shared gauge canvas into R/G/B
of gauge window 3 (upper MFDs) and R/G of window 4 (lower MFDs), with the
map palettized on the secondary and physically mounted portrait. The
desktop reconstruction previously required an external BitBlt-mirror
wrapper.
With L4MFDSPLIT=1, SVGA16 renders each display into its own window
(MFDSplitView, plain GDI) straight from the canvas + port bit-masks:
five green-screen MFD windows and the 90CW-rotated Map, tiled in the pod
grid to the right of the main view (L4MFDSCALE percent, default 50). The
packed D3D windows stay hidden but keep presenting off-screen, leaving
the original path untouched. Handles spanning mode (2-window setups).
Also: the plasma glass now opens directly below the main view (clamped
to the work area; L4PLASMAPOS=x,y overrides) per playtest feedback.
Verified: window grid comes up as main + 5 MFDs + Map + plasma with the
packed windows hidden; screenshots confirm a green MFD score readout and
the portrait tactical map rendering correctly. dist packer and BUILD.md
updated; the launcher wrapper is obsolete for split-mode use.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Collects the Release exe (+pdb), the AUDIO/GAUGE/VIDEO data and INIs from
assets\RP411 (leaving the arcade launch scripts and old 4.10 exe behind),
libsndfile + the system OpenAL runtime (oalinst.exe as fallback), a
desktop environ.ini (PAD;KEYBOARD + on-screen plasma), start-windowed.bat
and a controls README. -Zip additionally produces a handoff zip. dist\ is
gitignored; verified by running the game from the packaged folder.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Splits the control surface the game consumes from the RIO board into
RIOBase (8 virtuals + the five analog scalars); the serial RIO is now one
implementation of it. Adds two new ones:
- PadRIO (L4CONTROLS=PAD): in-process RIO speaking the full surface from
an XInput controller + PC keyboard using vRIO's default profile (left
stick/WASD = stick, triggers/Q,E = pedals, right stick Y/PgUp,PgDn =
rate throttle that holds position, A/Space = trigger, B/R = reverse,
dpad/arrows = hat, Start,Back/F1,F2 = config). Samples in GetNextEvent
so button latency does not depend on the 15 s menu-time analog cadence;
hot-plugs pads; L4PADFLIP=XY inverts stick axes; lamp commands land in
lampState[] for the planned on-screen cockpit panel. The stock
VTVRIOMapper/lamp/button path runs unchanged.
- PlasmaScreen (L4PLASMA=SCREEN): the 128x32 plasma glass as a desktop
window in plasma orange (L4PLASMASCALE, default x4), rendering the same
Video8BitBuffered surface the gauge system always drew; no COM port.
Verified in the sandbox with vRIO off and no serial devices: boots to a
running mission, controller hot-detected, plasma window drawing live game
content (score readout). BUILD.md 4 documents the desktop environ.ini and
bindings; roadmap updated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
d3d_OBJECT::LoadTexture never checked D3DXCreateTextureFromFileA, cached
the NULL texture, and unconditionally AddRef()ed it - an access violation
on any missing/unreadable texture, hit by every bare working copy because
the pod skins (VIDEO\player1-8) come from the presets/replacement-material
path, not the depot. Failures now log the filename+hr and the draw op
renders untextured, matching the existing no-texture-filename path. Also
guard the unchecked gReplacementData->find() in LoadObject (same latent
UB one branch earlier).
Verified in the sandbox working copy: the game now boots to a running
RPL4 window with -windowed -egg TEST.EGG (RIO served by vRIO), logging
the eight missing pod skins instead of dying in MakeEntityRenderables.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Hand-converted the four .vcproj projects to .vcxproj (Win32, v143,
Windows 11 SDK + DXSDK June 2010 for d3dx9/dxerr only). WinTesla.sln now
builds the v143 projects; the legacy solution is kept as WinTesla_vc9.sln.
Kept: /Zp1 in Munga_L4+RP_L4, Unicode, x86, /DYNAMICBASE:NO,
/FORCE:MULTIPLE (header-defined globals still duplicated across TUs).
Changed: CRT unified to /MD(d); import libs linked by the exes instead of
merged into Munga_L4.lib; WINDOWS_IGNORE_PACKING_MISMATCH and
_SILENCE_STDEXT_HASH_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS defined;
legacy_stdio_definitions.lib for the June-2010 dxerr.lib.
Source fixes, all behavior-preserving: Time gains standard (non-volatile)
copy-ctor/assignment overloads (rvalues cannot bind to volatile& in
standard C++); operator==(SOCKADDR_IN&,...) made inline; L4DINPUT's
Enum*Callback pair renamed DIEnum* (collided with L4CTRL's under LTCG);
std::ios.in -> std::ios::in in CAMMGR.cpp.
Verified: VC9 baseline rebuilt from this tree first, then the v143 build
compared against it in a sandboxed game working copy - identical logs and
behavior through RIO init (against vRIO) and mission load, including the
same pre-existing AV in d3d_OBJECT::LoadTexture (L4D3D.cpp:262) that both
toolchains hit; documented in BUILD.md 4 as the next debugging target.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Verified full build with VC++ 2008 Express SP1 + Windows SDK v6.0A + DirectX
SDK (June 2010): 4 Projects succeeded, 0 failed (Release|Win32). Outputs:
Release\rpl4opt.exe, Release\RPL4TOOL.exe, lib\Munga_L4.lib, lib\DivLoader.lib.
Two projects referenced DirectX but were never repointed at $(DXSDK_DIR)
(they had no hardcoded path to replace earlier):
- DivLoader.vcproj: add "$(DXSDK_DIR)Include" to both compiler configs
(was failing on D3DX9.h).
- RPL4TOOL.vcproj / RPL4TOOL VS2008.vcproj: add "$(DXSDK_DIR)Lib\x86" to the
linker search path (was failing with LNK1181 on dinput8.lib).
.gitignore: ignore the build-output static libs that land in lib/
(Munga_L4.lib, DivLoader.lib); the dependency libs OpenAL32.lib and
libsndfile-1.lib stay tracked.
BUILD.md / docs/BUILD-NOTES.md: record the verified build, the CLI recipe,
and the DXSDK_DIR stale-environment gotcha.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Express editions of Visual C++ ship without ATL. The only ATL usage was
in MUNGA_L4/L4APP.cpp (atlbase.h/atlconv.h + USES_CONVERSION/W2A macros, all
in that one file) for wide-to-ANSI conversion of command-line arguments.
- Replace the ATL includes with a self-contained L4WideToAnsi helper (a
WideCharToMultiByte wrapper) and local USES_CONVERSION/W2A macros that
reproduce ATL's W2A semantics. All call sites consume the result immediately
(stricmp / CString assignment / atoi / atol), so behaviour is unchanged.
- Set UseOfATL="0" in Munga_L4.vcproj, RP_L4.vcproj and their VS2008 variants.
- Document the Express build path and the confirmed June 2010 DirectX SDK in
BUILD.md (new section 6) and docs/BUILD-NOTES.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Opus 5