Red Planet 4.12 · plans drawn from RPL4.RES

Every track,
seen from above

There are no track maps in the game's files. Nine of these are the next best thing: the setup console's own pictures, score zones and drop zone labelled, recovered and shown here as they were drawn. The other nine never had one — so their plan comes from the track itself. Almost every track is a single piece repeated, a wall thrown across the route with a gate in the middle, and every gate is a point the race passes through.

{n} / {n} TRACKS
The course, gate by gate Offered for the death race Offered for football
{cards}

{n} tracks: {arcade} shipped in the 4.10 arcade cabinets, {r411} added in 4.11, {later} built by the community afterwards. Drawing what the pod's map screen draws turns out not to give a map. That screen follows NavDisplay::DrawStatic, laying down each placement's GaugeImage, and nearly every placement in every track is the same piece: cn3, whose image is two 25×5 bars at x 19.5–44.5 and -44.5–-19.5. That is not a wall running along the route, it is a wall thrown across it with a 39 unit gate in the middle, and the piece's collision solid says the same. A few hundred of those is a row of ticks, not a course.

But the gate is the point: cn3's own origin sits in the opening, so every placement marks somewhere the race passes through. Walk the gates in the order the course visits them — nearest to nearest, starting from the end furthest out, beginning a new line rather than reaching when the next gate is too far — and the track draws itself. Walls stacked for height repeat the same opening and count once. Placements standing alone more than 200 units from any other are dropped: fourteen tracks park a single piece at (1200, 0, 0) well off the course, and one stray placement stretches the frame to twelve times the width of the track. A real branch keeps its neighbours and stays — Paingod's second canyon is sixty pieces out at x = -400.

One track is drawn the other way. Chaining nearest neighbours across a regular grid invents a maze-like path out of nothing but the order the points happened to be visited in, and a plan has no business inventing a track layout. So each track is tested first: count how many neighbours a gate has within 1.6× the typical spacing. A corridor gives each gate the one ahead and the one behind; a floor of obstacles gives it four or more. Seventeen tracks score 1 or 2 and are drawn as a course. The large arena scores 8 on an exact 100 unit grid, so it keeps its wall blocks instead — and the small arena, which scores 2, really is the maze it looks like.

The console's nine pictures also check the other nine. Brewer's Bane is the one track with a shape distinctive enough to be wrong in an obvious way, and the reconstruction matches the 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, which is how the projection came to be corrected: 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. The tracks with no picture are now drawn the same way round as the tracks with one.

There is still no driving surface anywhere in the file: the track is walls and gates, never tarmac. Extent and relief are the span of the placed geometry in world units, so a long thin plan is a point-to-point canyon run — most of the arcade tracks are exactly that, a few hundred units wide and several thousand long — and a squat one is a circuit or an arena. Tracks marked NOT IN THE MENU exist in the resource file but the setup screen does not offer them.