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.

18 / 18 TRACKS
The course, gate by gate Offered for the death race Offered for football
The console’s own map

Paingod's Passage

pain

ARCADE 4.10DEATH RACE

Instances
255
Cameras
18
Start boxes
12
Extent
624 × 7223
Relief
162

241 of 255 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

The console’s own map

Blade's Edge

blade

ARCADE 4.10DEATH RACEFOOTBALL

Instances
216
Cameras
21
Start boxes
7
Extent
213 × 6786
Relief
334

202 of 216 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

The console’s own map

Yip's Yahoorama

yip

ARCADE 4.10DEATH RACEFOOTBALL

Instances
127
Cameras
20
Start boxes
17
Extent
524 × 5961
Relief
432

113 of 127 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

The console’s own map

Berserker's Bahnzai

otto

ARCADE 4.10DEATH RACEFOOTBALL

Instances
203
Cameras
24
Start boxes
16
Extent
219 × 5873
Relief
442

189 of 203 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

The console’s own map

Firestorm's Fury

frstrm

ARCADE 4.10DEATH RACEFOOTBALL

Instances
325
Cameras
20
Start boxes
15
Extent
219 × 5873
Relief
382

311 of 325 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

The console’s own map

Wiseguy's Wake

wise

ARCADE 4.10DEATH RACEFOOTBALL

Instances
133
Cameras
16
Start boxes
9
Extent
231 × 5708
Relief
90

118 of 133 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

The console’s own map

Burnt Cookies

burnt

ARCADE 4.10DEATH RACEFOOTBALL

Instances
251
Cameras
17
Start boxes
3
Extent
589 × 5444
Relief
467

239 of 251 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

The console’s own map

Brewer's Bane

brewers

ARCADE 4.10DEATH RACEFOOTBALL

Instances
607
Cameras
20
Start boxes
20
Extent
3158 × 4529
Relief
297

594 of 607 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

The console’s own map

Lyz's Lane

lyzlane

ARCADE 4.10DEATH RACEFOOTBALL

Instances
105
Cameras
12
Start boxes
44
Extent
251 × 4170
Relief
313

93 of 105 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

Course traced from the gates

Freezemoon's Freeway

headoff

ADDED 4.11DEATH RACE

Instances
264
Cameras
18
Start boxes
5
Extent
589 × 5044
Relief
200

250 of 264 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

Course traced from the gates

Freezemoon's Freeway (Football)

headmf

ADDED 4.11FOOTBALL

Instances
274
Cameras
18
Start boxes
5
Extent
589 × 5044
Relief
200

262 of 274 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

Course traced from the gates

-- Tour De Mars --

tourdemars

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

Instances
607
Cameras
20
Start boxes
20
Extent
1187 × 23298
Relief
627

595 of 607 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

Course traced from the gates

-- Donut --

donut

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

Instances
325
Cameras
20
Start boxes
15
Extent
3289 × 9694
Relief
124

313 of 325 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

Course traced from the gates

-- Ares' Armpits --

trough

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

Instances
633
Cameras
16
Start boxes
9
Extent
322 × 9217
Relief
530

619 of 633 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

Course traced from the gates

-- Zaxxis --

rpweekend2014

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

Instances
695
Cameras
40
Start boxes
3
Extent
3389 × 5959
Relief
266

683 of 695 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

Course traced from the gates

-- Wiserguy's --

wiserguys

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

Instances
133
Cameras
16
Start boxes
9
Extent
1513 × 5708
Relief
150

118 of 133 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

Wall blocks — no single course to trace

-- Arena (Large) --

demoderb

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

Instances
455
Cameras
17
Start boxes
3
Extent
2000 × 1995
Relief
0

443 of 455 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

Course traced from the gates

-- Arena (Small) --

arena

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

Instances
695
Cameras
17
Start boxes
3
Extent
1844 × 1850
Relief
55

683 of 695 placements are drawn; the rest carry no map art or stand alone off the course

18 tracks: 9 shipped in the 4.10 arcade cabinets, 2 added in 4.11, 7 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.