Red Planet 4.12 · plans drawn from RPL4.RES

Every track,
seen from above

There are no track maps in the game's files — the console had pictures of them and those pictures did not survive. But the track itself knows where it goes. Almost every one is built from a single piece repeated: a wall thrown across the route with a gate in the middle. These plans are the course those gates describe — every gate is a point the race passes through, walked in the order the course visits them.

18 / 18 TRACKS
The course, gate by gate Offered for the death race Offered for football

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

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

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

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

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

Wiseguy's Wake

wise

ARCADE 4.10DEATH RACEFOOTBALL

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

Same footprint and instance count as -- Wiserguy's --

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Tour De Mars --

tourdemars

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

Instances
607
Cameras
20
Start boxes
20
Extent
1187 × 23298
Relief
415

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

-- 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

-- Ares' Armpits --

trough

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

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

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

-- Zaxxis --

rpweekend2014

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

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

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

-- Wiserguy's --

wiserguys

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

Instances
133
Cameras
16
Start boxes
9
Extent
231 × 5708
Relief
138

Same footprint and instance count as Wiseguy's Wake

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

-- Arena (Large) --

demoderb

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

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

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

-- Arena (Small) --

arena

COMMUNITYDEATH RACE

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

678 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.

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.