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.

{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.

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.