Red Planet 4.12 — the Steamification

Red Planet is VWE's pod-racing game: eight-player VTV races on Mars, originally played from inside VWE Tesla cockpit pods. This repo is the third life of that code:

Generation	What it was
Red Planet 4.10	The original game, running on the Tesla 1 pod platform (DOS-era MUNGA engine, serial RIO cockpit hardware, operator console, batch-file relaunch between missions)
Red Planet 4.11	The Win32 port of 4.10 (RP411) — DirectX 9, WinSock TCP, TeslaConsole/TeslaLauncher session control; still runs in pods, still a LAN
Red Planet 4.12	This repo: the Steamification of 4.11 — the same engine, the same wire protocol, the same missions, made distributable on Steam and playable over the internet with no cockpit hardware

The architecture is deliberately conservative: the VWE's design survives intact, with each pod-era dependency replaced by a consumer equivalent behind the engine's existing seams.

Arcade (4.10/4.11)	4.12 replacement
RIO cockpit board (serial)	PadRIO — virtual RIO from XInput pad + keyboard, fully rebindable (bindings.txt, vRIO profile format)
Seven physical displays	Single-window cockpit — all displays composed on a locked 1920×1080 canvas around the viewscreen, with the real button banks lamp-lit and clickable
Pod button lamps	On-screen lamps, plus an RGB keyboard mirror (Windows Dynamic Lighting)
TeslaConsole operator	In-game front end — race setup menu builds the mission egg locally; an in-process console marshals every race (missions still only end on a console stop, exactly as designed in 1994)
TeslaLauncher relaunch-per-mission	Single binary — menu → race → results → menu in one process
WinSock TCP LAN mesh	NetTransport seam — the deterministic pod mesh unchanged, running over plain TCP (LAN/dev) or Steam Networking Sockets (FakeIP + Steam Datagram Relay)
Site network / fixed IPs	Steam lobbies — lobby owner is the console; members exchange FakeIPs and loadouts as lobby data

Status: it works. Release v4.12.2 carries the first verified end-to-end internet build: three machines, three Steam accounts, lobby → mesh → marshaled five-minute race → deaths and respawns → timed stop → results on every machine → rematch from the same lobby.

Playing

Grab the release zip (or run pack-dist.ps1 on a build). Single player: run start-windowed.bat — the game boots into the race setup menu. Steam multiplayer: see docs/STEAM-3-MACHINE-TEST.md (until RP412 has its own AppID it runs under Spacewar, 480).

The two config files beside the exe are self-documenting: environ.ini (every engine option, commented) and bindings.txt (every key, pad button, and axis; written with the full default layout on first run). Default controls: numpad flies (8/2/4/6 stick, 7/9 pedals, 0 trigger), Shift/Ctrl throttle, Alt reverse, arrows look, Space fires, letter rows are the MFD button banks as printed on the panel. Alt+Q aborts a mission.

Building

VS 2022 (v143) + DirectX SDK June 2010 + the vendored Steamworks SDK (extern/steamworks_sdk_164) — see BUILD.md. Solution WinTesla.sln, configuration Release|Win32, output Release\rpl4opt.exe.

Documentation

Doc	Contents
docs/RP412-ROADMAP.md	The original plan and workstreams
docs/RP412-FRONTEND-DESIGN.md	TeslaConsole analysis, the egg format, the console protocol, and the Steam mapping — with status notes as each layer landed
docs/STEAM-3-MACHINE-TEST.md	Multiplayer test procedure, Steam Input notes, the abort key
BUILD.md	Toolchain and build steps

Dev tooling: tools/two-pod-test.ps1 races two pods on loopback, marshaled by a console feeder speaking the arcade Munga protocol.

Related repositories

Repo	Role
RP411	Upstream: the Win32 arcade port this repo Steamifies (full history preserved; remote rp411 for cross-pulling fixes)
VRIO	Virtual RIO panel + vPLASMA — source of the bindings format, the cockpit layout, and the keyboard lamp mirror
TeslaSuite	TeslaConsole / Launcher / vPOD — the arcade session-control stack 4.12 absorbed (and the reference implementation of the Munga control protocol, TCP 1501)