CydandClaude Fable 5
1bd6dd83e2
Two pieces of MFD work that had been sitting in the tree (already in every build and dist since). The compact cockpit glass shows the full 640x480 gauge canvas at about half size, and COLORONCOLOR did that by dropping every other row and column - which shredded the 1-bit vector strokes and small text. HALFTONE area-averages instead (with the brush origin set, as MSDN requires) so the downscaled MFDs stay legible. L4MFDSPLIT=2 adds an exploded diagnostic view: every display in its own full-size desktop window at native resolution, decoded exactly as the pod VDB split them from the single gauge canvas, with no cockpit compositing and no downscale. It makes an individual MFD readable and screenshottable at full resolution for comparison against the emulator per-channel reference windows. L4MFDSPLIT=1 keeps the composited glass cockpit and stays the default. Also: .gitignore now covers the packaged RedPlanet-*.zip releases, which live on the Gitea release page rather than in the tree. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Red Planet 4.12 — the Steamification
Red Planet is VWE's pod-racing game: eight-player VTV contests on Mars — Martian Death Race and Martian Football — 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 setup menu, where the
SCENARIO group picks Death Race or Football (Football swaps in the
team/position columns and its own track list). 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) |