CydandClaude Fable 5
29ad567ffb
Filed, not started. Proton already carries Linux players and the Windows build reaches a running mission under it; this is the answer to the separate question of what one source tree building natively on both would take, so that the number exists before anyone needs it. Three sweeps of the tree, and the measurements are the part worth keeping. Two of them make the job smaller than the earlier assessment feared, and one makes it different. /Zp1 was called an entanglement with no manifest of which structs mattered. There is a manifest now: 31 distinct whole-object stream types, of which 29 are enums, scalar typedefs or all-float aggregates. Modelled at both packings and compared by sizeof, exactly one struct changes - the anonymous .met reader in L4D3D.cpp, 14 bytes packed against 16 default. Dropping /Zp1 costs one pragma. That also retires the packing divergence between RPL4TOOL and the game that FORCE:MULTIPLE has been hiding. The include mess is not the blocker. 172 of 172 core translation units fail under GCC, and 171 still fail with every 64-bit error removed, because MUNGA/SCHAIN.h uses a friend-declared name as a type and sits in the precompiled block. One line breaks the entire core, and 155 friend sites over 117 names share the shape. The whole conformance list is about thirty sites across twenty headers - small, and it gates everything. And the windows.h leak into engine core is NETWORK.h, not MATRIX.h. Winsock2.h reaches APP.h and 157 translation units, which is how APPMGR.h's bare 'extern HWND ghWnd' has been compiling all along. The D3DX9 include in MATRIX.h is real but narrow: ten files, two members. docs/RP412-LINUX.md said otherwise and now says so. What the sweeps found in our favour: RP is clean outright, 190 of 241 units touch no platform symbol, the renderer's distinct surface is nineteen render states and one mesh draw call with no shaders, all 224 .X files are text using eight templates, and the entire gauge production path - including four thousand seven hundred lines of L4VB16 - is already portable C++. RIOBase, the whole input seam, is two pure virtuals and five scalars. DivLoader is referenced by nothing and linked by nothing; the lobby room screen has no callers at all. The plan is phased so that almost everything happens on Windows first, verified by the existing build and the two-pod harness, with Linux arriving only at phase four. A port that spends six months unable to run is a port that gets abandoned. The document ends by saying when this would not be worth doing, which is most of the time: Proton already delivers the player experience, and only the first three phases have standalone value. It becomes worth starting when the goal changes to retiring the 2010 SDK dependency or removing Wine as a support variable. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
143 lines
9.3 KiB
Markdown
143 lines
9.3 KiB
Markdown
# Red Planet 4.12 — the Steamification
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**Red Planet** is VWE's pod-racing game: eight-player VTV contests on Mars
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— **Martian Death Race** and **Martian Football** — originally played from
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inside VWE Tesla cockpit pods. This repo is the third life of that code:
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| Generation | What it was |
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|------------|-------------|
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| **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) |
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| **Red Planet 4.11** | The **Win32 port** of 4.10 ([RP411](https://gitea.mysticmachines.com/VWE/RP411.git)) — DirectX 9, WinSock TCP, TeslaConsole/TeslaLauncher session control; still runs in pods, still a LAN |
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| **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 |
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The architecture is deliberately conservative: the VWE's design survives
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intact, with each pod-era dependency replaced by a consumer equivalent
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behind the engine's existing seams.
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| Arcade (4.10/4.11) | 4.12 replacement |
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|--------------------|------------------|
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| RIO cockpit board (serial) | **PadRIO** — virtual RIO from XInput pad + keyboard, fully rebindable (`bindings.txt`, vRIO profile format) |
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| 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 |
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| Pod button lamps | On-screen lamps, plus an **RGB keyboard mirror** (Windows Dynamic Lighting) |
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| 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) |
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| TeslaLauncher relaunch-per-mission | **Single binary** — menu → race → results → menu in one process |
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| 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) |
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| Site network / fixed IPs | **Steam lobbies** — lobby owner is the console; members exchange FakeIPs and loadouts as lobby data |
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**Status: it works.**
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[v4.12.2](https://gitea.mysticmachines.com/VWE/RP412/releases/tag/v4.12.2)
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carried the first verified end-to-end internet build: three machines, three
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Steam accounts, lobby → mesh → marshaled five-minute race → deaths and
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respawns → timed stop → results on every machine → rematch from the same
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lobby.
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[v4.12.3](https://gitea.mysticmachines.com/VWE/RP412/releases/tag/v4.12.3)
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is about the screen. The cockpit now scales up as well as down and re-fits
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whenever the window changes, keeping 16:9 so a wide panel letterboxes
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instead of stretching; `-fit` runs it borderless over the whole monitor and
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picks the render size to land on the viewscreen 1:1. The displays are the
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player's to arrange — each of the six can be scaled on its own and the
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radar moved out of the middle of the road (`environ.ini`). Each display's
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button bank now reaches under its glass, so the picture itself is the press
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target rather than a sliver at the edge.
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[v4.12.4](https://gitea.mysticmachines.com/VWE/RP412/releases/tag/v4.12.4)
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is about the lobby. Both rooms now show the host's mission setup — the track,
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then time of day, weather and game length — since everyone flies the owner's
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picks and it was the one thing in the room nobody could see for themselves.
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The football team sheet names each player's VTV beside their team colours and
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position. And a lobby holds **eight** players rather than four, a full grid as
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the pod hall ran it, with the room sizing its roster to whatever space the
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window gives it.
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[v4.12.5](https://gitea.mysticmachines.com/VWE/RP412/releases/tag/v4.12.5)
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restores the **Winners Circle**. The pod hall stood the finishers on a
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numbered award platform when the race ended, and all of it was still in this
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repo — the stand, eight ranked spots in every map, and the code to put racers
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on them — wired only into the mission-review build and so never once run by a
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pod. The race now fades out and fades back in on the platform: finishers in
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finishing order, each pilot's callsign on the plate beside their spot, the
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cockpit glass cleared away, held for a few seconds before the results screen.
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Three pieces of it had been stubbed out in the D3D9 port and are working
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again.
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[v4.12.6](https://gitea.mysticmachines.com/VWE/RP412/releases/tag/v4.12.6)
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is about the windows. Where you put them now survives the
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menu-race-menu loop: `RP412MFDLAYOUT` remembers the game window, the
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exploded view's display panes and the plasma glass in `mfd_layout.cfg`
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beside `bindings.txt`. Append `,noframe` to a line to take that
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window's title bar and border off — a cockpit filling the monitor edge
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to edge at a rect you chose, rather than `-fit` taking the whole
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screen — and the setup screen carries its own **EXIT GAME** button,
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since a window with no title bar needs a way out. The Steam buttons
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now dim and say *STEAM NOT RUNNING* instead of disappearing. And the
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Winners Circle camera is framed off the award stand itself rather than
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off whoever is standing on it, so the shot is the same one for every
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player at every head count.
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[v4.12.7](https://gitea.mysticmachines.com/VWE/RP412/releases/tag/v4.12.7)
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is about sticks. Anything that is not an Xbox-class pad — a flight stick,
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a HOTAS throttle, a twist grip, rudder pedals, a wheel — comes in through
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DirectInput rather than XInput, and the game could not see any of it.
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Now it can, and `joyconfig.bat` sets it up: the wizard asks you to move
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each control in turn, works out which device and axis answered and which
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way round it reads, and writes the joystick rows of `bindings.txt`,
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leaving anything you have edited yourself alone. A twist grip or rudder
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bar drives both pedals through one signed `Pedals` axis, and a real
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throttle lever owns its channel outright rather than nudging a position
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the way a spring-centred stick has to. Ported from the sibling BT411.
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## Playing
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Grab the release zip (or run `pack-dist.ps1` on a build). Single player:
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run `start-windowed.bat` — the game boots into the setup menu, where the
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SCENARIO group picks Death Race or Football (Football swaps in the
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team/position columns and its own track list). Steam multiplayer: see
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[docs/STEAM-3-MACHINE-TEST.md](docs/STEAM-3-MACHINE-TEST.md). It runs
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under Spacewar (480) for now; Red Planet's own AppID, 5108000, is parked
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until its Steam permissions are sorted.
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The config files beside the exe are self-documenting and none of them
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ship: the game writes each one the first time it needs it and then leaves
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it alone, so a new build dropped over an existing folder keeps every
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setting. **environ.ini** is every engine option, commented; **bindings.txt**
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every key, pad button and axis; **pilot.cfg** your callsign and loadout;
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**mfd_layout.cfg** where you dragged the windows. Delete any of them to
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start that part over with the current defaults.
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Default controls: numpad flies (8/2/4/6 stick, 7/9 pedals, 0 trigger),
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Shift/Ctrl throttle, Alt reverse, arrows look, Space fires, letter rows
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are the MFD button banks as printed on the panel. **Alt+Q** aborts a
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mission. Full map with pad and keyboard diagrams:
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[docs/CONTROLS.md](docs/CONTROLS.md).
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## Building
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**VS 2022 (v143)** + DirectX SDK June 2010 + the vendored Steamworks SDK
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(`extern/steamworks_sdk_165`) — see [BUILD.md](BUILD.md). Solution
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`WinTesla.sln`, configuration `Release|Win32`, output
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`Release\rpl4opt.exe`.
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## Documentation
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| Doc | Contents |
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|-----|----------|
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| [docs/CONTROLS.md](docs/CONTROLS.md) | Controls map — pad and keyboard diagrams, the panel button banks, rebinding |
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| [docs/RP412-ROADMAP.md](docs/RP412-ROADMAP.md) | The original plan and workstreams |
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| [docs/RP412-FRONTEND-DESIGN.md](docs/RP412-FRONTEND-DESIGN.md) | TeslaConsole analysis, the egg format, the console protocol, and the Steam mapping — with status notes as each layer landed |
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| [docs/STEAM-3-MACHINE-TEST.md](docs/STEAM-3-MACHINE-TEST.md) | Multiplayer test procedure, Steam Input notes, the abort key |
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| [docs/RP412-LINUX.md](docs/RP412-LINUX.md) | Linux compatibility assessment — Proton path vs native port; parked until late playtesting |
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| [docs/NET-TEST.md](docs/NET-TEST.md) | Network test protocol — WAN emulation profiles, the NetLog/NetStats telemetry, the stall-recovery test, `-spoolstats` |
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| [docs/RP412-UNIFIED-BUILD.md](docs/RP412-UNIFIED-BUILD.md) | Proposal (not scheduled) — one source tree building native on Windows and Linux; the portability survey behind it |
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| [BUILD.md](BUILD.md) | Toolchain and build steps |
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Dev tooling: `tools/two-pod-test.ps1` races two pods on loopback,
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marshaled by a console feeder speaking the arcade Munga protocol.
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## Related repositories
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| Repo | Role |
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|------|------|
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| [RP411](https://gitea.mysticmachines.com/VWE/RP411.git) | Upstream: the Win32 arcade port this repo Steamifies (full history preserved; remote `rp411` for cross-pulling fixes) |
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| [VRIO](https://gitea.mysticmachines.com/VWE/VRIO.git) | Virtual RIO panel + vPLASMA — source of the bindings format, the cockpit layout, and the keyboard lamp mirror |
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| [TeslaSuite](https://gitea.mysticmachines.com/VWE/TeslaSuite.git) | TeslaConsole / Launcher / vPOD — the arcade session-control stack 4.12 absorbed (and the reference implementation of the Munga control protocol, TCP 1501) |
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