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. v4.12.2 carried 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.

v4.12.3 is about the screen. The cockpit now scales up as well as down and re-fits whenever the window changes, keeping 16:9 so a wide panel letterboxes instead of stretching; -fit runs it borderless over the whole monitor and picks the render size to land on the viewscreen 1:1. The displays are the player's to arrange — each of the six can be scaled on its own and the radar moved out of the middle of the road (environ.ini). Each display's button bank now reaches under its glass, so the picture itself is the press target rather than a sliver at the edge.

v4.12.4 is about the lobby. Both rooms now show the host's mission setup — the track, then time of day, weather and game length — since everyone flies the owner's picks and it was the one thing in the room nobody could see for themselves. The football team sheet names each player's VTV beside their team colours and position. And a lobby holds eight players rather than four, a full grid as the pod hall ran it, with the room sizing its roster to whatever space the window gives it.

v4.12.5 restores the Winners Circle. The pod hall stood the finishers on a numbered award platform when the race ended, and all of it was still in this repo — the stand, eight ranked spots in every map, and the code to put racers on them — wired only into the mission-review build and so never once run by a pod. The race now fades out and fades back in on the platform: finishers in finishing order, each pilot's callsign on the plate beside their spot, the cockpit glass cleared away, held for a few seconds before the results screen. Three pieces of it had been stubbed out in the D3D9 port and are working again.

v4.12.6 is about the windows. Where you put them now survives the menu-race-menu loop: RP412MFDLAYOUT remembers the game window, the exploded view's display panes and the plasma glass in mfd_layout.cfg beside bindings.txt. Append ,noframe to a line to take that window's title bar and border off — a cockpit filling the monitor edge to edge at a rect you chose, rather than -fit taking the whole screen — and the setup screen carries its own EXIT GAME button, since a window with no title bar needs a way out. The Steam buttons now dim and say STEAM NOT RUNNING instead of disappearing. And the Winners Circle camera is framed off the award stand itself rather than off whoever is standing on it, so the shot is the same one for every player at every head count.

v4.12.7 is about sticks. Anything that is not an Xbox-class pad — a flight stick, a HOTAS throttle, a twist grip, rudder pedals, a wheel — comes in through DirectInput rather than XInput, and the game could not see any of it. Now it can, and joyconfig.bat sets it up: the wizard asks you to move each control in turn, works out which device and axis answered and which way round it reads, and writes the joystick rows of bindings.txt, leaving anything you have edited yourself alone. A twist grip or rudder bar drives both pedals through one signed Pedals axis, and a real throttle lever owns its channel outright rather than nudging a position the way a spring-centred stick has to. Ported from the sibling BT411.

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 config files beside the exe are self-documenting and none of them ship: the game writes each one the first time it needs it and then leaves it alone, so a new build dropped over an existing folder keeps every setting. environ.ini is every engine option, commented; bindings.txt every key, pad button and axis; pilot.cfg your callsign and loadout; mfd_layout.cfg where you dragged the windows. Delete any of them to start that part over with the current defaults. 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. Full map with pad and keyboard diagrams: docs/CONTROLS.md.

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/CONTROLS.md	Controls map — pad and keyboard diagrams, the panel button banks, rebinding
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
docs/RP412-LINUX.md	Linux compatibility assessment — Proton path vs native port; parked until late playtesting
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)