CydandClaude Opus 5
6c3127a94d
docs/tracks.html joins the roster page: all 18 tracks with a plan view, what the console calls them, which scenarios offer them, and how big they are. There are no track maps in the game's files. The console had pictures of them and those pictures did not survive - RPConfig.xml still points at "images/red planet maps/Wiseguy's Wake.bmp" and the folder is gone. So the plans are drawn from the tracks themselves. A map's instance stream places its scenery: 76-byte records carrying a position at +48 and a unit quaternion at +60, a few of them longer, so the reader resyncs on an unexpected class id rather than trusting the stride. The quaternion doubles as a checksum - a mis-read almost never yields a unit one - and 17 of the 18 decode every instance the header promises. Trough gives up 631 of 633 and the card says so. Seen this way the tracks have obvious shapes: Brewer's Bane turns two corners, Tour De Mars is one 23,000-unit run, and both arenas are a regular lattice of obstacles rather than a route at all. The eras come from the resource-file archaeology rather than a guess: 9 tracks shipped in the 4.10 cabinets, headoff and headmf arrived with 4.11, and 7 were built by the community afterwards. Scenario legality is read out of the front end's own kMaps and kFootballMaps, so the page cannot claim a track is offered when the menu does not offer it. tools/pages carries the generators for both reference pages, with a README covering the two formats they read and the id-alignment the listing is needed for. They were scratch scripts until now, which made a committed page harder to regenerate than to rebuild by hand. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Regenerating the reference pages
docs/vtv-presets.html and docs/tracks.html are generated from
assets/RP411/RPL4.RES, the gauge config, and the console's RPConfig.xml.
Both are committed, so this is only needed when the resource file changes.
Both need a resource listing from the original tool, which is the authority for resource ids — the directory can be walked in file order, but the ids have holes (this file leaves 53 and 56 unassigned) so the walk has to be aligned against the listing:
Release\RPL4TOOL.exe -l assets\RP411\RPL4.RES > listing.txt # ends in _getch(); close it
python tools\pages\extract_presets.py vtv.json listing.txt
python tools\pages\build_page.py vtv.json docs\vtv-presets.html
python tools\pages\build_tracks.py listing.txt docs\tracks.html
RPL4TOOL finishes with _getch() (RP_L4/RPL4TOOL.cpp), so with stdout
redirected it writes the whole listing and then waits for a keypress —
close it once the file stops growing.
What each reads
| script | reads | writes |
|---|---|---|
extract_presets.py |
RES, L4GAUGE.CFG, tools/console-config/RPConfig.xml, listing |
vtv.json |
build_page.py |
vtv.json, GAUGE/s*.pcc silhouettes |
docs/vtv-presets.html |
build_tracks.py |
RES, listing, RPConfig.xml, RPL4FE.cpp catalogs, tracks.css/js/tpl |
docs/tracks.html |
build_tracks.py reads the front end's own kMaps / kFootballMaps arrays
so the page cannot claim a track is offered when the menu does not offer it.
Two formats worth knowing
Control mappings. A vehicle's ControlsMappings List holds the resource
ids of its L4 and Thrustmaster streams. Streams are named plainly, so
there is nothing in a stream saying whose it is — resolve by id, never by
which vehicle name sits nearest in the file. Records are 24 bytes and carry
their own mode mask; bits 3–8 are ModePreset1..6.
Map instances. 76-byte records: class id at +0, position at +48, unit quaternion at +60. A few records are longer, so resync on an unexpected class id rather than trusting the stride. The quaternion doubles as a checksum — a mis-read almost never produces a unit one.