It stopped being a controls map somewhere around the display arrangement
and the joystick wizard, and a page called CONTROLS.html is the wrong
place to look for what a file in the game folder does. So:
docs/rp412-controls.html is now docs/rp412-handbook.html and ships as
HANDBOOK.html, titled to match.
The new section answers the question the page could not: what is in the
game folder and which of it is yours. Four files are - environ.ini,
bindings.txt, pilot.cfg, mfd_layout.cfg - and only the first ships, so a
fresh unzip has none of the others and deleting one simply starts that
part over. A second table covers the shipped engine data, which nobody
should edit but everybody eventually wonders about: which INI the gauge
canvas comes from, why there are audio mixer tables for hardware that has
not existed since 1995, and that JOYSTICK.INI is the legacy path rather
than anything the new joystick support reads.
The callout carries the two that actually catch people, both of which
have caught us during this work: environ.ini is applied OVER the
environment, so a variable set in a shell loses to an uncommented line in
the file; and bindings.txt is never overwritten once it exists, which is
what protects a player's edits and also why an update's new defaults do
not appear until it is deleted.
CONTROLS.txt keeps its name. It is the controls half in plain text for
Notepad, which is still exactly what it is, and the README now says so
rather than describing the two as the same thing.
Verified by rendering the packed HANDBOOK.html headless: both tables and
the callout sit in the page's own components, the footer names the new
file, and the version stamp still flows through - the shipped copy reads
4.12.96 from the build it was packed with.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Opus 5
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