Cyd
86bf6a934b
They are not a fixed 76 bytes. The first int of each record is its length, and while most placements are 76, every track also has eight of 140, two of 80 and one of 336 - 560 on Paingod's. Striding a fixed 76 landed mid-record on those, and hunting forward for the next plausible quaternion then locked onto arbitrary bytes: that is where the impossible class ids came from, and the "resource id" 1065353216, which is 0x3F800000 - float 1.0. Reading the length instead, all eighteen tracks parse to exactly their declared instance count with no bytes left over. That is the check that was missing before. It does not change what gets drawn, because the extra records were never drawable anyway. It does mean the parse is no longer guessing.
mapview
A dev tool: every track drawn the way the pod's map screen draws it, with pan and zoom, so you can ask "what does the map actually show here?" without booting the game. Nothing here ships — pack-dist.ps1 does not look at it.
python tools\mapview\build_mapview.py <rpl4tool-listing.txt> tools\mapview\mapview.html
Then open mapview.html. It is self-contained: track data, palette and all.
| key | |
|---|---|
| ↑ ↓ ← → | pan north / south / west / east |
| + - | zoom in / out |
| [ ] | previous / next track |
| F / A | fit the course / fit everything |
| G | GPS or NavDisplay LOD behaviour |
Dragging pans and the wheel zooms.
What it reproduces
NavDisplay::CalculateBounds (RPL4GAUG.cpp:1587)
derives metersPerPixel from the zoom and sets LODIndex to it. L4GaugeImage::Draw
(L4GAUIMA.cpp:908) then walks the LOD scales:
for (lod_index = 0; lod_index < LODCount; ++lod_index)
if (LOD_value <= LODScales[lod_index]) break;
if (lod_index < LODCount) { ...Draw... } // else nothing is drawn
Scales ascend, so index 0 is the finest and running past the largest drops the
object entirely rather than simplifying it. The viewer does the same and reports
the count, though this content barely exercises it: every placement in every
track is cn3, which carries a single LOD at scale 1000, so nothing is dropped
until 1000 m/px and then all of it goes at once.
Two display modes, because the game has two map gauges and they disagree:
- NavDisplay —
nav(A,ModeAlwaysActive,(448,416),0x00,0x3C,...). The 448×416 radar screen, LOD following the zoom. - GPS —
gps(R,ModeAlwaysActive,(125,203),1.0). The 125×203 panel, LOD pinned at 1.0 by the config however far out it is scaled.
Colour
Not a phosphor screen. Primitives carry palette indices and the palette is
whichever the port was configured with; for the pod's secondary port, where the
nav display lives, L4GAUGE.CFG says
configure(0, sec, 270, 0x00ff, clut0, rgb, secpal.pcc). PCC is PCX, so the last
769 bytes are 0x0C and 256 RGB triples. The walls come out grey because index
51 is #4b4b4b; the background is index 0, black. A primitive whose own colour
is 0 keeps the colour already set, which is the display's staticColor, 0x3C.
Palettes are per-file, not global — 39 of 40 gauge PCCs differ from each other — so the port's configured palette is the one that matters, not any convenient nearby image.
Orientation
+X runs right, +Z runs up. That is the engine's projection rather than a
choice. L4GaugeImagePrimitive::Draw plots MoveToAbsolute(dest->x, dest->z),
so the screen axes are view-space X and Z; and the graphics view's origin is at
the bottom left with Y increasing upward — BackgroundLine draws
endpoints.bottomLeft to endpoints.topRight, and the port's zero-degree blit
is documented with the origin at the bottom-left corner.
Worth knowing: the setup console's pictures of the tracks are mirrored against
this. They are illustrations, not screenshots. The plans in TRACKS.html
deliberately follow the console pictures, because nine of those cards are the
console pictures and the reconstructed nine have to sit beside them consistently.
This viewer follows the game instead. The two disagree by a mirror, and both are
right for what they are.
The nav display also centres on the vehicle and turns with it, inverting the
viewer's transform and taking yaw only unless rockAndRoll is set. Heading 0
here is the north-up case; Q/E turn the map.