CydandClaude Opus 5
91420b5cb2
Ported from BT411, which needed the same thing for its glass cockpit. PadRIO reads XInput, which covers Xbox-class pads and nothing else. A flight stick, a HOTAS throttle, a twist grip, rudder pedals or a wheel arrive through DirectInput instead, and until now the game could not see any of them - the only generic-joystick path left was the 1995 single- device DIJoystick behind L4CONTROLS=DIJOYSTICK, which is untouched here. L4JOY is the reader: up to four devices as normalized state blocks, hot- plug re-enumeration on the same ~3 s cadence PadRIO uses to look for a pad, and a device lost mid-race zeroed rather than left holding whatever was pressed when it went. XInput-class devices are excluded by VID/PID against the RawInput paths carrying the "IG_" marker - without that an Xbox pad arrives through both APIs and every button counts twice. bindings.txt gains four rows in the grammar it already had, using its own vocabulary (deadzone/rate) rather than BT411's: joydev <slot> [product-name substring] joyaxis <src> axis <axis> [invert] [deadzone <d>] [rate <n>] joybutton <n> button <addr> [toggle] joyhat <n> <up|down|left|right> button <addr> Slots resolve to a live device every poll, by name substring or ordinal, so unplugging and replugging does not rewrite anyone's file. Two things the pod's shape forced that BT411 solved differently: Pedals - a signed composite axis that decomposes into the pod's two pedals, positive right and negative left. The pod has a pedal each side; a twist grip or rudder bar is one signed control, and pressing one or the other but never both is exactly what it wants to say. It is a channel name like any other, so a pad stick can drive the turn too. A joyaxis on Throttle with no rate is a real lever and OWNS the channel - full travel maps onto the 0..1 the pod runs on, instead of nudging the accumulator that a spring-centred pad stick has to use. RP412JOYCONFIG=1 (joyconfig.bat) runs the capture wizard before the console screen: it asks the player to move each control, and derives the sign convention from the DIRECTION of the move. That is the point of it - a stick that reads positive pushed right and one that reads negative are equally common, and no amount of documentation gets a player to work out which they own. It writes only its own section, between marker lines, so hand-edited keyboard and pad rows survive re-running it. The wizard also prints every axis at rest before it starts. A driver that refuses the +-32767 range we ask for reports its own, and an axis then sits hard over instead of near zero; seeing "X +1.00" on an untouched stick is the difference between a five-minute fix and a bug report that says it configured itself. Each capture reports the move it saw for the same reason. Verified on the Logitech Extreme 3D on this machine. Enumeration finds it and excludes the Xbox pad, which still arrives separately through XInput. Every row shape parses - 7 axes, 2 buttons, 4 hat directions - and three deliberately malformed rows (a bad axis name, button 99, a "sideways" hat) are each rejected by line number rather than silently dropped. The wizard lists the device with its axes at rest reading X +0.00 Y -0.01 RZ -0.04 SL0 +1.00, waits on the first prompt without self-triggering, and with a hand on the stick captures X to steering, Y to pitch, RZ to the pedals and SL0 to the throttle, inverting the ones that read backwards. Running the captures through to a written file needs a hand on the stick, so that part is the machine's to confirm, not this build's. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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.
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 two config files beside the exe are self-documenting: environ.ini (every engine option, commented) and bindings.txt (every key, pad button, and axis; written with the full default layout on first run). 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 |
| 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) |