CydandClaude Fable 5
9389ec2003
The pod hall stood the finishers on a numbered platform when the race ended. All of it shipped in this repo and none of it ever ran here: the stand geometry, the eight ranked dropzones win1-win8 in every one of the 11 maps, and the sequence that places the racers on them. The sequence lived on RPL4PlaybackApplication - the mission-review build - behind a spool file, so the app the pods actually race has never called it. RPL4Application now has its own StopMission handler that ranks the finishers, drops each onto their spot, freezes them, re-sorts the name plates into finishing order and frames a camera on the stand. It fires once: StopMission arrives twice, from the console at the buzzer and again from the player when the ending fade expires, and only the first is the end of the race. Ranking works in football as well as a race. CalcFootballRanking ranks only the RunnerPlayers group, which would have placed the runners and stopped - but nothing calls it. What runs is Player::CalcRanking, every frame, over every scoring player by score. Three pieces of the original had been stubbed out in the D3D9 port and are restored: SetViewAngle was an empty function, so the 45 degrees the sequence asks for did nothing. It now rebuilds the projection the way DPLReadINIPage does and pushes it, and sets viewRatio, which nothing had written since the DPL body was commented out. winnersCircleFogStyle was an empty case. The stand sits far off the track in open ground where the track's own fog leaves it dark; this is the blue-violet the original used, with the fog pushed back to 100/1050 and the clip plane pulled to 1100. The end-of-mission fade had to be told to stand down. It multiplies the fog colour and both fog distances toward zero every frame - correct when a race just ends, fatal to anything shown afterwards. That fade is what made the podium a black screen, and it took a while to find because every frame was being built and presented correctly the whole time. The presentation camera overrides D3DTS_VIEW between the eye renderable writing it and ExecuteImplementation reading it back for the draw calls, so no CameraShip is needed. It builds with LookAt LH, not RH: the projection is LH, and RH aims the camera the opposite way - ask to look down at the stand and you get the sky behind you. The engine's own eye renderable is right to use RH, because its forward and up come out of the entity matrix already in that convention. The mission is held open 11 seconds rather than 3. That fade timer is the only thing keeping the simulation and the renderer alive once the race is over, and it has no upper bound on the ending path. Switches, all off-by-default behaviour aside: RP412PODIUM=0 skips it, RP412PODIUMCAM=0 keeps the cockpit view, RP412PODIUMSTANDOFF/HEIGHT/AIM frame the shot, RP412MISSIONSECONDS overrides the menu game length (the shortest it offers is 3:00, a long wait when what you are testing is the buzzer), and RP412RENDERDIAG=1 reports what a frame is made of. Verified end to end on Wiseguy's Wake: the stand, its tiers, the blue 2 and 3, the red 4 through 8 and all eight name bays, held steady for the full 11 seconds and then handing off to the results screen. Known gaps: the name plates are blank, because the player1-8 textures are runtime name bitmaps that do not resolve as files in this port, and your own vehicle has no exterior model - you see the others, not yourself. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <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.
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) |