CydandClaude Fable 5
b97dcce3a2
The plates beside each spot came out blank. They ask for textures called player1..player8, which are not files - the renderer draws each pilot's callsign into a texture at run time - so the load failed and left them untextured. Nothing bound the two together. SortAndReloadNameBitmaps already builds those textures indexed by finishing place, which is exactly how the plates are numbered, so the plate beside each spot wants mNameTextures[place]. Binding them is the whole fix, but it takes two steps rather than one. The plates have to survive mesh consolidation first. Static geometry is merged with D3DXConcatenateMeshes and its draw ops deduped by material - and eight failed texture loads leave eight identical untextured ops, so all eight plates collapse into one that could only ever carry a single name. Each plate now gets a distinct 1x1 marker texture as it loads, which keeps it a subset of its own. The marker is never seen. Then the binding runs against the consolidated mesh, not the objects the plates were loaded from - by podium time those have been merged away and are no longer drawn, which is why re-pointing them changed nothing. Verified on a race: 8 plates found in the consolidated mesh, 1 bound, and the winner's plate reads their callsign under their vehicle. One bound of eight is right for a single-pod race - the rest of the places have nobody in them. 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) |