Red Planet 4.12

Red Planet is the VWE pod-racing game built on the in-house MUNGA engine (Win32 / DirectX 9, MUNGA_L4 platform layer). The 4.12 line is the consumer port: a version of Red Planet that can be sold on Steam and played over internet multiplayer, without cockpit-pod hardware.

Forked from RP411 (the arcade/cockpit 4.11 line) with full history preserved.

Goals

1. Steam distribution — Steamworks integration, SteamPipe builds, store-ready packaging.
2. Internet multiplayer — take the engine's LAN-era WinSock networking online (NAT traversal, matchmaking, latency tolerance).
3. No cockpit required — keyboard / mouse / gamepad input and on-screen replacements for the pod's RIO panel and plasma display, drawing on vRIO.
4. Self-hosted sessions — in-game race setup/join replacing the operator-driven TeslaConsole flow.

See docs/RP412-ROADMAP.md for the plan and the Steam-multiplayer logistics.

Building

Unchanged from 4.11 for now — see BUILD.md (VS 2005/2008 + DirectX SDK June 2010, Release|Win32, output Release\rpl4opt.exe). Toolchain modernization is a roadmap item.

Related repositories

Repo	Role
RP411	Upstream arcade source (this repo's base)
VRIO	Virtual RIO panel + vPLASMA display — input bindings and display emulation to fold in
TeslaSuite	TeslaConsole / Launcher / vPOD — the arcade session-control stack 4.12 replaces (and a reference for the Munga control protocol, TCP 1501)