CydandClaude Fable 5
f0f0e3d70e
The mech rendered with a live root and frozen limbs. Cause, and it is not in
the renderer:
L4VIDRND.CPP:1028 sets SINGLE_AXIS_HINGE True, so HingeRenderable pushes a
joint with dpl_SetDCSXAxis / YAxis / ZAxis -- three separate libDPL entry
points, each handed only (sine, cosine). The AXIS is carried by WHICH
FUNCTION WAS CALLED, and libDPL never puts it on the wire.
Confirmed against a live capture rather than argued: every articulation
record in joints_check.fifodump is 12 bytes, [handle][sin][cos], 26133 of
them, no axis field anywhere. And the renderer cannot recover it from
context either -- that capture contains ZERO action-0x22 name records, so a
DCS handle cannot be matched back to a .SKL node. vrboard was parsing those
records correctly and dropping them on purpose, with a comment saying so.
THE FIX is the archive's own alternative. The #else half of that same #if
(L4VIDRND.CPP:1153) builds a Quaternion from the Hinge and assigns it over
the DCS matrix -- the axis ends up IN the matrix, and it flushes as a
12-float pose the renderer already applies. That is precisely what
BallJointRenderable::Execute does unconditionally, with no #if at all, which
is why ball joints were never affected. So this is the branch the original
authors wrote and did not take, applied to hinges so they behave like the
ball joints beside them.
A DCS REMEMBERS HOW IT WAS LAST SET -- the part that cost a build.
The first attempt subclassed HingeRenderable and overrode only Execute. It
compiled, ran, and did not work: the wire still carried 12-byte records. What
it DID change was their contents -- the pair went from (sin, cos) to
(0.9990, 0.0000), which is m00 and m01 of the matrix being written. That is
the whole diagnosis in one number. The base ctor calls dpl_SetDCS?Axis before
the subclass gets control, which puts the DCS in single-axis mode, and the
flush then serialises two floats out of it no matter what goes in through
dpl_GetDCSMatrix.
So the axis setter must never touch this DCS. BTL4HingeRenderable therefore
derives from ChildOffsetRenderable, whose ctor builds the offset DCS and calls
no axis setter -- making it the exact hinge analogue of BallJointRenderable:
same base, holds its own attribute pointer plus a previous-value copy, writes
a full matrix in Execute. CODE/ untouched; Component::Execute is virtual
(CMPNNT.HPP:40) so the override dispatches normally, and shadowing 1900 lines
of L4VIDRND.CPP to flip one #define was not needed.
VERIFIED on the rig, torso-sweep conf, clean run:
before 26133 records, ALL 2-float, 1 handle, renderer applied NOTHING
after 7626 records, ALL 12-float, ZERO 2-float messages remaining,
22 handles emitted, renderer applied all 22 (anim_abs)
and the swept joint moves: handle 0x684, m00 across 1532 distinct values
from 0.1582 to 1.0000 -- cos of a 0..80 degree sweep, which is exactly what
BT_FORCE_TORSO drives.
LEG GAIT: NOT FIXED, and the earlier note claiming this would fix it was
wrong. The transport was necessary but not sufficient. On a walking run
(new pod_render_joints.conf = the arena mission with BT_JOINTS) all 22 joints
flush as matrices and the renderer applies them, but only handle 0x672 -- the
vehicle ROOT -- animates. The limbs emit their initial pose and never change.
Because nothing drives them. Joint::SetHinge / SetRotation exist, and the
ONLY caller anywhere in the reconstruction is TorsoSimulation
(BT/TORSO.CPP:382, horizontalJointNode->SetRotation). That is why the
torso is the one thing that moves. MAD.SKL declares JointCount=25 --
jointhip, jointlthigh, jointrthigh, jointtorso, jointshakey, jointeye and
the rest -- and the gait that should walk them is simply not reconstructed
yet. Separate piece of work, now unblocked rather than done.
HARNESS CAVEAT: pose_probe frames on "the last-articulated root" in
anim_abs. With 21 joint DCSs now landing there, that heuristic picks a joint
instead of the vehicle root and frames empty arena. The change invalidated
the assumption; the render is not evidence either way until it takes the root
handle explicitly. The counts above are the evidence.
FAULTS SEEN: two crashes during this work, both cr2=7000FA64 at host 66D9 --
the known parked load-window fault, address unmoved across a relink (which is
the standing test for "not ours"). They died at DIFFERENT points ([mer] 217
and [mer] 116), where a defect in new construction code would die
consistently. Third and fourth runs clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tesla Release 4.10 — Tesla:BattleTech & Tesla:Red Planet
Source code and game content for Tesla:BattleTech and Tesla:Red Planet, the two games that ran on the Tesla-generation simulator cockpits built by Virtual World Entertainment, Inc. (VWE). Source file headers are dated 1994–1996; this tree corresponds to release 4.10 of the Tesla software.
This repository is an archival snapshot. The tree is preserved byte-for-byte as
found (see .gitattributes — no line-ending conversion is applied).
See emulator/PLAN.md for the implementation plan to run these games on the surviving cockpits' Windows 10 computers via a VPX-board HLE device in DOSBox-X, with the cockpit RIO (COM1) and plasma display (COM2) passed through to the game's original drivers.
See HISTORY.md for findings from a recovered VWE developer hard drive that accompanies this tree (excluded from the repo), including Division renderer source, runnable game builds, unreleased prototypes (Star Trek, Hull Pressure, Renegade Legion, and the Starship Troopers pitch that became DisneyQuest's "Invasion!"), and an analysis of whether these games can be rebuilt from the sources in this repository (summary: the engine can, the games cannot — most game-logic sources are absent from this cut).
Target hardware
Each Tesla cockpit was driven by a server-class Pentium Pro machine running Novell DOS. Graphics were split across two adapters:
- The main (out-the-window) display was rendered by one of the first
pixel-pipeline 3D accelerator cards ever made, driven through Division Ltd.'s
dVS/DPL libraries (
libDPL— DPL, dsys, dvs, and the VPX headers; Division copyright 1995). - An S3 video adapter drove the other six cockpit displays (instrument
and gauge screens — see the
GAUGEcontent directories and thePCPIC.INC/L4GAU*gauge code).
Other hardware/OS interfaces:
- Audio: HMI SOS (Sound Operating System) —
sos/libraries, with variants for Borland (bc4) and Watcom (wc). - Networking: pods were networked over Ethernet using WATTCP (DOS TCP/IP, with BOOTP) via VWE's NetNub layer.
- Input: joystick/pedal/panel I/O in assembly (
JOYSTICK.ASM) and theL4CTRL*control modules.
Toolchain
- Borland C++ 5.0 (
BCC) with TASM32 for assembly — see the.MAKmakefiles (original build tree lived atD:\TESLA_RP\andD:\BC5\). - Precompiled-header discipline throughout (
.CSMheaders,#pragma hdrstop). VSSVER.SCC/MSSCCPRJ.SCCfiles are remnants of the original Visual SourceSafe source control.- File extensions:
.CPP/.HPPC++ source/headers,.TCP/.THPC++ template source/headers,.MAKBorland makefiles.
Repository layout
ARTTOOLS/ (empty placeholder — art tools were not included in this snapshot)
BORLAND/ (empty placeholder — compiler was not included in this snapshot)
CODE/ Game and engine source (~200k lines of C++/asm)
CONTENT/ Game data: models, animations, audio, maps, textures, gauges
HEADOFF/ Head/camera offset calibration configs for the cockpit displays
CODE/
Both games share the same architecture: a portable simulation engine (MUNGA, VWE's in-house engine) plus a hardware layer (MUNGA_L4, the "L4" Tesla pod platform layer), with game-specific code and a game-specific L4 layer on top.
CODE/BT/ Tesla:BattleTech
BT/ Game logic: mechs, weapons (PPC, Gauss, missiles),
damage tables, teams, missions, scenario rules
BT_L4/ BattleTech pod application layer (app modes, arena,
radar, playback, version)
MUNGA/ Engine bricks: math (matrices, angles, splines),
containers, file streams, audio manager, events
MUNGA_L4/ Pod hardware layer: video renderer manager, keyboard,
mouse, audio hardware, warehouse (resource loading)
LIBDPL/ Division Ltd. dVS/DPL graphics library (headers +
LIBDPL.LIB + VREND*.BTL renderer modules)
NETNUB/ WATTCP-based pod networking (headers + WATTCPLG.LIB)
SOS/ HMI Sound Operating System libraries + drivers
CODE/RP/ Tesla:Red Planet (same structure)
RP/ Game logic: VTV (hover racer) power/subsystems,
pickups (booster, blocker, crusher, thruster)
RP_L4/ Red Planet pod application layer
MUNGA/ Engine (fullest copy — 351 files incl. all .CPP)
MUNGA_L4/ Pod hardware layer (fullest copy, incl. JOYSTICK.ASM)
libDPL/, NetNub/, sos/ as above
*/opt/ Compiled Borland C++ 5.0 object files from the
original build (preserved as found)
Note: the BT copies of MUNGA/MUNGA_L4 are partial (69/68 files) while the RP copies are complete (351/231 files) — the BT tree appears to hold only the files that diverged from the shared engine.
CONTENT/
CONTENT/BT/ Tesla:BattleTech content
CONTENT/BT3025/ Parallel BattleTech content set (3025-era variant;
mostly identical to BT/ with a different mech roster)
CONTENT/RP/ Tesla:Red Planet content
Per-game content directories:
| Dir | Contents |
|---|---|
MODELS |
.MOD/.SUB/.DMG/.TBL — vehicle/mech models, subsystems, damage tables |
ANIMS |
.ANI — animations (BT only) |
AUDIO |
.MID MIDI music, .SCP audio scripts, .BNK/.BLD banks |
GAUGE |
.GIM — gauge images for the six S3-driven cockpit displays |
MAPS |
.MAP/.ZNE — arena/terrain maps and zones |
SOLIDS |
.SLD — collision solids |
VIDEO |
Division renderer data: GEO/ geometry, MAT/ materials, and TEX/ textures per environment (ARENA, DAY, NIGHT, DESERT, POLAR, CAVERN, …), .DZM skins, .BMF/.BGF binary geometry, BUILD/ sources |
SCENES |
Scene definitions (RP only) |
BTCAM |
Camera batch setups (BT only) |
DIVISION.SAV subdirectories inside VIDEO/ are backup saves written by
Division's tools. MTMCDAI.SYS (Mitsumi) and TAISATAP.SYS are DOS CD-ROM
device drivers used on the pod machines.
HEADOFF/
INI-style calibration files (.XST/.CAM/.BAK) defining viewing extents and
camera offsets ("head offset") for the cockpit's main display, including a
[LAB_ONLY] configuration.
The team
From a published VWE BattleTech credits page (scan supplied to this archive, July 2026). The roster matches the 1994–1996 source in this tree — see the cross-references below the table.
| Role | Name(s) |
|---|---|
| Producer and Designer | Jordan Weisman |
| Art Director | David McCoy |
| Technical Director | J.M. Albertson |
| Audio Director | Eric Huffman |
| Corporate Director of Technology | Bill Redmann |
| Software Engineers | |
| — Framework and Simulation Design | J.M. Albertson |
| — Secondary/Auxiliary Screens and Low Level I/O | Chris Brewer |
| — Low Level I/O Design and Programming | Marek Ciolek |
| — Framework and 3D Video Rendering | Greg Corson |
| — Animation Simulations and Tools | Jerry Edsall |
| — Macintosh Design and Programming | Garth Hermanson |
| — Framework and 3D Audio System | Eric Huffman |
| — Simulation Code and Cameras | Joanna Mason |
| — Graphics Research and Art Tools | Ken Olsen |
| — Simulation Code and 'Mech Internal Systems | Gabe Underwood |
| Artists & Animators | |
| — 3D Art and Animations | Tom Burlington, Duane Molitor, David McCoy, Lex Story |
| — Allen Workshop 2D Art | Victor Bonilla, Tom Peters |
| Software Tools Group Leader | Ken Olsen |
| Sound Samples/Designs | Bing McCoy, Tom Effinger, Eric Huffman |
Cross-references to this tree:
// Author:headers inCODE/name four of the credited engineers: J.M. Albertson (MUNGA math/debug bricks —LINE,SPHERE,DEBUG*), Jerry Edsall (TOOL,FILEUTIL, the BT/RP*TOOLmodules), Ken Olsen (NAMELIST,NOTATIONtemplate containers), and Eric Huffman (CSTR,MEMREG,SCHAIN).- The pod-lab per-developer update scripts on the recovered developer drive (see HISTORY.md) are named Chris, Gabe, Joanna, and Jordan — matching Chris Brewer, Gabe Underwood, Joanna Mason, and Jordan Weisman.
- Garth Hermanson's "Macintosh Design and Programming" credit fits the venue side: the operator console the pods connect to was a Macintosh application.
Provenance
- Copyright (C) 1994–1996 Virtual World Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Original headers mark the source as proprietary and confidential.
- Third-party components retain their own copyrights: Division Ltd. (dVS/DPL), Human Machine Interfaces (SOS), Erick Engelke / University of Waterloo (WATTCP).