Putting a car back on the track

2026-10-24, the pod-physics session.

The recorded Gold race (derived/physics/gold-beltane). The player's car (red) climbed a wall and fell below the track at step 870; the game put it back, and the port now does the same.

What the game does

When a car ends up below the track, or has been upside down for 2.5 seconds, POD puts it back. Gold does this from inside the track pass. Once no wheel has found ground and the car is well below its sector, it calls the put-back before it returns. Read in Gold's code, the put-back:

• takes the face the first wheel last touched, and puts the car at its middle: the average of a triangle's three corners, or of a quad's four;
• turns it along the race path, from the driver's place on the path to the next point;
• clears the car's motion, engine and gearbox, sets the wheels at their rest height and the engine limit to 1000 rad/s;
• sets the car down one unit above that point, level, and finds each wheel's sector again.

The rest belongs to other parts of the game: the driver's place on the path, a computer driver's target, the race record, the camera and the beacon test. The port hands those back to its caller.

Checked

The emulator caught the put-back and the functions it calls at step 870, and the port matches each of those calls. In the whole-race test that step was the one left out; it now matches like the rest, 8,328 of 8,328. The player's car, followed on its own from its first recorded state, now stays with the recording through all 1,041 steps instead of stopping at the put-back.

It is one recorded case. A car left upside down, a track without race paths and a put-back at the end of a path link would each take a path this race did not.

Next

Car-to-car collisions: with them, the computer cars can be followed past their first contact.