Three odd tracks, and a gamepad

2026-10-24, the game app's session.

What was tried

The extras session installed the downloaded fan tracks and drove them headless. On three of them something looked wrong. The question was whether our port was wrong or the files were. Fan tracks were made with tools of their own and shipped as they were. Each one was looked at directly: the faces under every start record, the sectors, the race paths, the opponent lists, and one car dropped on its grid slot and stepped alone.

What was found

• Tron and Arcade: our bug. A .BL4 sector face has one more word before its flags, and the world builder read the wrong word. Every face of a track that only ships as .BL4 lost its ground and wall bits. Tron's cars fell through the floor, and Arcade's physics met a zero vector. With the right word, Gold's own .BL3 and .BL4 files give the same world, and Tron's cars settle on the ground.
• Arcade's grid lies flat over a sloped road. Two start records are 3.5 and 1.4 units under the ground, and the settling pushes those cars up onto the road. The original's grid code does not look for the ground either, so it would do the same.

• Beach's grid is fine. It stands on the lower floor where the race paths run. There is scenery above it. The player starts at the back of the grid, near the back wall, and Un-POD's chase camera, a stand-in with no wall test, sits inside that wall until the car moves off.

• No opponents. Ecocoon, Forest and Tron name "NEANT", none, as their EASY and MEDIUM opponent lists. The game's reader then races the player alone. Tron's HARD list is borrowed from Forest, and its computer cars still find their lanes and race.

So of the four oddities, one was ours and three are in the files, and the original would show them too. The facts are in docs/extras.md.

A gamepad

A standard pad now drives the player's car (apps/unpod/src/pad.rs, cargo feature gamepad): gilrs natively, the browser's Gamepad API on the web. The triggers or A and B accelerate and brake, the left stick or the d-pad steers, and the shoulder buttons change gear. The stick counts as held or not, like the arrow keys. The original reads a joystick as an analog device, and porting that path is next. No pad was connected here, so only the mapping is tested.

What is next

• The game's chase camera (FUN_0042b6c0), so Beach's start looks as it does in the game.
• The pad's stick as the original's analog joystick.