Un-POD drives

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

unpod --menus --live: a single race started from the menus, the up arrow held, then left.

Until now Un-POD replayed races recorded from the original. The physics and the opponents' controllers had been ported, but the physics could only read the track from a snapshot of the running game's memory.

The track world from the disc

The physics finds the track the way the game keeps it in memory: a table of sectors, each with its bounds and a list of neighbours, meshes of vertices, quads and triangles with their normals, and a table of surfaces with their grip. The new crate pod-world lays all of that out from the track file. Most of it is the file as it stands. A few things are not: each quad carries the normals of its two halves, which the game computes as it loads; a face's flags word is split three ways, with the surface in its third byte; and the sector bounds are widened, 2 below and 10 above. Every field the physics reads now matches the running game on Gold's Beltane: 141 sectors and 2,837 faces.

A live race

Each simulation step now runs, racer by racer, the controller and then the car step, and hands the car's move to the race rules, as the original does. The first run had every computer car reversing off the grid. The cars stand still through the countdown, so the stuck timer ran out and the controller backed away. The original holds that timer at zero during the countdown, and now Un-POD does too. The computer cars race, change gear, cross the line and swap places.

Two stand-ins remain. The race starts from the first step of a recorded race, because a car's start state (its set-up from the car file, the grid, the settling) is not ported yet. And the cars pass through each other: car-to-car collisions are still to come in the physics.