MechWarrior 2: Resource Forum

hey welcome endymion!
Sounds like ya had a alot of fun despite all of the trouble ya went through. I love hearing those types of stories surrounding the two games.
Pretty much the community is back to square one again. Many tools from those days are missing, and do not support netmech.
(Mercnet is no longer a main driving force of the game due to the fact that mercnet has no free multiplayer unlike netmech.)

Hope you stick around for some games, I would love to fight ya!

Ed was definitely the man when it came to mech2 content. At some point I did attempt to find out if this was indeed the first ever commerical release to have user created content available for multiplayer gameplay over the internet. If so, Ed is the person who deserves the majority of the credit for making this happen.

I'm surprised there's not a way to play mercnet for free. I remember nothing about mercnet's protocols, but have you looked into such programs as Hamachi? Hamachi lets you make a virtual LAN over the internet. I've used it in the past to play xbox games without having to go through xbox live or whatever the "real" xbox multiplayer requires.

No, that is not the issue. Mercnet can be played for free on our IPX emulation server through dosbox.
The problem is simply that not enough people own mercenaries as compared to MechWarrior 2. On top of that, Activision released netmech for free on their servers when it was origionaly released. This was primarily because netmech did not ship with mech2 unlike mercnet's bundle with mercenaries. Since it was bundled activision saw no reason to release mercnet on their servers i suspect. Therefore mercnet will never be a major driving force online so long as the game is not released for free by Activision. Yes, I or anyone else could easily strip mercnet out of an install, but copyrights and the ever annoying DMCA prohibit be from doing that.

As for hamachi, actually when we first started with netmech again it was on the hamachi network.
That failed pretty miserably though. Hamachi is not a good base station for gamers to flock around; it is too finicky and the amount of people that can be connected to a server at once is prohibitive.
In the end we dropped it for kali. Which in turn last year we dropped for our IPX emulation server combined with IRC. This latest solution seems to be the ideal solution at this time.
In the future we may not even be tethered to dosbox, but that is a long time from now.

Sir MMPD Radick wrote:hey welcome endymion!
Sounds like ya had a alot of fun despite all of the trouble ya went through. I love hearing those types of stories surrounding the two games.

Yep, I got a lot of info just by hacking around in the binaries - which was possible for the versions that weren't compressed. Funnily enough the reason they started encrypting them was in part due to a tool that i'd written to "balance gameplay" in GBL, that happened to work in mercs as well.

In my own defense, the reason was that i thought autocannons weren't modelled properly in Mech2 and decided to do something about it. However, I didn't realise that the tool would work with mercs, and that people would stoop low enough to cheat in multiplayer. Naive, i know.

When I was coding for the Nais TDL shell, I hit upon the idea of showing version numbers of the people dropping into matches from kali, since the compressed exe's couldn't be hacked. So at least I ended up "fixing" the problem that I created.

Sir MMPD Radick wrote:Hope you stick around for some games, I would love to fight ya!

When we played on 56k modems I was an expert at lag shooting, but when it came to real-time play I sucked quite badly. I think we had ping times of between 600 - 1000ms in those days.

Don, on the other hand, was excellent at both.

600-1000! No wai!! I think we used to hit the yanks with around 400ms... on 14.4 for netmech and 28.8 for mercnet.

I doubt the extra bandwidth we have available these days makes much difference either. You could probably drop with 8 comfortably now, but with pings around the same and no changes to the engine, good ol' lag shooting would still be the order of the day!

Also, IIRC, in the 3 way final between Ed, Blade and myself, and one of the last games of mercnet I remember playing (in some kali based league tournament), Ed won.

Edit: Actually, I do remember sometimes getting pings up over 600...

allmhuran wrote:600-1000! No wai!! I think we used to hit the yanks with around 400ms... on 14.4 for netmech and 28.8 for mercnet.

Yeah you're right, when we pinged each other it was no more than 1-200ms, and the worst was Sabre, that filipino kid who regularly hit 1000ms.

allmhuran wrote: I doubt the extra bandwidth we have available these days makes much difference either. You could probably drop with 8 comfortably now, but with pings around the same and no changes to the engine, good ol' lag shooting would still be the order of the day!

I'm suprised by that. I don't do multiplayer at all anymore so i have no idea.

allmhuran wrote: Also, IIRC, in the 3 way final between Ed, Blade and myself, and one of the last games of mercnet I remember playing (in some kali based league tournament), Ed won.

I don't remember ever beating you!

I doubt the extra bandwidth we have available these days makes much difference either. You could probably drop with 8 comfortably now, but with pings around the same and no changes to the engine, good ol' lag shooting would still be the order of the day!

Actually there is bearly any lag, even for those near Australia. We have a couple of players from New Zealand. The lag is less than 1 mech distance.
For those in europe and USA the lag is even less. Usually right outside the targeting recticle.

On another topic...

Strange question for either of you. I am not sure if either of you are aware since both of you played on kali, but mplayer with the 95 version was able to set the settings for matches predrop into mech 2; would you happen to know whether they used any built in undocumented command line switched? I realize this was long ago, but I have always wondered this question.

Wait a second... I think I have already figured out what they did thinking back... it is so obvious how could I have missed it....
They must have preloaded mech2 inside of mplayers shell and released it upon launch for the host. Grr I wish i could confirm that, but it fits with what i remember.

Endymion wrote: Yeah you're right, when we pinged each other it was no more than 1-200ms, and the worst was Sabre, that filipino kid who regularly hit 1000ms.

Oh man, that Sabre guy... I can't remember any specifics but something in the depths of my memory is telling me not to dig any further.

I'm suprised by that. I don't do multiplayer at all anymore so i have no idea.

Oh, I have no idea... just a guess.

I don't remember ever beating you!

Yeah, it was in a sort of sandbox mission... a fairly small (maybe 800m to a side) walled in square filled with smallish rolling hills of sand. I think Blade and I managed to leg each other pretty early on. I think all three of us were wearing =SLDF= tags at the time.

[quote="Sir MMPD Radick" On top of that, Activision released netmech for free on their servers when it was origionaly released. [/quote]

Man did I get ripped off, I purchased a shiny disc labelled NETMECH: Eight-Player Pack "requires one original mechwarrior 2 CD to host up to eight players.

And you say Activision gave it away.... Oh well I still enjoyed it.

Kell Shadowolf is playing Netmech 4 with us over at ISW. The Kell Hounds are a regiment of House Davion.