Looking to assist

[ecpeterson]

Hey, all. I just caught wind of this community yesterday via an emblem in a Youtube video, and I was stunned to see that, along with being a general community for MechWarrior 2, you guys specifically had a development thing going. I've been working with the DOS engine for quite some time, and I've figured out a wide variety of things on my own. I'm not sure exactly what you guys are looking for, since you both seem to have multiple projects going and also are pretty decentralized about what you've figured out and what you haven't. It's somewhat inconvenient for me to just post what all I've got information on, since most of it is just scraps of notes and pseudocode, but if there are specific things that need doing I can focus on making those digestible.

How about it? What's on your wishlists? Where can I start?

[Col.Kell]

Welcome, ecpeterson! Glad to see someone drop by the dev sections

I'll introduce myself; I'm Col.Kell. I have been a member of mech2.org since late September of 08, I stumbled across here when I was looking for Mercenaries downloads.
Basicly, I am not a developer, I am a modder. Usualy I stumble across many interesting discoveries and record them. But my interests in modding/development would be the mw2 project file primarily, mostly I make new maps and sometimes make new battlemechs.
I would like so much to share my mods and works with the mech2 community, but I don't know how to make patchers, so unfortunetly, the only people who can play with my stuff are people who know how to use a hex editor. I would like to get that fixed...
You can take a look at my stuff here in the Modding & Development forum in the Dev Sections, see "Col.Kell's Trial of Grievance Map Packs 1&2", "Build-a-mech" and "Build-a-world" threads. Hope you can get the chance to see them.

Now Skyfaller, he has been working on rebuilding the MW2 engine for quite some time, you two already have something in common.

[Skyfaller]

Welcome to mech2.org!

Simulation Programmers: ... Eric Peterson

If it's you, then yes, you have been dealing with the DOS engine for longer than most others ... Mind sharing some bits about your involvement in MW2?

Well, yes, I have been trying to remake MW2. So far, most of that work was spent deciphering MW2 file formats, and reasonably successful. So, soon, the actual sim development may start. Few mysteries remain, biggest of them are the SFL files. I know the SFL files are organized in blocks. Type 5 blocks use a sampling rate 11025, but I don't know how the others are encoded.

Kell has been trying to understand the mission tables, don't know with how much success.

If you care about helping, what are your interests?

[Col.Kell]

Welcome to mech2.org!

Simulation Programmers: ... Eric Peterson

Could we have an original programmer here? oooooooohhh....

Yes, I have also been looking into reverse-engineering the mission tables, I haven't gotten very far though... Don Halloran said that Edward Wong [may have] had a BWD-to-TXT converter, if I had something like that, then that would be good...

[ecpeterson]

Actually, that Eric Peterson is an Eric T. Peterson (I think), though he and I have had a few conversations before. To fill you in on what he did, he wrote the original sim, which was developed over some stretch of time between I'd guess the late 80s and 1993, when it got picked up by Activision and converted into the MechWarrior 2 we now know. He left the time sometime shortly before its completion due to a variety of reasons, mismanagement foremost.

The SFLX format is pretty straightforward: it's a DPCM variant that works at variable sampling rates, the other headers specify how much you need to interpolate to get back the original audio. I'll put together some more exact pseudocode for you this evening, and look over what I have on the mission tables.

As for what I want to do, I'd prefer content creation to working on a new sim at least at first, for a couple of reasons. It's been a while (nearly two years, looks like) since I've really seriously looked at the files, so I'd like to get my sealegs back, so to speak. Second, I have pretty minimal experience writing intelligent modern engine code; I can draw some textured polygons to an OpenGL context, but little more than that, and nevermind doing ten thousand of them with any reasonable speed. Maybe in a few months, when I have a handle on things again, I can do some kind of work on sim internals if I'm needed, but I suspect that an honest map editor will be an equally noble goal.

-- edit --

Ah, another thing, I know a guy that worked with me on this a couple years ago. He's a far more competent programmer than I am, and he might be looking for a fun project. I'll point him this way.

[Skyfaller]

Sounds great. I'd like it if you keep us updated on your efforts so we can coordinate them.

[Sir MMPD Radick]

<S> ecpeterson, welcome to mech2.org!
Sorry I missed you yesterday! I missed you on IRC by like 30 seconds.

[ecpeterson]

C source for an SFLX -> raw PCM decoder posted here: http://mw2.jjaro.net/ It's pretty well commented, you ought to be able to read through the algorithm itself without too much trouble. sflx() itself is the decoding function, the main at the bottom is just a testbed so you can convert some SFLX files you might have lying around to hear that it works. That's the whole of it to the best of my knowledge, though I didn't test it very thoroughly so maybe I missed something obscure, just enough to clean up silly mistakes and get it to stop segfaulting.

I'm stuck doing work for the rest of tonight, but I'll look into the mission tables in the near future, hopefully tomorrow. Enjoy, let me know if there are questions.

-- edit --

whoops, something was broken, but it's fixed now retry if you've already downloaded it

[Archon]

Not the Wing Commander 4, Starlancer, Conquest... Eric Peterson by any chance?

How many Eric Petersons are there?

[Skyfaller]

Thanks a lot for your efforts. These sources is could be very helpful.

May I use the source code as part of MechVM? I would require your word that the code is not derived from the original source code of MW2. If any of the original code were to be found in MechVM, it might have undesirable consequences for me.