Mercs mods please?

[Col.Kell]

This 3dfx style battle suit is very unusual... It has no mech texturing whatsoever (more like a building), its enormous for a suit, and the face is reflective of all different colors.
I'll get a pix and possibly a BWD when I'm done.

Iwould say more, but I am writing this on my PSP which is odd.......

didn't know you could control the fate of 191 people with your mobile videogame thing.

[Skyfaller]

Previous thread on the battlesuit:

http://www.mektek.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=108766

I seem to have reassembled it once for MechVM, but not in Mercs.

[Sir MMPD Radick]

didn't know you could control the fate of 191 people with your mobile videogame thing.

LOL. When a person is bored at college waiting for a ride home there is not much else to do but to surf the net on the wireless net.
I really got lucky that it actually worked when i tried as previous semesters I could never get it to work because it required my college e-mail and password to login, but this time it appears they put a guest mode in so it is much easier to surf.

[quota4stupid]

I've managed to (partly) work out some of the undocumented WASM commands specific to Mercenaries. Nothing that would be useful if you were just going to make an MWM, but definately interesting if you were going to patch the Mercs project file with Skyfallers tool. Specifically the commands I've got so far would let you create your own mech/aerospace pilots for hiring, set Mercs specific campaign parameters (ie: contract pay, bonus pay, which mechs/weapons/pilots/etc are added to the mech shop on completion of missions, etc) and weather effects (actually, that one probably would be useful for MWMs I guess).

There's still a lot of question marks (particularly over what most of the weather parameters do - haven't tried testing them yet, but you could certainly fx add basic snow/rain with what I have got), but if anyones interested I'd be happy to post them.

[Skyfaller]

Repomancer gave a hint about horizon parameters here:

http://www.mektek.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=109442

(That thread was in mektek, before they put us in the legacy forum ... )

Anyway, what I'd like to know is where the goods for the market place are defined. I'm always short of (double) heat sinks, to the point where I sell salvaged mechs without heat sinks. The other thing is the market shortage after the battle of Wolcott, when the campaign is completed. The sim sends you back to the 3040's, marketwise ...

I remember reading about ways to set the market place to a certain date by editing the savegames, but I can't find it atm.

[quota4stupid]

You can find my WASM notes here: http://users.tpg.com.au/nkjd245/mw2/wasm/ (campaign.txt is the one you want Skyfaller - alternatively if you want to hack xxxxCAM1.BWD values directly, I've partially documented the CPGN chunk here http://users.tpg.com.au/nkjd245/mw2/bin/cpgn.txt). I think equipment_begin/end (EQUP subchunk) is the one that should interest you.

Everything I've got on setting campaign parameters so far is from WASM and hexdumps - I haven't done any experiments with the sim yet (which is why I know where the fields are and what they're called, but not what all of them do )

I'm still in the process of WASM'ng and hexdumping my way thru the weather_begin/end construct (which is why my notes for it don't appear at the above link yet), but will probably finish that later today and upload it then. To set basic weather for a mission (I'm pretty sure this is Mercs-only, since I haven't found in WTHR chunks in 31cc/GBL BWDs), you want to:

1) Create a WLD file named xxxxWTHR.WLD (where xxxx is your mission name prefix) containing something like this:

Code: Select all

weather_begin
type snow
velocity 5000 -5000 0
weather_end

2) Include this file into your xxxxSCN1.WLD file:

Code: Select all

include xxxxWTHR

The weather "type" parameter can be one of: rain, snow, hail, dust or user. Only rain and snow are actually used in Mercs BWDs, so I dunno what the other three do. The "velocity" parameter is used to make it look like your weather is being blown by a wind (if not specified, rain/snow/etc will just fall straight down to earth - this bit I *have* checked in the sim by playing the eight missions that include weather). No idea what units the velocity is measured in, but if they're consistent with the rest of the sim I would guess something like cm/cycle or cm/sec??

There are numerous other weather parameters, and I have no idea yet what most of them do (although I can say that only two others apart from "type" and "velocity" are actually used by Mercs missions, so I guess there's every chance the others may not even be implemented by the sim).

[Skyfaller]

Thanks a lot. I'm sure this will prove handy.

I remember seeing dust in one mission against the Draconis Combine, where they send you into a sand storm: "Find us that Draconis lance, and we'll do the rest". I could imagine that the particles are defined in screen coordinates rather than 3D coordinates. This would circumvent the need for 3D transforms, reducing the amount of computation per particle considerably. In that case, you might find two coordinates, small integers.

From the next version, you'll be mentioned in MechVM's documentation for helping with texturing and tags.

[quota4stupid]

Thankyou

I've uploaded updated copies of my notes at the links I gave in my last post - still a LOT of holes in the weather_begin/end construct, but it's something at least.