adding mechs to mercs/mech2/gbl

[Freebirth]

Does anyone know how they made the mechs in NAIS and how they actually put them in the game?
Could you just use some modeling program to make a mech and succesfully import it into mercs
or even mech2/gbl? Is there some way i could take mech models out of mech 2, like the Battlemaster
or marauder, and put it in mercs? Also, in mechwarrior 2 and gbl, each individual mech has its own damage
meter when you press f5, that small sprite of the mech on the bottom right of the hud.
I noticed mercs just uses one for every single mech. Is it possible to put custom ones in for each individual mech?

Sorry for all these questions all at once, I just figured I might as well throw them out there

[Skyfaller]

These are very interesting questions, but they go beyond my knowledge about MW2.

Inserting mechs into any MW2 would take some amount of research. You cannot simply use a modeling program to create and insert mechs into MW2, for various reasons:

1. You would have to convert the geometry into MW2's WTB format
2. You have to create BWD, MGI and 3DI files describing that mech
3. You would have to isolate the code in MW2 that decides what mechs to offer for single player/network play

Working out all these details isn't my idea of a good time, sorry. IMO, this kind of endeavour is just as difficult as rewriting the engine, and rewriting the engine would solve a number of bugs that can't be solved otherwise, like the Z-fighting bug or Titanium's texturing issues.

I am going to try inserting new files into the PRJ, but just to work around Titanium GBL's mech overweight issue. It would still take a lot of experimentation only to insert existing mechs from GBL into NetMech, for example, and Mercs uses different formats.

I tried NAIS, but I couldn't figure out how to activate the new chassis, although the installer seems to have renumbered the MEK files correctly.

The question about the the HUD sprites: I don't know how to that either. For one thing, we don't have all HUD sprites, and we don't know if that rendering code was removed.

[Col.Kell]

I'm not sure how to help you with that, I've tried to get the GBL mechs on original MW2 for quite a while now.
But something interesting though, when I used the NIAS shell, I cracked open some of the BWD. files in my chassis file with a hex editor, it seems all mercs "geometrical shapes" have some sort of "code" assigned to them, and when I changed that code in a mech BWD file, one of the mech's limbs changed shape.
But anyway, I don't think I know.