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Who ? What ? Why ? How long ?

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Starman01:
A battletech forum ? Here ?  

Yes, you have seen right :) Thanks to the HLP Admins AND the obvious interest of the forum users in Battletech we received our very own Forum here.

But what are we doing ?

The Goal of the Mechcommander OmniTec mod is, to create an updated, and more easily moddable version of the good old Mechcommander 2.  A game based in the universe of a great and fun franchise, a game with lots of tactical components and full of possibilities, which have unfortunately not being discovered by the Microsoft programmers, but I think no one is actually surprised about this. Our Goal is NOT, to release a new campaign, there are actually a lot of good campaigns already availabe, and some of us are also working on a new one. So content is certainly no problem, it’s the game that needs upgrading.

And after all, MS released the sourcecode of the game (which really surprised me when it happened), and that’s certainly something, I like MS for. I have started modding MC a few years back before the sourcecode came, but the possibilities where quite limited, and so I left it quickly (like most of the fans did, not to mention the Carver V campaign was rather boring storywise IMO)

But a few people remained, and even created some nice new additions, and after the SC came out, there has already been some scattered, but very good work being done throughout the web in the last few years, like new mechs, vehicles or gameplay changes. So that has restarted my modding will again, and I started to collect information. I found a few very talented modders that already made changes to the code, and made the proposal for a combined effort and it found some interest. There is already an alpha base available, and two of the three major code enhancements are making progress or are already half way done. Of course, there are a lot of more changes than only the three that could be done :)

So, here we are. The reason why we are here, and not somewhere else in the battletech forums is pretty simple. I LIKE HLP, been here for many years now, and that’s why I wanted to come here. A lot of talented people are around, it’s a good administrated site and one of the friendliest modding community I know. The noob friendly atmosphere that I have seen here in the past years is certainly something very special in this place and is actually pretty rare in the internet.

So, once again I say a open “Thank you” for the hosting at HLP, and welcome everyone to our subforum :) In the next days I will post a few links to the available campaigns so you people can reload your wish for mechbattles again.

Also, feel free to discuss here whatever battletech or mechcommander related topics you want, and we will try to give support as much as we are able to.

Do we need new people ? Of course ! What we need most of course are coders at the beginning, and later one definitly 2D and 3D Artist to add and enhance the content of the game. So, if you think you can offer something to our cause, feel free to contact me or anyone from my staff. As I said, we do not intend to provide campaigns in the first place, so we don’t have much need for mission designers right now, but that doesn’t mean that YOU should not create new missions. Simply start creating your campaign. The editor is actually quite easy, it’s certainly not more complicate than FRED, it’s just more limited ;)

So, that’ enough for introduction, back to work

Best regards

Starman

headdie:
Welcome guys (I know there are a number of familiar faces involved but what the heck), projects of like mindedness should stick together.  I wish the project many years of success.

The E:
So, questions I have are, what are your plans regarding the source code? Are you starting from scratch with the original MS Source release? Do you have an svn/git/whatever set up to host the code and coordinate efforts?

Starman01:
The plan is, to enhance the existing code.  Like I said, there is already done some small stuff by a few guys who will join me here shortly.

The 3 major problems are :

1) You can only add new objects by editing a few packed files, one dll, a pak file and some others, which mostly made it impossible in the last few years. That has now been done after the SC came out, and one of the guys is working on placing all info in a single and easy to edit csv file. It's sofar done and beta stage for mechs.

2) There is a limit, how many polygons the engine can display max per frame. This one is also already identified and breached.

3) The texture size is limited to 128x128 tga files, and the biggest mission ground map is 1536x1536.  That must be raised too.

Besides that, there are more features planned, I hope that it will develop so that we can go for those too.

Example : A better logistic system, buying and selling components and a inventory for it, more like in MC1

We don't have a svn, I'm not sure we need one yet, depends how the project evolves. I'm not good in such technical stuff, I will even need help with the FTP :) I'm a modeller and 2D artist at limited scale, so my work is more based on content. We are very much at the beginning now, but I have the hope that a few more people will start helping us.

As for coordination, I have volounteered for doing that. I might not be a good coder, but at least I'm sort of a organizer :)

The E:
Believe me, for any shared code work (and I assume that there's more than one coder involved in this), an SVN repository or any other form of version control software is absolutely necessary. Without it, you can't effectively coordinate efforts between coders.

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