i finally got mechwarrior 2 to work again. that game kicks ass with the full ch setup i got. ive also been playing mw4 but i still think 2 is better.
ive also been contemplating a battletech mod. it would require
of script but i figure it would be possible. you would need to override pretty much everything. terrain would be in pof format but a secondary elevation map wound need to be used for vertical colisions. mech physics would be trickey, youd need a vertical bob in sync with the stepping motion. animation and turret functions could be simulated (i have code for some fo this already).
cameras would be used to simulate the pilot viewpoint and the hud replaced with a new one. which would need to be in one of the turret sobjs. there would technically be no turrets used, theese would all be handled in lua.
of extra matrix math would need to be done because of the complex heirarchy requirements. to be true to battletech each arm would have several joints and could act as an individual turret. torso and sholder would give the first set of x,y gimbals and this is what the player has control of. the upper arm rotation and elbow joint would be handled by firecontrol to make the shot converge on the crosshair at target distance and compensate for ballistic falloff, which i would want in the mod.
the spine joint, which connects the pelvis with the torso, is essentially the top most part of the heirarchy. 3 segment legs would opperate of somewhat of a keyframe system. the file would be based on a cyclical system where the joint angles would be stored at intervals along a time scale. the rate this cycle operates on would be based on throttle position so throttleing up and going into reverse could be handeled properly, this also ties into vertical bobbing motion.
weapon handeling would probibly need to be redone as well. you would have 6 trigger weapons, which would represent firing groups. each trigger weapon takes up one bank. script scans for theese weapons and replaces them with the actual battletech weapons which you have armed. you can have multiple types of weapons on a bank if the mech profile (yet another custom table file to be parsed and handeled by lua) stores the hardpoint count. trigger weapons would be hanled with the cycle flag. so if you know how many guns you have and you have counted how many shots have passed, then you can reference a list of installed weapons and fire them one at a time. bting all this together with some models and you have a really cool mod.