Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: AdmiralRalwood on November 29, 2013, 05:14:37 am
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Esarai, SpardaSon21, chief1983, and I have been playing MW4:Mercs quite a bit lately, and I thought I'd share with you all the latest development on this front:
(http://deviance.duckish.net/pictures/HLP_decal.png)
(http://deviance.duckish.net/pictures/HLP_decal_mechlab.png)
A Hard-Light Brigade decal, helpfully converted by the wonderful HerraTohtori. You can download it here (http://deviance.duckish.net/pictures/hlp-64.tga).
"What if I don't have MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries?" Well, you're in luck. A while back, I found my old installation media for the MW4:Mercs Free Release, and redownloaded what I was missing through the still-active torrents; have some helpful links:
MTX Extractor + MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries + 0030c hotfix (http://deviance.duckish.net/downloads/MW4Mercs.7z) (The "complete pack", as it were.)
Mechstorm MTX High-Definition Patch (http://deviance.duckish.net/downloads/Mechstorm_MTX_v002.exe) (Not really "high-def" by modern standards, but looks better than retail graphics.)
Hard-Light Brigade decal (http://deviance.duckish.net/pictures/hlp-64.tga) (Again, many thanks to HerraTohtori for making this; this goes in "\Mechwarrior Mercenaries - Mektek Mekpak\Content\Textures\customdecals\"; if the "customdecals" folder doesn't exist, which it won't before you join a server allowing custom decals, you can create it safely.)
If you don't want to download the whole, almost-2-GB MW4Mercs.7z archive, you can also just grab the MTX Extractor setup file (http://deviance.duckish.net/downloads/SetupMTXExtract0.0.1.5.exe), the 0030c hotfix setup file (http://deviance.duckish.net/downloads/mekpak31.0030c%280030x%29-hotfix3.exe), and use these magnet links to grab the necessary .MTX archives:
[redacted]
If you're interested in multiplayer, you can always join #hlp-mw4 (on EsperNet, same as #hard-light and #freespace and all those fine channels).
Mercs multiplayer Co-op campaign map pack download (http://deviance.duckish.net/downloads/mercs_coop_v1.0.zip) - We often play these missions in multiplayer.
To make sure multiplayer works, if you're behind a router, you need to forward ports 2300-2400 (both TCP and UDP). For hosting games, you also need to forward ports 27999, 28800-28809, and 47624. There's also this interesting little tidbit in the readme:
You MUST set your connection speed to 56K in Connection Setup if you are playing as a client otherwise your online performance will suffer. If you are hosting a server, you can use higher rates, but anything over 384k should be avoided unless you are hosting on a LAN.
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i tried to get the mektek version of mercenaries to work, but havent had much success. im all for big stompy mech action.
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I never got the MW4 free release to work either, which is a damn shame in my opinion. I never got why Mektek just sticked to .exe installers and torrent files.
EDIT: Aside from that, thank you very much for releasing it here.
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i got the thing installed. yay! ive actually been trying to find a copy that works for some time now.
so whats the play schedule like?
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And I was literally just looking at this in my list of games. I am totally in.
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so whats the play schedule like?
Completely random. Easiest thing to do is just hop on #hlp-mw4 and see if anyone is interested (or even currently playing, as happened when Hobbie joined earlier).
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Yep! Good times. We wound up creating the Ravana Loki and the Dakka Deimos. :P
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Dakka Deimos
That's just called "the Deimos". ;P
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I've installed mine some time ago. Only played SP, though, I don't know if MP works.
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I've installed mine some time ago.
By "some time ago", do you still mean "after the 0030c hotfix came out", or does it need updating?
Only played SP, though, I don't know if MP works.
To make sure multiplayer works, if you're behind a router, you need to forward ports 2300-2400 (both TCP and UDP). For hosting games, you also need to forward ports 27999, 28800-28809, and 47624. There's also this interesting little tidbit in the readme:
You MUST set your connection speed to 56K in Connection Setup if you are playing as a client otherwise your online performance will suffer. If you are hosting a server, you can use higher rates, but anything over 384k should be avoided unless you are hosting on a LAN.
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Might just join you guys for this after my exam period is over.
Save me a Vulture.
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I haven't played any Mech games excluding MechCommander in over a decade, but if this installs I am totally in.
Generally, what kind of times are you guys on? Just wondering if I have any chance of running into you.
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I haven't played any Mech games excluding MechCommander in over a decade, but if this installs I am totally in.
Generally, what kind of times are you guys on? Just wondering if I have any chance of running into you.
I have been on at 3:00 AM before, so it really is more-or-less completely random. There's usually someone in the channel at all times, though whether or not anyone is at their keyboard is another question.
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So I was inspired by my ten Clan MG Deimos idea and I wanted to see how far I could take the concept.
I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.
Behold, the 16 HMG'd Dakkannihilator.
(http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/6388/4dcx.png)
Cons:
-- Ammo consumption.
-- Butt ugly.
-- Slower than a three-legged sloth nailed to the floor.
-- Maximum fighting range is slightly shorter than a slap to the face.
Pros:
-- Jaunty pink colour scheme.
-- Zero heat.
-- Four free tons to play with once guns are equipped and Ferro Fibrous armor is maxed.
-- Murders absolutely everything in the room. Tested with an Atlas. It evaporated under ten seconds of sustained fire.
This kind of build can be done with anything with an abundance of ballistic and/or omni hardpoints. Clan MGs will give more tonnage and significantly more range but loses a third of the damage, so it's more practical but less omgwtfkill. Definitely worth trying, if only for the sheer hilarity.
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So I was inspired by my ten Clan MG Deimos idea and I wanted to see how far I could take the concept.
I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.
Behold, the 16 HMG'd Dakkannihilator.
*imgsnip*
Cons:
-- Ammo consumption.
-- Butt ugly.
-- Slower than a three-legged sloth nailed to the floor.
-- Maximum fighting range is slightly shorter than a slap to the face.
Pros:
-- Jaunty pink colour scheme.
-- Zero heat.
-- Four free tons to play with once guns are equipped and Ferro Fibrous armor is maxed.
-- Murders absolutely everything in the room. Tested with an Atlas. It evaporated under ten seconds of sustained fire.
This kind of build can be done with anything with an abundance of ballistic and/or omni hardpoints. Clan MGs will give more tonnage and significantly more range but loses a third of the damage, so it's more practical but less omgwtfkill. Definitely worth trying, if only for the sheer hilarity.
YA LEGGING BASTARD!
(seriously, thats awesome XD )
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Piranha says hi (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Piranha)
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IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIiinteresting
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Having never touched any of the MW games after 2, how does Mech construction work in multi? Do I have to unlock stuff, or do I get the full range of stuff to tinker with from first launch?
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Piranha says hi (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Piranha)
Note, what MW4 calls "Machine Guns" is actually a Machine Gun Array. According to description, Clan version has 4 MGs. So, that works out to 64 machine guns maximum! The HMG one has 48 of them, so it's no slouch either, but for me, ammo consumption and weigh kill this config. I've actually made something like Dakkaanihilator before, with some CERSPLs thrown into the mix. The resulting config had good range, decent endurance, good speed, incredible firepower and staggering ROF. :)
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im having trouble getting the game to recognize my ch gear. it just doesn't show up in the damn control screen.
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Having never touched any of the MW games after 2, how does Mech construction work in multi? Do I have to unlock stuff, or do I get the full range of stuff to tinker with from first launch?
You get the full range of stuff from first launch, no ranking up or unlocking necessary.
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Having never touched any of the MW games after 2, how does Mech construction work in multi? Do I have to unlock stuff, or do I get the full range of stuff to tinker with from first launch?
This game was made long before it was in vogue to "unlock" things for multiplayer. You get instant access to every 'Mech (and Battle Armor, with the MekPaks) and every weapon right from the get-go; it uses the same loadouts that you use for Instant Action.
The MechLab works very differently than it does for MW2, though. You can no longer do things like strip out internal components in order to mount an obscene number of weapons on a Light 'Mech :P. Instead, each 'Mech has a limited number of weapon slots that can mount a specific type of weapon (although there are also "combo" slots; "Omni" slots, which were in the original game, allow you to mount any kind of weapon there; "Direct Fire" slots let you mount either Energy or Ballistic weapons, "Heat-Generating" slots mount either Energy or Missile weapons, and "Ammo-Consuming" slots mount either Missile or Ballistic weapons). This gets rid of most of the hilariously stupid designs people would make in earlier MechWarrior games (although, as the "Dakkannihilator" and our own 10x Clan Ultra Autocannon/2 "DakkaMaster" Marauder II loadout demonstrate, there are still some hilariously stupid loadouts to be made out there :P).
im having trouble getting the game to recognize my ch gear. it just doesn't show up in the damn control screen.
I've never used anything but the keyboard to play MW4, sorry; only thing I can suggest is to try one of those joystick-to-keyboard programs, but that's lousy for turning and stuff.
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im having trouble getting the game to recognize my ch gear. it just doesn't show up in the damn control screen.
Combine the controllers into one (you can do that with CH CM) and make sure it recognizes the axes. Then assign buttons to keyboard keys. That's what I did, works wonderfully. I use pedals for turning the mech, joystick for torso twist an throttle for, well, throttle. It's amazingly immersive. :)
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Hurr.... Net Framework 3.5 doesn't want to install on my PC. Odd.
Will try it on the Laptop, as this look like a fun little game. Still I'll be sticking to singleplayer (given that I don't have acess to the router on my laptop) and that I?m playing a lot of Planetside 2 lately.
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im having trouble getting the game to recognize my ch gear. it just doesn't show up in the damn control screen.
Combine the controllers into one (you can do that with CH CM) and make sure it recognizes the axes. Then assign buttons to keyboard keys. That's what I did, works wonderfully. I use pedals for turning the mech, joystick for torso twist an throttle for, well, throttle. It's amazingly immersive. :)
im using my old mw4 ch profiles, the ones i used last time i played mw4. but the virtual device doesn't show up in the dropdown box in the game's joystick configuration screen. i think its a win 7 thing. this is actually the first time the ch software let me down.
i always bind buttons to keys in the ch profiler (for any game). the idea behind that is that i can just set defaults in the game and all my buttons work out of the box. i still have to bind axes but that is usually pretty straight forward (if the game has default axis bindings, i make sure that the axes are remapped in the ch profile to match). its generally good practice to avoid using the ingame control mapper whenever possible.
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Having never touched any of the MW games after 2, how does Mech construction work in multi? Do I have to unlock stuff, or do I get the full range of stuff to tinker with from first launch?
The second.
SP requires you to salvage or purchase items.
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I'll try to get it installed this weekend.
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Yeah, but in SP you're a the leader of a merc corp, so buying new weapons makes sense.
P.S. Pick the Wolf's Dragoons as your sponsor if you plan on doing the campaign. You start with Clan tech and have easy access to more as soon as you can afford it, and Clan weaponry is just so much better than IS equivalents it isn't funny.
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i think i solved my control problem, mw4 didnt like that my ch virtual device didnt have any buttons. so i just gave it a couple dummy buttons in the cms profile to make it happy and sure enough it showed up in the list.
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Well, installation was an arduous process, but it's done. Now I just have to get it set up.
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Sorry to revive this old thread, but for people who want to play this online, the easiest solution I found was to install Gameranger ( its free) and then you can join or create multiplayer matches on the fly. No need to tinker with the different ports, easy set up and play.
Also, the .mtx files are just zip files, If you don't trust the installer exe, just rename the files with .mtx extension to .zip and unzip them the old fashioned way in the right order according to the revision numbers.
Hope this helps.
Dertien
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Also, the .mtx files are just zip files, If you don't trust the installer exe, just rename the files with .mtx extension to .zip and unzip them the old fashioned way in the right order according to the revision numbers.
.mtx files are just zip files
zip files
/me growls.
All that bloody...
Anyway, thanks Dertien :).
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Sorry for the late reply, but I've been away from the forums for several weeks.
Sorry to revive this old thread, but for people who want to play this online, the easiest solution I found was to install Gameranger ( its free) and then you can join or create multiplayer matches on the fly. No need to tinker with the different ports, easy set up and play.
If people that don't have Gameranger can play with people that do, that sounds like an excellent solution.
Also, the .mtx files are just zip files, If you don't trust the installer exe, just rename the files with .mtx extension to .zip and unzip them the old fashioned way in the right order according to the revision numbers.
Ah, not quite. The .mtx files are indeed zip archives, but every "patch" .mtx file contains extra data for patching large files without having to include the whole file; if you know how to use that data without using the MTX Extractor, please share. Otherwise, you'll be missing some of the changes from the patch.
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What about MechWarrior 4: Vengeance? I don't have the Vengeance, but I still do have the Mercenaries on cd.
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Vengeance wasn't very good and was never part of the free release (although there were plans for some sort of port of the Vengeance campaign to the Mercenaries engine, they never went anywhere before MekTek dropped the free release). Black Knight was slightly better than Vengeance, but still inferior to Mercenaries, let alone Mercenaries with extra 'Mechs and weapons. You're really not missing out.
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Vengeance wasn't very good and was never part of the free release (although there were plans for some sort of port of the Vengeance campaign to the Mercenaries engine, they never went anywhere before MekTek dropped the free release). Black Knight was slightly better than Vengeance, but still inferior to Mercenaries, let alone Mercenaries with extra 'Mechs and weapons. You're really not missing out.
Actually Black Knight and Vengeance were both part of the final version of the free release, before MekTek crapped out. I am not sure they worked properly, however.
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Actually Black Knight and Vengeance were both part of the final version of the free release, before MekTek crapped out. I am not sure they worked properly, however.
You sure about that? I'm 99% sure that they never got around to releasing anything Vengeance- or Black Knight-related.
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I downloaded the free release from a mirror, and there were neither Vengeance nor Black Knight in there. If there was a version released with those two, I'd like to have it, though (it was free, so mirroring it isn't wrong, IMO).
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I downloaded the free release from a mirror, and there were neither Vengeance nor Black Knight in there. If there was a version released with those two, I'd like to have it, though (it was free, so mirroring it isn't wrong, IMO).
Uh, it's not free anymore, and it would be wrong, because they lost the license through mismanagement.
I'll try to dig it out to confirm, but I suspect I've lost the original files and I didn't install Vengeance or Black Knight when I got them.
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Well, it's not free anymore, but it was released. It should have stayed free, what is wrong is making people pay for things that were supposed to be free. Especially given who the license went to I see no reason to see anything wrong with downloading MW4, as long as you stick to freely released versions.
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Unfortunately your interpretation is not the 'correct' one, and I'm going to have to ask you stop promoting what amounts to piracy.
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Just how did you determine what is the "correct" interpretation? Laws? They might be different between two countries, you can't even quote international treaties, because there's usually at least one country that didn't ratify any given one. Some authority supposedly versed in this? Link to the source.
My interpretation is that free is free, even if the links don't work. I don't care what corporations (especially now PGI or MS) say about that, and it's not just limited to this issue. If you say something, you'd better have a darn good reason to withdraw your statement (hint: whims and greed are not good reasons).
So, from my POV, it's not piracy, but saying "screw corporations and their whims". They gave permission, withdrawing it later like they did was underhanded and wrong.
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Just how did you determine what is the "correct" interpretation? Laws? They might be different between two countries, you can't even quote international treaties, because there's usually at least one country that didn't ratify any given one. Some authority supposedly versed in this? Link to the source.
My interpretation is that free is free, even if the links don't work. I don't care what corporations (especially now PGI or MS) say about that, and it's not just limited to this issue. If you say something, you'd better have a darn good reason to withdraw your statement (hint: whims and greed are not good reasons).
So, from my POV, it's not piracy, but saying "screw corporations and their whims". They gave permission, withdrawing it later like they did was underhanded and wrong.
Having strong feelings on the subject does not make you legally in the right. MechWarrior 4, its expansions, and even the MekTek version of the game are no longer free to distribute. That's the end of the discussion line in this direction.
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Legally, maybe. I'm was talking about moral rights the entire time. But just because something is illegal doesn't make it wrong, it simply means you're gonna be punished for it if caught, fairly or not. Generally, a lot of things that are morally wrong are also illegal, but there's a lot of things that are legal, but shouldn't be done anyway, and also quite a few of things which should be legal, but they aren't (a regrettable state of affairs).
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Legally, maybe. I'm was talking about moral rights the entire time. But just because something is illegal doesn't make it wrong, it simply means you're gonna be punished for it if caught, fairly or not. Generally, a lot of things that are morally wrong are also illegal, but there's a lot of things that are legal, but shouldn't be done anyway, and also quite a few of things which should be legal, but they aren't (a regrettable state of affairs).
There is no "moral right" to a free MechWarrior 4. Get that idea out of your head, and this thread.
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Also, the .mtx files are just zip files, If you don't trust the installer exe, just rename the files with .mtx extension to .zip and unzip them the old fashioned way in the right order according to the revision numbers.
.mtx files are just zip files
zip files
/me growls.
All that bloody...
Anyway, thanks Dertien :).
What if I told you that iPhone .ipsw files were also just .zip files?
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Hey, it looks like soon-ish, the .vp are going to be replaced by .zip files as well :P