[Ma.Din]

https://springrts.com/


Have you seen this yet? It's an open source RTS engine that uses LUA as a scripting language. It's also Linux and MacOS friendly. I know you were frustrated with the limitations of the MC2 Engine, but just a pass through, this could be used to field entire REGIMENTS of battlemechs and it appears to be animation-friendly to animators, like myself. 

Bump me, if you think you might want to jump ship. I've been playing MWO and got a bug to play MCO again.   

[Ma.Din]

Looks like they're already working on a BT mod.......


and they're using some of the MCO Mechs. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJBkAzt0AoY



[EDIT] - Nope. They're not. Still, this might be something to look into.

[Zarax]

If you like that you might want to take a look at this: www.wz2100.net
Code approximately from the same years along with a research tree and customizable units which is closer to MCO in philosophy.

[Ma.Din]

This might be more what we're looking for. Spring is more updated and from what I've seen has more open code and steady development, but is hampered more as it's like StarCraft - The map engine is rather lackluster. I'll download the 2100 code/engine and take a look.

Just looking at the forums, it seems we may run into the same issue with polycount we had with MC2/MCO. Also, Warzone doesn't support DDS, but appears to just support PNG (I'll make an account and hound the developers about all this, in a day or two.) PNG is awesome, but runs into the same problem with TGA. They're big files (though not as large as Targas) and that means more graphics memory. Another issues is the models seem to be in a ".pie" format. I found a model importer, but I'll need to find out how animations are done, first. I don't want to get stuck in the same position I was previously, where I really couldn't add anything, other than textures, due to the fact I couldn't use the tools I'm familiar with.

[Ma.Din]

The more I look at 2100, the more it seems like it's REALLY limited, compared to even Mechcommander 2 Vanilla. Polys seem to be limited to 512 for buildings and less for defenses and units. It looks like they added normal mapping, but no one is using it. It DOES appear to use bones and have a few more commercial tools available. Still waiting to get the ability to post on the forums.


I mean, there's always Unity Personal, but good luck making maps, if you don't have it already. We'd need a better sandbox approach, since Microsoft refused to release the engine code.

[Ma.Din]

Still waiting to get into the 2100 website.

[Zarax]

Ma.Din, both engines are RTS ones rather than tactical ones such as MCO so in both cases there would be quite a lot of code involved.
That said, wz2100 mods can be nicer than vanilla:

http://forums.wz2100.net/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=11829&p=129106&hilit=mechs#p129106
http://forums.wz2100.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11005#p121995

For a less flexible but prettier option one might try to finish what this started: http://www.moddb.com/mods/supreme-mech-commander

[magic]

Spring is very nice RTS engine.

Porting MCO to it will require a lot of work. I tried a few years a go but I cant do it alone, too much work and there was no one to help me...