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MW5: Possible Fix for Mouse Bug in Co-op

The issue

When playing Co-op in Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, if you get a mission that starts from a dropship (rather than just spawning directly onto the map), you sometimes lose mouse control when it’s time to exit the dropship. You can still fire, and the mouse will work on the game menu, but you can no longer aim using the mouse.

What worked for me

As an Nvidia GPU user, pull up the Ansel overlay using ALT+F2, then close it again. Mouse control returns.

Speculation on root cause

I’ve noticed that when the bug is going to occur, I actually have mouse control while in the dropship itself (and can fire my weapons inside it, which you normally can’t do).

My theory based on that is there’s some kind of issue relating to mouse control being toggled (between on and off) rather than being explicitly set to on or off.

It could also be an issue with Ansel or some other software that might be interfering with what program “owns” the mouse. Since the fix is so easy and has had a 100% rate of success, I haven’t bothered to investigate further, and haven’t even tried disabling the Ansel overlay to see if that’s the issue.

Feedback

This seems to be an uncommon issue (I couldn’t find anyone else experiencing it specifically in MW5, just in some other games), so if you have it and this helps (or doesn’t help) please take a minute to leave a comment – especially for the latter if you find something that does!

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Fall of Nations: Dev Blog #00

Now that nearly 100 people have subscribed to Fall of Nations, it seems like I should go into more detail about what exactly I want to accomplish with it. I’m also starting to run into the character limit of a Workshop mod’s description – and even if I wasn’t it’s still becoming pretty unwieldy.

Let’s start with the broadest strokes and work our way down from there.

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The Next 8 Months (Content Schedule)

I have a lot of stuff I’m working on right now. Some are large projects (e.g. Olaf guide, Fall of Nations), some are smaller (like individual articles), and there are a few that are sort of in between (e.g. B5 giffing). If my study schedule goes as expected then I have ~8 months of less than a full-time study workload. After the 8 months is over I don’t jarringly stop all content, but I can’t realistically study full-time and do content full-time simultaneously – time just doesn’t work like that.

Over the past couple weeks or so I’ve spent quite a bit of time figuring out what and how I want to work on things over this coming 8 month window, and how long I expect each project to take.

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Jhin “4 image description”

A few weeks ago /r/leagueoflegends ran a contest for reaching 4 million subscribers to the subreddit. There there four categories, and four winners in each category. With around 2 days left on the submission deadline, I submitted a Loss parody for the category of “4 image description” and ended up getting first place, winning myself 1848 RP.

Here are some notes about the submission I made.1

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My Workaround for the Limitations of the RoN Mod Manager

In the course of my RoN modding adventures, I decided to make a broad-scope “tech demo” style mod, showcasing some of the moddable aspects of RoN that I felt were being underutilisied – and hopefully learning a few things in the process.

After trying to mod a few things that I feel have been vastly undermodded, I ran into.. some problems. After much frustrating troubleshooting and testing, I realised this was due a limitation of RoN’s mod manager.

I then got to work on how to get around it.

The first process I mapped out while exploring how to solve the issue.

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How to Add a Thumbnail to a RoN Mod on the Steam Workshop

If you’ve ever tried to browse the Steam Workshop for Rise of Nations, you may have been frustrated at how none of the entries appear to have thumbnails. I looked into this and it appears that this is because the native mod uploader does not support thumbnails.

Nonetheless, by using a workaround, last night I became probably the first person to ever have a thumbnail for my RoN mod on the Steam Workshop. Here’s how I did it.

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Nick’s Gaming PC 2: Electric Boogaloo

Back in April of this year, Nick — who I helped with a gaming PC back in 2014 — was looking for a new system to get him a step up in performance. His old system was going to be given away / sold, so simply upgrading that was not in the cards.

The new system was to have essentially the same purpose and priorities as his existing system. The budget wasn’t particularly strict as long as it was under 2K and performance needs were met, but I obviously also didn’t want to just burn his money. Some people like to spend right up to the allocated machine’s budget, whereas others just set an amount as the maximum and leave the specifics up to me. Nick is the latter.

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