I imagine if there’s a coordinated, sustained push by “all” of big tech, one of the next-gen formats might be able to make pretty good inroads if they’re aggressive enough about it. I’m not sure what it would take for them to do it though, particularly because even now some people oppose the use of WebP even though support for it has become pretty good; pushing a new format aggressively would annoy plenty of people who just want “it” to keep working as-is without having to worry if X program or service supports Y format.

RIP to your modding attempt.

It is possible to do a jump-to-the-end-and-back kind of thing (I do this with my patching work on RoN) but initially setting it up is a bit more involved because you need to basically allocate more space to the program. If you / someone were doing a bigger patch it’d be worth doing (it gives you virtually infinite space), but for a once-off like this probably not. There are also alternative ways to implement larger changes which you could look into at that point (which may be more sensible, tbh), but since this is what I’ve used in RoN it’s the method I know best. If you have the space you can add something more-or-less completely new, but you would have to do it in a way that understands the state of the system (registers, stack, memory) at the moment your new code starts, how to change that state to do what you want (including how to have the state set up the way that individual functions need so that you can call them), and then how to restore it to the original state once you’re done so that the program can continue executing its original code (restoration is straightforward though). If you jump in to tweak something then you don’t really have to understand as much of the state or how to change it, since you don’t necessarily need to know how to e.g., pull pilot info or weapon info into registers / memory so that you can actually use/read/manipulate it; the scope of what needs to be understood is very limited so long as the change you’re making is small.

For the way the function is set up, it’s possible that this is the result of compiler and the original function was more readable in its original C++ or whatever. Since I don’t really know how the weapon data is handled so it’s hard for me to say, and I don’t have grounded experience in how compilers specifically modify code structure when doing C++ -> assembly / machine code.

Yep, large-in-torso and small-in-arms seems to be how it’s set up. Not really sure why ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If MC2 is fussy about something it seems like there’s a good chance MC1 would be as well given how surprisingly similar they’ve looked under the hood so far. You might also be able to look at some of the existing MC1 modding – maybe somebody has some anecdotal experience with how it works given that a few people have already added weapons and stuff.

Weapons – a 6-pack a day keeps the Elementals away, but if you load up on racks, watch your back?

It looks like magic-wise, it’s a lot more doable to tweak a variable or slightly rearrange existing functions than to add something truly new? Unless you can jump all the way to the end of the file instead of looking for a cave, do whatever you like, then jump back up. Probably inefficient but this function seems like it’d only be used once a mission. Idk anything about assembly beyond a vague impression of it being horrible though.

The long chain of if() && if() seems like a really bad way to do it when they could have just set a flag or something on the weapon def.

If I’m reading it right, small guns go to arms first, big ones go to torsos first? Backwards from how most of the game’s mechs are canonically laid out but it does mean losing an arm costs less firepower and the PC games almost never have different firing arcs for arms.

Last LBX… wonder if weapons need their ammo to be in the same location, or if they can only feed from their own ammo bin. The Mechcommander 2 mech defs seem emphatic about part order. But again, out of scope.

Def very neat that you were able to sort it out.

Well it’s written up now, so I guess you can decide what depth of magic I’ve had to do vs how much it is just explained by sitting down and testing how things work 😛

https://mhloppy.com/2026/05/mechcommander-weapons-left-arm-bug-fix/

Weapon placement thought was before I took a closer look ingame and noticed how wacky the effects are.

Loadouts, true. Battletech as a system always has been kind of prone to convergence when over-optimised though, usually on energy weapons and specifically the Clan ERPPC, ERLLaser and LPulse. Environment effects and the newer damage-type-resistant armour can affect that, as with combined arms; a Hellstar will eat mechs and tanks for breakfast, but can’t do anything to infantry. They have been tweaking the rules lately to even things a little but the need to keep statlines the same to avoid invalidating decades of unit designs means there’s only so much that can be done on tabletop rules.

Imo making small changes to the exe (when it has debugging symbols available like both MC1 and RoN do) is pretty low-hanging fruit in the grand scheme of modding, and the tools and some beginner-friendly tutorials for getting started have been around since at least 2020 or so. Since working on RoN patching I’ve been perpetually surprised by people’s generally near-complete unwillingness to engage in learning how to do it given how fantastic some of the learning materials that have come out are and how much power it gives you to change things.

Trying to replicate the position of stuff in the loadout feels a bit strange when the mech editor for the game doesn’t even support choosing component locations and the printouts for the mechs won’t tell you where things are, but god speed in your pursuit of flavor 😛

Thinking about it now, I kind of wish there was a (..well done) modern remake (or like.. SEQUEL!?) that allowed for a bit more depth in mech customization. Customizing and iterating on loadouts is one of the big appeals of the MW/MC (and HBS Battletech) games for me, but it’s so simplistic in MC1. I guess in a way it matches the relative simplicity of the combat though; there’s not much reason to try most of the loadouts because slapping XYZ weapons on a mech if you have them is just stronger lol. I think the only time I changed loadout strategies much is when I was defending a base with a known repair bay (switch to using more ammo-based weapons), but I otherwise just kept a mental list of like 10 weapons to choose between and barely touched the rest of them. The curse of player optimization I guess 😔 Edit: stuff like being pushed to switch loadouts based on mission environment would’ve been great too, like (if heat were modeled in game mechanics) hot/cold biomes, fighting enemies that use a lot of AMS, fighting areas with lots of terrain (bad LoS) etc so that there’s an actual reason to tweak the loadouts.

MW5:Mercs had a short-lived “MechCommander” mod that I would’ve definitely tried out if it was still being updated. Something like an official / more polished version of that I’d be pretty happy with.

The modder’s curse, seeing something not-quite-right and being compelled, like a vampire seeing a pile of loose change, to sort it out.

Before the update I was going to say that you may have been underestimating yourself given that what you had earlier was more progress than had been made on this in 30ish years. Shoulders of giants and modern tools etc but still.

Had been noodling a little but I suspect I’m generally a much slower operator; was thinking about something that would try to get as close as possible to the mech’s usual loadout distribution for consistency/flavour, but I’m not sure weapon location has anything to do with where the visual effects (muzzle flash, projectile etc) fire from. Probably in one of the unknown filetypes in Shapes, .hsp probably. But that’s just cosmetic.

Ah for fuck’s sake, I got a brain worm thinking about why the code I was looking at didn’t work, and every time I stopped working on it I just ended up coming back. Luckily for both of us, for the two weeks right before you left your comments I’d actually been doing some hardcore work on Rise of Nations and the time estimate I gave for how long it would take to fix assumed my level of skill from before my patching spree. Because I did that intensive patching work, I’ve actually gotten meaningfully better at a few things. Still not “fix it in a few hours” better, but 1 day instead of 1 week.

I’ve managed to undercover the cause and implement a patch (albeit a bit of a janky one) which correctly distributes “large” weapons across both arms and side torsos instead of just piling it all into the left arm. I’ll do a writeup about it later and leave RiZZen a note, but I was right in my initial assessment that it wasn’t that hard to fix. https://imgur.com/a/vlFGILI

Something interesting about this is that both of my pilots punched out / died after I blew off their left (?) arm. Based on that, this proof-of-concept change might have actually placed the engine or cockpit in their arm LOL.