Actually, digging a bit deeper, I see I confused some things.

1) LBX weapons do two kinds of damage – direct and splash.
2) Splash damage is “chunked” so that it is always in hits of 2 or less; more overflows to new locations.
3) Each splash hit is a separate roll on the model, so it can hit anywhere.

Then we have one straight up code bug:
4) Splash damage for Light LBX is 0.5, which is accidentally coerced to 0.

The rest of the LBX family has integer splash damage, so they don’t hit that bug. Even according for that, the damage cards for all LBX aren’t right, but that could be changed via tuning cycle times, direct damage, or splash damage.

Gun family wise:
Light LBX: does 0.5 direct damage and 0 splash (should be 0.5, but the bug). Assuming no bug this is the same damage per strike as other light autocannons, but they have longer cycle times, so their DPS is worse. However, you do get roughly 2x the number of shots from the ammo, so the total damage dealt over a whole mission might be higher.

Medium LBX: does 2 direct damage and 2 splash, compared to 6 for other medium cannons. This is basically just worse, except again they have between 2x and 3x more ammo than their equivalents.

Heavy: does 5 direct and 6 splash, compared to 15 for the other heavy cannons. Again, much worse, except here we get 3x the ammo.

Assuming the splash bug is fixed:
1) Lights hit for 0.5, and splash for 0.5 on one segment
2) Medium hits for 2, and then splash for 2 on one segment.
3) Heavy hits for 6, and then splashes for 2 on three segments.

So this suggests:
Light LBX: ~30% dps loss (due to cycle time) and damage spread across 2 locations, but double ammo.
Medium LBX: ~33% dps loss (due to low damage) and damage spread across 2 locations, but double ammo
Heavy LBX: ~40% dps loss (mostly due to low damage, a little cycle time) and damage slightly more focused on the primary hit though still spread across 4 locations, but triple ammo.

So all the LBX guns do more damage than their non-LBX counterparts… once the non-LBX runs out of ammo and the LBX keeps going. It takes quite a while for that to even out.

Hm, it sounds plausible at a glance, but if direct damage into splash damage is how it works across the LB-X lineup then the test result shown for the Heavy LB-X test near the bottom of the OP doesn’t make sense to me (though maybe I’m just envisioning the damage calculation wrong in my head?). If even the Heavy seems to be dealing <33% of the non-LB-X damage then I don't think a rounding error accounts for the missing DPS - it still seems to be off by close to an order of magnitude when the Heavy non-LB-X punched to orange structure on the CT while the Heavy LB-X struggled to get past yellow armor anywhere. If the issue was rounding, then I'd expect it to not make much difference to total raw DPS for weapons with very high damage values.

1) LBX weapons do direct damage, and then a splash effect.
2) The splash damage for Light LBX is set as 0.5 per segment on 3 armor segments
3) 0.5 is accidentally coerced to 0 due to a small type conversion error

Medium/Heavy versions aren’t busted, but are a tad undertuned – given that focused damage is generally much better in Battletech, you really need a lot of extra damage to make them competitive.

(There may be a secondary effect reducing the splash damage further related to the time delay for explosions, but I’m not sure).

No prob hehe the fact that you got as far as you did is already hero stuff 🙂

Sure, I’ll let you know if I figure out the .gmm files, but just to be straightforward that I think it’s extremely unlikely that I will. I think I’d probably have to reverse engineer a huge chunk of the game to do it (and even then, maybe the game exe doesn’t explain the format of all of its file types!), but the time and effort — for someone of my limited skill level — is hard to justify against an existing backlog of other projects.

One of the reasons I could do the change in the article is because I got pretty lucky and the thing I wanted to fix involved a relatively isolated system which was relatively easy to understand. One of the other gameplay bugs that I wanted to fix (LB-X damage) I’ve spent nearly as much time and effort on but have made basically no progress on fixing because the systems involved are larger and interconnected, and they’re individually much harder to understand (let alone when having to combine multiple bits together to get the full picture). I expect the code required to understand .gmm files — if it’s explained by the game code rather than some separate tool which we don’t have — is probably more like that than like the simpler weapon distribution code :'(

Much better than me for sure!

True about writing game logic… but i think for a modern map and campaign editor, the gmm file is the last one needed? Maybe? But from what ive seen, its the last one IronArthur didnt fully decode?

I think if the gmm files (which i think is the data for the hierarchical astar they used? Like the rooms and doors info?) I think an editor would be more realistic?

But anyway, congrats on this work, its really good! If by any chance you get to peak into the gmm (or any other game logic from the data), please let us know?

I think I saw the original MCUnity project briefly a couple months ago but didn’t look that hard at it.

As far as I understand, it (and your successor) are so far all focused on assets? So from a mess-around-with-it perspective it’s cool, but you’d still need to recreate the game code to have something resembling MC1 in more than just visuals. I guess you could theoretically not attempt to re-create the logic and just roll your own but then I’m not really sure what the end goal would be for the project then.

I unfortunately don’t have any advice to offer on your .gmm files issue. I’m also probably not as good at this as you think I am 😛 (I’ve never even solved a simple crackme ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackme ) lol), but good luck with your efforts! I imagine the few online MC/BT communities would be interested in hearing about it, and I know there’s been recent interest in abusing LLMs to work on MC2.

Ive been digging around his work and some of the binaries in mcg too (but nowhere close to this level of skill!). Atm, i am trying to continue ironarthur’s work, but have reached a wall with decoding the .gmm files used for creating maps in the game. But between me and iron, we have managed to get the assets out of the game pak files and into unity… here’s the very janky hacked together stuff we figured out 🙂

https://github.com/GypsyFromTheSatelliteofLove/MCUnityContinued