Some Mechwarrior 5 MOD I working on: Pirate FrankenMechs
The video (no sound) shows new working models either on Unreal Engine with the 160Gb MW5 source code or the raw model in Blender. This is a very boring video, I just put it so the channel is not completely dead. I certainly did not expect this to be such a pain in the ass to make a simple MOD. When they say you need a computer with SSD hard-drive, they are not joking. My potato computer crawls when running Unreal Engine, and constantly crashes.
Those are Pirate FrankenMechs. BattleMechs made from parts of other mechs, and are generally worse than the original design. I put some effort to make sure they are not as good as the originals, but still, be unique to ensure players still want to use them. Compatible with the vanilla game and the MOD 'Yet Another Mechlab'.
So far there are a new variant of the 30T Javelin BattleMech, the 10NF. Half 10N, half 10F weapons loadout. The 65T Catapult, half C1, half K2 weapons loadout (no imagination on my part). The 50T Hunhunchee, a Hunchback with a Banshee right arm to punch better with two variants, a 4G with an autocannon 20, and a 4J with long-range missiles. By just replacing that one arm, I had to redo +120 animations. And finally, the 35T Jallinder, a Javelin chassis with a spider mech cockpit and a Shadow Hawk autocannon pod.
Such a tedious work to complete only half of what I want. Taking skeletal meshes parts from one model to put on another, rigging the skeleton, paint weight on the meshes to correct armature bone, texture paint on correct UV planes and making sure that texture works fine with the normal maps, doing this over and over again for all damage skeletal meshes components and weapons, editing weapons hardpoints, weapons convergence, armour, internal components, etc, etc to work on the game properly. I feel sorry for 3D artists that have to do this daily. This is sure not programming.
Mechwarrior 5 is a very incomplete game, and it is only playable and enjoyable with MODs, lots of MODs. No wonder PGI made a MOD editor, as they know how limited their game product is. I want to fill a gap as there was no dedicated 35T ballistic mech on this era of the game. The others are just something I did on a whim.
Working in Progress: I want to do a 25T frankenmech of some sort, probably using a Spider and a Locust mechs, the black Marauder (a cursed/ghost haunted mech), and a dedicated 85T ballistic mech, the Urbinator (Charger + Urbanmech). And a mission where the player fights the pirates that uses those mechs. As usual, when I have this complete I'll post the MOD somewhere along with the source code.
00:00 Javelin JVN-10NF
00:19 Catapult CPLT-C1K2
00:36 Hunhunchee model - Blender
02:17 Hunhunchee HBK4G-BNC
02:36 Hunhunchee HBK4J-BNC
03:03 Jallinder model - Blender
05:05 Jallinder damage models DM1 - Blender
05:33 Jallinder damage models DM2 - Blender
06:38 Jallinder JVN10F-SHD
06:58 Jallinder JVN10N-SHD
BattleMechs mentioned:
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Javelin
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Catapult
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hunchback
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Banshee_(B...)
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Shadow_Hawk
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Locust
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Spider
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Black_Mara...
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/UrbanMech
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Charger