I always thought it would be fun to have custom Clan logos instead of the generic team images to pick from in multiplayer. These don’t do anything, it’s just for cool factor. They are located within \shelldb\netimg named icon01.pcx through icon10 so I guess we only get to have ten clans!
Okay folks, I am going through digging up and re-remembering some old knowledge about hacking Outwars.
First and foremost outwars.mml aka the multiplayer mission list. Lets open it up in a hex editor:
Very simple. Name of the .mis file located in /netmisn followed by some whitespace. I have added a few more:
The astute amongst you may notice hey ass isn’t a real mission, the game agrees and since there is no ass.mis it throws an error and immediately quits:
Lesson here being, don’t screw up the .mml file!
As soon as you add more than 15 entries to this file, the game actually renders a scroll bar but there seems to be some hard coded limit that prevents it from properly handling more missions. No matter, nobody is every going to play anything but anub1m anyway 😛
Ahhhhh the CAT clan 🙂 Good old Complete Annihilation Team. We have VeX represented as well, as importantly new blood. For all the time we spent back in the day trying to get new players, who knew today we would just have some fall in our lap? hah
I use Facebook for two things: buying old cars and BattleTech minis. I forgot all about the Outwars Never Dies Facebook page. Lo and hehold, maybe due to the present apocalypse, there has been a flurry of activity in that page of late and I just happened to click into it. Exciting!
So, I promptly fire up a Discord and get a hold of OWReaper. He’s telling me someone had the source code to the game and someone else has a remake in progress and frankly my mind is fucking blown. This is exciting. So, I go ahead and set up a Bookstack to organize things.
One thing OWReaper mentioned was documenting some of the history of ye olde days playing on zone.com. I was going to put that in the book stack but I figure its very bloggy material so might as well put it here. Plus, if something comes to me I can fart out a quick post on my phone. So yeah, enjoy!