On newer operating systems Mechcommander Gold can occassional have issues with corrupted textures in the main menu. When you start Mechcommander Gold the colours may display incorrectly, which will cause your game menu to look something like this:

To fix the colour/texture issue you can either put the game into windowed mode and then back to fullscreen using alt + enter or follow the steps below if you want a more permanent solution:

1. Create a shortcut to MCX.exe.
2. Disable desktop composition. Right click on the shortcut and select properties. Under the compatibility tab select “Disable desktop composition” and click apply (the issue is caused by having a Windows 7 Aero theme active).
3. Start the game from the shortcut.

*NOTE* If you can’t get around it don’t worry, this colour/texture issue only appears to be a problem in the game menu and the colours go back to normal once you start a mission.

If you’ve followed the above steps and are still having issues with the Mechcommander Gold corrupted textures issue, please post in the comments below. To increase your chances of a solution being found include as much detail as possible (which version of the game you’re running, what operating system you have, what video card you have and steps to reproduce the issue). Screenshots are also very useful!

With all of the extraction tools for Mechcommander Gold that have been appearing on the web lately, I’ve decided to create an open source project that will contain the extracted source data for all Mechcommander Gold FST and PAK files –> MCGExtracted

The purpose of this project is to save time and effort for any MCG modders out there. It will also allow the casually curious to eventually browse MCG art assets, and raw game data.

Want a sneak peak of what’s been done so far?

extraction tools

The tools that I’ve been using to extract the data at this point have come exclusively from cmunsta. If you’re not yet familiar with his work check it out on his website. I’ve included many of the completed extraction scripts here. Simply add the file you want to extract into this folder (after you’ve download the project from GitHub) and then double click the appropriate script!

what you can do!

Extracting all these files takes time! The tools I’ve been using to extract the PAK and FST files, while very useful, do not include file names or types in the extracted files, so putting names to faces would help a lot. I’ve been using trid to identify many of the file types. If you’re interested in contributing to the project please contact me via GitHub or through my twitter @alexgophermix

Mechcommander FST files are a special format of compression file (think .zip) used by Mechcommander Gold that contain descriptions and data values for various objects in the game, e.g. mech variants and mechwarriors. This tutorial describing how to extract Mechcommander Gold FST files is based off of CMunsta’s command line extraction tool and some great tutorials that he wrote.

Note: All FST files have been fully extracted in the MCGExtracted GitHub project, in case you simply need the source files rather than the explanation on how to do the extraction yourself. You can read more about the project in the Mechcommander Gold extracted post.

To extract a Mechcommander Gold FST file follow these steps:

1. Download the FST file extraction tool fstextract.exe
   Download link 1 <– Cmunsta’s website  (under “Tools used in the guide”)
   Download link 2 <– GitHub mirror
2. Place your fstextract.exe file into the directory containing the target .FST file.
3. Open up cmd and navigate to the directory containing the target .FST file and fstextract.exe. To change directory within cmd you’ll have to use the cd command for example:
   cd C:\Program Files\MCX
4. Extract the file at the index in the .FST file you would like to. FST files contain various files which will contain the data you need. The name of the file varies by the specific FST archive it is in. For example to extract the data for the Raven J variant into a file called raven_j.txt you would execute:
   fstextract.exe MISSION.FST PM102300.FIT raven_j.txt

Once again, if you need the fully extracted source for a specific FST file, all FST files have been fully extracted in the MCGExtracted GitHub project. There are also scripts you can run to automatically extract each FST file that are located in the extraction_tools directory of the MCGExtracted project. For more information about extracting specific FST files see the sections below.

Read more ›

The Mechcommander Gold mission editor extender is an excellent tool for adding many things that were left out of the game’s editor. Please note I did not create this program, and I am not responsible for it’s use and functionality:

+ Download link 1 – local mirror
+ Download link 2 – collosus.demon.co.uk

If you need help using the editor have a look at the tutorial below. There are several sections to this tutorial:

The GUI
Objectives
Drop Zones
Lookout Points
Adding Salvage
Damages
New Units

The Graphic User Interface (GUI)

The mission editor extender has a small and easy to use GUI. To use the extender, first save your changes in the mechcommander mission editor. After you’ve saved your changes switch to the extender, add what elements you need and when you’re done press generate. Finally go back to the mechcommander mission editor and select generate .DPK to create you map.

Objectives

Once you have a map selected (you will have to have created one through the original editor for it to appear on this list) click on the Objectives button to bring up the objectives window. Here you can see the list of all objectives that exist in the mission you selected. You can create up to 8 objectives total (4 from the editor, 4 from the extender). You can only delete extender objectives in the extender. The extender also allows you to add resource rewards and time limits to objectives; something you couldn’t previously do.

Drop Zones

The Drop Zones window shows you all drop zones in the selected mission. You can edit the location, the formation and the spread of your mechs when they are deployed in the mission.

Lookout

The lookout window lets you specify lookout points. When specifying a lookout point use the editor to find the x and y coordinates and then experiment to find the size you want your trigger point to be (in terms of radius of a circle). You can also specify a trigger condition, and the menu changes to accommodate this. With the structure related objectives make sure to specify the structure block and structure vertex, not it’s x and y coords.
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Mechcommander Gold defaults to 640×480 resolution with no way of changing it through the menu options. You can however increase the resolution manually through prefs.cfg which, when combined with increased zoom level, can give the game an HD effect:

1. Open prefs.cfg in a text editor. pref.cfg is located in the root directory of your MCX installation (e.g. C:\Program Files\MCX\prefs.cfg)
2. Set resolution=3 to change resolution to 1280×1024. On the line before “FITend”  add the following (if you don’t have it already): l Resolution=3
   Different numbers here represent the different available resolutions:
   0 -> 640×480
   1 -> 800×600
   2 -> 1024×768
   3 -> 1280×1024
   Note – This will only affect your in-game resolution. The menu resolution will remain unchanged!
   Note – Setting the resolution higher than what is supported by your monitor will cause the game to crash!
   I’ve included a screenshot of my own prefs.cfg file below as an example:
   
3. (Optional) Increase the in game zoom level. Now that you’re got a larger resolution you could optionally zoom in as you should have a much larger view area. To do this, while in a mission press ‘+‘  to get a zoomed in view. You can now use this view to play the game as the large resolution combined with the zoom will allow you to see roughly the same amount of mission area as you could before but with much more detail.

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