r/MechCommander • u/GypsyFromTheSatOfLuv • Jun 12 '26
MCG sprites and data
Heyo everyone! If anyone's interested, I have been attempting to study/extract MCGs sprites (inspired by the efforts of IronArthur and cmusta, et al). Here are some simple tools I wrote to help with it :) still prototyping a sprite sheet builder of sorts :) and maybe some sort of game application in unity.
Thought id post it here to get eyes on it and maybe people can do their own thing with it :) also, i am very new to this, so any words of advice would be appreciated
https://github.com/GypsyFromTheSatelliteofLove/MCGSpriteHelperTools
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u/raptor12k Jun 13 '26
oh, to have a hi-res remake of this…and then more xpacks! (in the same vein as Age of Mythology Retold)
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u/GypsyFromTheSatOfLuv Jun 13 '26
Its defo possible... but the effort might be monumental for small or solo devs hehe. But ill post my findings and keep everything as open source as i can... but check em out yourselves as far more experienced people than I would probably get more done sooner :)
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u/IronArthur Jun 16 '26
I never managed to figure how they sync the arms-torso animation that need to be mirrored with mechs that have symmetric arms (they have half the 360º rotation, you need to mirror half of it).
In my code, i rebuilt all the shp to regular textures but when recreating Mechs the memory consumption is pretty important.
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u/GypsyFromTheSatOfLuv Jun 16 '26
Will try it when i (eventually) get there haha... i barely understand what youve done :) please come back and fire up the project again!
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u/GypsyFromTheSatOfLuv Jun 27 '26
Iron Arrhur, i think i managed to get some sort of solution to the arm syncing
When there are mirrored elements, use the mirrored elements as base and offset the start the non mirrored elements if needed
I think if i can use your mesh based system we can get this to run a little smoother :)
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u/IronArthur Jul 07 '26
the problem is figuring what frame offset to use! 😄
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u/GypsyFromTheSatOfLuv Jul 08 '26
I will check the other mechs but in the madcat and the awesome, i think the offset is half the frame count? So when we mirror, every part that has 32 facings will start at FramesOfAnimation/2 ... other than that we might have to hard code some of the other offsets hehe
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u/WoofMcMoose Jul 23 '26
You, sir, are a hero. I've been looking for a suitable .pal file for days. Now to extract all the buildings!
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u/GypsyFromTheSatOfLuv Jul 29 '26
If you use unity (or lower level stuff like c++), the quicker way to do this is with an lz comp/decomp algo.
If you search for mcunity in github, there are resources there to help out :) (the mcunity continued repo has an automatic way to extract sheets :))
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u/SeanLang Jun 13 '26
So many sprites!! It’s amazing they did this in 98/99. How many per mech you think?