GoKawiilMechCommander 1 has an annoying quirk where it shoves all of a mech’s biggest weapons into its left arm. If your mech is kitted out with mostly/only big weapons, then losing that arm means you basically lose the mech.
Normally this issue doesn’t have much impact on the outcome of a mission. Specifically targeting individual locations on a mech has pretty low accuracy (even with high-gunnery pilots) so it tends to not matter much for enemy mechs, and the chance that one of your own mechs loses specifically that arm by pure chance is pretty low — though it can happen. It’s still a weird issue though, and the times where it does happen to you can be a little rough.
Well no more! After being infected by Vana with a brain worm about why the code for distributing components didn’t seem to work for big weapons, I spent a day figuring it out and now have a working fix.
(Note that I’m going to be referring to the location in question as the “left arm” even though it’s not clear whether it’s actually the “left arm” or the “right arm” and the visuals of the mech are inconsistent after losing an arm. This is the location that gets blown off when you use the “fire at left arm” command as labeled in the manual, so I’m going with that.)
About a month ago I noted that MechCommander 1 (or at least the MechCommander Gold copy that I have) seems to come with embedded debugging symbols of some kind, giving some useful limited insight into what the game’s code is actually doing.
This means that we can take a gander to find out:
Which weapons count as “big” (is it just the >=9 tons rule I’ve seen tossed around?)
How weapons and equipment are distributed on a mech
Why the hell “big” weapons specifically all get lumped into the left arm
Sir, this Long Tom looks real big from down here — I think we can call it “big”
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