Still distracted from the Tranquil Nuclear Winter project due to working on the weapons mod, but it's been productive. I've re-discovered a few things...and discovered some new things.
The interp.zbd, one of the main files in the game, has 3 subfiles that have to do with size arrays for each world. Although I had looked into this long ago just a little bit and had a theory that these files might have something to do with helping the game stability...only recently have I begun to discover just how much., as I'll explain...
Back in '98 when MechWarrior 3 was published the developers knew there were limitations on the typical PC's that buyers of the game would be playing it on. So, some visuals were left out of the game, certain sound files they didn't even bother with, some effects in the game were done in a limited way...and the size array files were very limited. As I've re-worked some of the weapons and created new weapons using existing visuals, effects, and created new sounds, and increased velocities and so forth, I've called upon the game engine to rise to the challenge of having all this added "stuff" going on at once in the game where before it was more limited. This, I believe, caused glitches to become more prevalent, such as colored stripes decorating the landscapes, increased CTD's, something veterans of multiplayer used to refer to as "LRM boot", sometimes sounds I added would sporadically not play, some visuals would not always appear, and so forth.
So, one day I decided to test the theory of raising the limits of the size array files I mentioned. I discovered how high the game allows them to go...and it's pretty darn high. So I raised these limits...all the way. The results were amazing. It's like I'm playing a new game. Literally ALL the sounds play...ALL the visuals run...I even added some visuals to some weapons impacts...and they all worked great...there's so much more detail to the weapons effects now than ever before. It's amazing what this game engine is able to do, and I want to see how much more can be discovered. Oh, and since I did this the CTD has only happened once., and the stripes on the landscape...again, only once. And the "LRM boot" seems to be gone. I have to wonder how much better this would be if I upgraded my legacy PC I'm using for this project to something with a faster CPU but still legacy enough to run the game.
Anyway, work continues, and it's pretty cool.