MechCommander 2 Restoration Project

A community effort to become the definitive way to play MechCommander 2 (Microsoft Game Studios, 2001) on modern systems. Built on alariq's open-source port of Microsoft's shared-source engine release, this fork works toward three goals, in roughly that order of priority:

1. Make the game reliably playable on Windows 11 — fix the crashes, compatibility breakages, and dead dependencies that keep the 2001 binary from running on a current OS out of the box.
2. Improve performance and quality of life wherever it's worth the cost — renderer modernization, startup behaviour, resource handling, and so on.
3. Keep Linux working — the upstream port builds and runs on Linux, and that capability is preserved here. It isn't the current focus, but we avoid regressing it, and it'll be revisited.

The project is distributed as an installer that patches a legal retail MechCommander 2 install. No game assets are redistributed — the installer lays down the patched binary and supporting files alongside your existing retail data, with Mc2Rel.exe required as the license anchor.

Status

Completed and verified:

• Modern FMV playback — the original Bink video codec is end-of-life and fails on modern Windows. This project replaces it with an FFmpeg/MP4 pipeline that handles the intro, in-mission cinematics, mission briefings, pilot portraits, and credits through a single decode path.
• Retail-patch installer — wizard with registry-based install-dir autodetect, license-anchor validation, license-preserving uninstall, and in-place .bik → .mp4 transcode of the movie files on install.
• Windows 11 verification — confirmed running from end to end on a clean retail install of MechCommander 2 on Windows 11 64-bit.

In progress / on deck:

• Additional compatibility fixes and crash hardening as issues surface.
• Performance work (renderer call counts, lighting, resource hot-paths).
• Mission editor revival. MC2 shipped with a full mission editor — Microsoft released its source in the 2001 shared-source drop. It's MFC- based and hasn't been brought forward to modern toolchains by any fork yet. Near-term goal: get it building with VS 2022 and current MFC so players can author custom missions again.
• Font-rendering quality regression — the current shipping font set is worse than retail's originals; a one-shot tool to convert retail glyph atlases back into the engine's expected format is planned.
• Auto-detecting display resolution on first launch instead of the current hardcoded 1080p.
• Linux: revisit build instructions and verify nothing regressed after the Windows-side work lands.

Tracked in more detail under devlogs/ and the top-level claude.md follow-ups list.

For players

Public release is staged but not yet published. Once it is:

1. Install retail MechCommander 2 (you must own a legal copy — the installer refuses to proceed without Mc2Rel.exe present in the target directory).
2. Download the installer from the Releases page.
3. Run it. Point the wizard at your MechCommander 2 install directory when prompted — it autodetects the usual locations.
4. Launch from the new Start-menu shortcut.

The installer is fully reversible. Uninstalling restores the original .bik videos from a local backup and removes only the files this patch placed.

For modders

Want to make a custom campaign with your own mission sequencing and video briefings, without touching engine code? See CUSTOM-CAMPAIGNS.md. It walks through the campaign .fit format, includes a copy-paste 3-mission template, and notes the relevant engine entry points. No build required — drop a single .fit file into data/campaign/ and your campaign shows up in the New Campaign list next to Carver V.

Custom missions, units, terrain, and videos are beyond data-only modding and need the mission editor to be usable — revival plan tracked under devlogs/.

For developers

If you want to build from source:

1. Clone this repo.

2. Extract 3rdparty.zip to 3rdparty/ in the repo root.

3. Follow the detailed steps in BUILD-WIN.md (Visual Studio 2022, CMake, x64). Short version:

   mkdir build64 && cd build64
   cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$PWD/../3rdparty" -DCMAKE_LIBRARY_ARCHITECTURE=x64 ..
   cmake --build . --config Release --target mc2
   

   Build output copies itself to full_game/mc2.exe for testing.

Game data (maps, missions, assets) lives in a separate repository: alariq/mc2srcdata. That's where you point a full from-source setup if you are not overlaying this patch onto a retail install.

Linux builds follow roughly the same flow; see BUILD-WIN.md and upstream docs for details.

Credits

• Microsoft Game Studios — original MechCommander 2 engine source release, without which none of this would exist.
• alariq — the open-source port: OpenGL renderer, Linux support, and the overwhelming majority of bug fixes carried forward into this fork.
• This fork — FMV pipeline rewrite, installer, compatibility and crash fixes on the Windows 11 path. Work in progress; contributions welcome via pull request.

Licensing

• Original game code is covered by Microsoft's Shared Source Limited Permission License — see EULA.txt.
• Original port and this fork's contributions are licensed under GPLv3 — see license.txt.
• Third-party libraries (SDL2, FFmpeg, GLEW, zlib, etc.) retain their own licenses.

Reporting issues

• Crashes or regressions: open an issue with mc2_stdout.log attached (next to mc2.exe in the install directory — it is overwritten each run, so grab it before relaunching).
• Build failures: please include your OS, toolchain, and the CMake configuration output.