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Beautiful driving setup
kahlid74:
--- Quote from: Yenome on March 16, 2012, 04:10:27 am ---I been wanting to make a closed in machwarrior simulator. not as elaborate as his but a simple closed in boxed with a nice size monitor, maybe even a projector. with foot pedals throttle and a simple stick. Don't have the room for one ATM and i been waiting to see if mechwarrior 5 is gonna be released first or if ill be stuck with mechwarrior 4.
--- End quote ---
Just a side note, there is no Mechwarrior 5. There is Mechwarrior Online, but no 5. There will not be a 5 for at least a few years to boot. Publishers didn't want to fork up the mondo bucks for it with no sustainable model. Mechwarrior Online is going to be ridiculously awesome. Trust me, those guys are working stuff you've only read about in Battletech lore (Like multiple reticules for arms/torso)
So in the 80's and 90's, if you were rocking during those times, you might have had a chance to go to one of the many FASA Virtual Reality centers. And inside of those centers lived something WAY ahead of it's time. It was 4-16 player Battletech Mech Free for all fought from inside 4*8 foot wooden structures we called PODs. There were two designs of the PODs. VR2.5 and 3.0.
Inside these monstrosities sat 4 Motherboards with CPU's and memory. If I remember correctly two were used for nominal processes and two for graphics.
Back in 2006 I got a chance to visit Greenday out in Cali, the guy who owned the last 6 VR 3.0 pods in existence. At the time all six were fully functional. Boy was that a flashback to the early 90's for me. I took 800+ pictures and made sketchup drawings of the entire cabinet. Since then he's had to literally hack up four of the PODs just to keep the remaining two pods working. A lot of shortcuts were made during the creation of said pods (Crappy power supplies, rusting solder joints, etc.)
Now days the latest and greatest pods are known as the Tesla II pods run by Nicolas "Propwash" who bought the rights and all of the jazz from FASA/Microsoft.
Watch the Project Announcements forum over the next week or two as I begin my build on a replica Battletech VR3.0 pod.
Here's a link about their history - http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/battletech.html
If you do a google search you'll see lots more info on them but the VR2.5/3.0 pods information is slowly drying out on the internet. If you want to build one, start creating an archive of the available information before it becomes fully "lostech".
Marketing Picture of a VR 3.0 Pod
Another good picture allbeit small:
My pictures of the last working ones:
Greenday booting up the MAC system which ran the whole BNC networked POD getup:
Closeup of the front interface side of the POD:
Closeup of the seating area of the POD:
Picture of a Tesla II pod:
Yenome:
Mechwarrior online is Mechwarrior 5 they just changed the name to online instead of 5. everyone who was on board for the game when they was calling it Mechwarrior 5 is still involved. they had some legal trouble over a few mech designs. seemed that slowed down work on the game. but yea i lived near Chicago in the early 90 and we had in our mall a battlestorm store with the pods and with red planet. the Tesla II pods are still being built today. least last i checked the company who held the rights to em was still making them per order. been a while since i was on my Mechwarrior fad. last time i was on it Mechwarrior living legends(crysis mod) was still being worked on and had just gotten a beta release. I had heard the Chicago location was the last to shut down.
kahlid74:
--- Quote from: Yenome on April 03, 2012, 07:08:23 am ---Mechwarrior online is Mechwarrior 5 they just changed the name to online instead of 5. everyone who was on board for the game when they was calling it Mechwarrior 5 is still involved. they had some legal trouble over a few mech designs. seemed that slowed down work on the game. but yea i lived near Chicago in the early 90 and we had in our mall a battlestorm store with the pods and with red planet. the Tesla II pods are still being built today. least last i checked the company who held the rights to em was still making them per order. been a while since i was on my Mechwarrior fad. last time i was on it Mechwarrior living legends(crysis mod) was still being worked on and had just gotten a beta release. I had heard the Chicago location was the last to shut down.
--- End quote ---
So here's the thing, Mechwarrior Online is NOT Mechwarrior 5. The engine is the same, the Mech combat is similar but that's where the similarities end. Mechwarrior Online is a F2PMMO (Free to Play Massive Multiplayer Online Game). There is no single player campaign. There is no small scale Multiplayer Mech free for all. Mechwarrior Online is like Rainbow Six with Mechwarrior. Basically Battletech the way it always should have been where Scouts have a workable and useable purpose all the way up to assaults being lumbering walls of weapons with slow movement and turn radius/capability. I'm sorry to say this but if you think this is Mechwarrior 5 you're going to be in for a very disappointing experience. Mechwarrior Online has the capability for you to enter a 20 minute match, be killed in the first 2 minutes and not be able to do ANYTHING the remaining 18 while you wait for it to finish. There won't be anymore alpha strikes period. No Missile boats that survive more than a round without reinforcements either. MWO is Mech warfare the way it's described in the Battletech books/Lore and NOTHING like what you've experienced in Mechwarrior 3/4 besides the concept of Mechanized Warfare.
Lets also be clear on what happened to Mechwarrior 5. In 2009 when Jordan Wesiman and Piranha started pitching the idea, everyone was giddy but didn't like the price tag. Fast forward through every publisher and they had no funding. That's when Mechwarrior 5 died. Piranha then decided they really wanted to make a battletech game so they decided on a Free to Play MMO which is what Mechwarrior Online is. They re-licensed the rights for Mech combat on computer from Jordan W (Who had originally re-licensed it from Microsoft) and began to build MWO.
The legal troubles you're talking about deal with something known as "The Unseen" (See here - http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Unseen). The "Unseen" refers to several Mech designs that were stolen in likeness from Macross back in the 80's. The owners of the rights to Macross sued and won forcing an injunction on FASA to prevent them from ever using Unseen mechs in games/fiction/lore. Mechs like the Rifleman and Maurauder. When the current owners of Macross saw Mechwarrior 5's trailer of a Rifleman fighting a Jenner and then an Atlas they IMMEDIATELY filed suit hoping for money. They have always only been about the money so the second they thought they could get more money from FASA they hoped right on it. To the credit of the original creators of Macross, the Lostech mechs are clearly a rip from their stuff.
SavannahLion:
Jesus, I can't conceive of the volumes of information required to even think about recreating such cabs. I'll definitely be watching a project thread like that.
Yenome:
yes except in an interview with the games maker he him self says the game they made to pitch the idea became the game. so 5 is online. far as i know there was no info released bout 5 save for that trailer and that could of also only been an opening fmv. tho i love the mechwarrior series and still think it would be fun to build a generic cockpit for it and possible some driving games. i played 4 online and unless you was on a non heat server you wasnt doing too many alpha strikes. most setups people used would shut a mech down from one. plus i played mechwarrior living legends which is more along the lines as MWO so i know what to expect.
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