Mental Omega 2.0 using Ares + Client
This is a largely nostalgia driven project. I played 2.0 quite a bit with a childhood friend back in my teenage years. It personally feels to me like Yuri's Revenge part 2, in that it refines Yuri's faction into something more varied and balanced while adding to the Yuri's Revenge story through the campaign. I tried to revisit the mod a while back but found my TFD install didn't really play nice with NPatch, mainly causing the game to need an original YR CD to run. But even when I *did* manage to get it working in the sense that I was able to load the first Soviet mission, it was functionally unplayable. So basically, I started this project hoping to produce something more stable and playable. I figure Ares can probably supplant much of the need for the NPatch barring maybe some niche features which I'll try to rework in some other way using Ares features.
I was able to get the countries functioning starting from a clean rulesmd file easily enough. I do probably need to adjust the client UI a bit to fit things, since it looks that the flags in the dropdown aren't quite right. Probably a side effect of more or less just copying MO 3.0's client theme.
So far, I have implemented most of the tweaks to the original units/weapons and have most of the new units in the game, minus some of the finer details. The blizzard tank isn't fully functioning, railguns are lacking their particles, and charge turrets aside from the Chrono Prison's are simply not showing up for whatever reason. Nothing I shouldn't be able to handle with a bit of troubleshooting and debugging. The only thing that's noticeably missing in skirmish is the support powers which I haven't touched yet. I also haven't done much testing with the AI or worked on any of the missions. Ideally, the missions would be plug and play with all the mod coding worked out but I reordered the country array differently from how 2.0 had things, so I probably will need to do a bit of touching up of each mission manually. Thinking about it more, I actually might scrap adapting MO's source files for a full rewrite/refactor to make things a bit cleaner for my own sanity. I found the MO rules to be quite a bit messier than I had expected, with scrapped bits and 1.0 holdovers being pretty rampant. I'm not entirely sure though. That would be quite a bit more work I reckon and might drift into being more of its own thing, since I am pretty scatterbrained and prone to creating quite extensive feature creep for myself. I don't know.
Anyhow, I wanted to make a post here to show off what I've got so far and maybe throw around some ideas. I'm interested to see what kind of interest it'll generate and if there are any others out there that share my nostalgia. If any of the Mentalmeisters happen to see this, I would be interested to get your thoughts on the project as a whole and honestly be absolutely giddy if I could get my hands on a 2.5 build to work from, if that's something you were able to help me with. I was a beta tester, of sorts, back in day but I don't think I have any old launchers for those builds still lying around to tinker with.
EDIT: So looking at Twisted Insurrection's client, I didn't realize I could specify a different internal index for a displayed country. That actually changes a lot because I'm basically using my own country array right now that differs both from the base game and what Mental Omega 2.0 used. Now knowing this, it opens up the door to a more direct port that uses the 2.0 array or I might try a re-implementation from the ground up that keeps compatibility with the original game's campaigns since it'd probably be less work in the mission fix-up department.
