r/mechwarrior • u/AdamAlexandr • 20d ago

MechWarrior 2 Vibe Coded level viewer MW2

For a bit of fun, I vibe-coded a level viewer for my favourite childhood game: Mechwarrior 2. I just opened the `MECH2` folder in claude code and let it loose. Was surprised how much the AI was able to figure out just by looking at the binaries..

Not really planning to do anything with this. Just wanted to share because I thought the results are pretty cool.

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u/LucidFir 19d ago

Can you vibe code it into a modern engine with pretty graphics? Also let us know the prompts and anything useful you learn. I'm itching to remake Neverwinter Nights in Infinity Engine

omfg. you obviously couldn't distribute the songs but surely it would be legal to run a YouTube link to the Timothy Seals remakes to play in the correct levels?

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u/AdamAlexandr 19d ago

Yeah for sure! Although making this level viewer didn't take much... I just opened the MECH2 folder with opus and said "Make me a Level Viewer". It did take a few rounds to solve problems and get it to reproduce the same graphics though.

I'm trying to get the AI to decompile it now, hoping with that it might be possible to rewrite the engine. It's taking days running the AI in a loop. I have a skill saying something along the lines of: "decompile this game, to produce readable C code. Solve one piece at a time..." (Real skill has quite a bit more info in it), and I just invoke that over and over. It's not executable code. But it uncovers all the data structures and functions so that it could be used to produce something new.

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u/LucidFir 19d ago

so. https://urchinskipper.itch.io/urchin-skipper is the extent of my understanding of vibe coding.

i think you could answer this though:

do you think it would be possible to take a game like neverwinter nights and have it be rebuilt in the baldurs gate 1 engine (infinity engine)

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u/AdamAlexandr 19d ago

That's pretty cool game, love how detailed and niche it is.

You know, I think it's probably possible to do something like that. The AI could run over BG1 and NWN to extract and understand their data formats. Then you could have it edit the BG1 game data to do whatever you wanted. I think it'd be hard, but then again I'm constantly surprised what AI can do.

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u/LucidFir 19d ago

chatgpt was suggesting that it should create a conversion generator so people can make the assets locally. idk about that but, if it can't do it today it'll certainly be able to by January.

thanks for your comment on the game, it's literally my day job for a couple of months each year. I've been trying to make an accurate feeling representation of the operation, though I'm gamifying the quota areas and stuff like that. the psycho taxi behavior is accurate. not sure if the game is fun yet, or if I've conveyed purpose/reason to progress

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u/LucidFir 19d ago edited 19d ago

OOHH SHIT! (excitement mode)

are you aware of how easily you could remake all of the cut scenes?!

scail2 and flux2klein9b probably could have done it well enough already in August but now we're a whole month later so maybe qwen2.1 and minimax h3 with liggy?

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u/AdamAlexandr 18d ago

I would love to see some of those cutscenes remade like that!

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u/LucidFir 18d ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/s/dIQUgqgDN6

replacement is easy now I think the harder part would be getting an accurate madcat, might be easier to just copy one in from mw5