Last Updated: March 5th, 1998

Dan Kegel's Personal Mechwarrior 2 Page

I helped write the networking for Activision's popular MechWarrior 2 giant robot combat sim game.

I'm using this page as a way to get my personal hints about the Mech2 games out to the people who play it. (For official Activision information, go to the official Activision site instead!)

FAQ's

My Mercs FAQ has disappeared from the Activision server, but is still useful.

Game Servers

See The Activision Game Server FAQ for info about what game servers Mercnet supports.

The Zero Mek Error

The dreaded Zero Mek error in Netmech and Mercnet seems to happen in the following circumstances:
  1. You select a custom 'Mech.
  2. You leave the game or are kicked out for some reason before launch.
  3. You go back in and pick your custom 'Mech again.
Wham! Zero Mech error.

Here's how to avoid it: if you leave the game or are kicked out for some reason before launch, be careful when coming back into the game setup screens to do the following:

  1. Go to the Mech screen and pick *a different 'Mech chassis* than you picked last time
  2. Go to some other screen (say, the launch screen) for a couple seconds
  3. Go back to the Mech screen and pick the custom 'Mech you really wanted.
The mere act of picking a different chassis and leaving the Mech screen does something that prevents the Zero Mech error from happening.

This bug was fixed in time for Mechwarrior 2: Battlepack, and will be fixed in later patches of Mercnet.

Mercenaries 1.1 Problems

The Mercs 1.1 (aka Mercs 1.10, sorry) patch gives Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries and Mercnet some awesome graphics. However, it also introduced some problems. I have collected a number of problem reports and workarounds from Usenet in the hopes it will help some users.
Dan Kegel