Hi Everyone,
We are thrilled to announce the special Beta launch of Story Arcs - A feature we’ve envisioned and talked about for years!
In the beginning, MekHQ was primarily for managing tabletop campaigns and creating missions in MegaMek. Then back in 2014, when MekHQ was five years old we implemented the “Against the Bot” (AtB) spreadsheet into MekHQ. This, followed by Stratcon, has led to countless Merc units being born, destroyed, and born again. But early on, there was a clear demand for a branching narrative tool in MekHQ, which would enable users to craft Starterbooks-style campaigns or their own Mech-based adventures they could play and share.
This concept languished as an idea for years, sporadically receiving attention but lacking solid development. Then, in 2021, Taharqa, the creator of MekHQ, took significant steps by starting to code this feature, leading to the creation of the “Young Wolves” campaign, which delves into the Refusal War of 3057.
This beta aims to test its functionalities and gather user feedback.
IMPORTANT!!! This is NOT a development release and is NOT eligible for MILESTONE status.
So what does this mean? Simply, it has code from the still in development 0.49.19-DEV which is NOT the 0.49.19 release (notice the missing -DEV). This means this is bleeding edge code very similar to our nightly releases. It does have a lot of bug fixes and improvements over the 0.49.18 release, including fixes for the aerospace issues in MegaMekLab. But this release should ONLY be used for playing and testing Story Arcs.
The link at the bottom can be used to download the Beta. Unix and Mac users should use the non-Windows release. From the first splash screen, select “Load Story Arc” and choose the “Young Wolves” story arc.
Please play through the story arc and identify issues, bugs, grammatical errors, etc. Feel free to play through multiple times and make different choices. We recommend making multiple saves throughout so you can go back and make different choices to explore all the possible outcomes.
A Quick FAQ:
Story Arcs Project Tracker If you want to see what is happening with the Development of Story Arcs you can go HERE.
I want to learn more about Story Arcs You can review the README notes HERE.
I’ve been playing with Young Wolves and have found an issue? If you find a specific bug or error, please report this as an issue to the STORY ARC ISSUES TRACKER HERE. Please note that you are not providing issues for the main MekHQ repository on GitHub. Please ensure that your issue is not addressed by existing issues. Please include the version number of the Story Arcs beta in your release. Detailed information including how to reproduce the bug will help us in resolving it. Please only report bugs related to the story arc. All other bugs need to go to our normal tracker HERE.
You mentioned Feedback? If you have overall feedback on the story arc itself that goes beyond a simple bug such as a comment on the narrative, difficulty of the scenarios, etc., we would also appreciate your feedback. You can either provide that feedback on this pinned forum topic of the MegaMek subforum on the CGL Battletech forums, or on the Story Arcs channel of the official MegaMek Discord.
How can I help? Looking ahead, we’ll want players to write and share the Story Arcs they create. We understand that initially hand crafting these will be a challenge, but we intend to support this over time with an editor.
We also want to build an art library for people to use. We cannot use any art produced for or in any official products. If you are interested in helping contribute to or build the art library, please join our Discord and DM Hammer.
Story Arcs requires Java 11 or 17 only We’ve updated to Java 11. To use the 0.49.x development branches, an update is needed. As Java is now open source, we recommend Adoptium Temurin 11. Help pages for Windows and Mac users are available. Linux users should use their package manager to install Adoptium Temurin.
This release also supports Java 17, which has undergone some testing. More player usage is needed, but Java 11 remains our recommended version.
DOWNLOAD LINK
MekHQ - Story Arcs 0.49.19.3-Story Arcs