You might notice that the variables changed are all to do with audio triggers, i.e. Enjoy the sound of not quite so much motionless silence.
#JALOPY GAME INCREASE SPEED MOD WINDOWS#
Change a couple of numbers and they go away entirely.įound via assorted good people on Reddit, this fix involves navigating to \steamapps\common\BATTLETECH\BattleTech_Data\ StreamingAssets\data\constants in Windows Explorer, then find and make a backup copy of the file audioconstants.json, before opening the original in your text editor of choice (I used Notepad++).įind the following lines, and change the number at the end of each to 0, so they wind up looking like so:
Nope, turns out the pauses were a deliberately-made decision on the devs' part, which is frankly bewildering. Given BattleTech's unusually slow load times and graphics card load, it had been tempting to presume this was down to something in the game or the underlying Unity engine struggling to spin its various plates efficiently. The most grating issue is the pauses - a couple of seconds of nothingness before and after many Mech actions and reactions, which add up to several minutes of dead time across the course of a battle. The answer to both those is "yeah, but if you just tweak a couple of lines in Notepad it's all sorted out anyway." There's been a question mark over whether or not the slowness and pauses are baked so deep into the game that we can only pray for official updates, and to what extent the unhurried pace is an artistic statement of intent we should respect. I'm far from alone there, but fortunately others pour their energies into fixing rather than moaning about problems. Its unnatural delays and maddeningly ponderous moving and shooting animations were a massive barrier to enjoyment, but the amount I learned during my first 15-20 hours in its school of totally unexplained hard knocks at least meant I could make my own actions as deadly efficient as possible.ĭespite this new affection, the degree to which the game wasted my time with short pauses before and after most actions and lovingly-rendered but passive animations meant I continued to seethe and alt-tab out during endless-feeling enemy turns. I had something of a road to Damascus moment during my by-now 50 hours in BattleTech. well, I don't want to let my prose get too purple here, but it's so much closer to the turn-based mech combat game I'd long dreamed of. The surfeit of frustrating pauses and pretty but time-wasting animations surely require an official patch, right? Nope - turns out that all you need to haul BattleTech out of the quicksand is a spot of ini file editing. User guides and videos solve the bonkers decision to not so much as hint at absolute combat necessities that make the difference between grim slugfest and satisfying tactical supremacy, but the other one's trickier. Two things stand between BattleTech and true greatness.