well i went and dl the two packs from ven. and bk, but they dont work. they were put in the folder and everything but i cant join the games hosting those maps. got any suggestions?

RTFM?

Read all this before doing anything.

1 ) Assuming you have nothing installed and maybe not all that you need downloaded

I really am guessing a bit here as I just install these things and forget about it. You are likely missing the terrain installer. I've put what you need below. I'm assuming you had to download everything and didn't have Veng/BK previously installed. Below is various things you have to run to install.

The md5.bat's checks and the update.bat you will find here after you run the other installs :
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Mechwarrior Mercenaries\RESOURCE\MAPS


- VTerrain.exe (download this)
- VMapPack.exe (download this)
- md5chk-veng.bat ()


- BKTerrain.exe (download this)
- BKMapPack.exe (download this)
- md5chk-bk.bat ( )


- update.bat (run this after )


2 ) You have everthing downloaded and you installed but something didn't work.

- Make sure you copied over all the V / BK maps like the install warned about.
- Run the installs again.
- Run the md5.bat checks to make sure all is well.
- Run the udate.bat to finish converting the maps.

Normally you shouldn't need to do all this unless you skipped something during the map install.