I have my own suspicions about who they were and their adgenda, but that's not your problem. What I can't do is tutor individuals in learning the required skills. I'll gladly point folks in the right direction.MM9 is indeed very accessible. The Lithtech 2 architecture was designed that way. The game has 2 executables; MM9.exe runs as a client of Lithtech.exe. I presume these were written in C++, but the code has never been publicly released. I've decompiled MM9.exe and there should be sufficient room to insert machine language routines to correct some of the bugs or add missing functionality.
Outside of the game mechanics, most of the game is controlled by three systems: the dialog, the flags and the scripts. These are all closely integrated and can be modified using a text editor. The scripting language is straight-forward but the game behavior is quirky. I'll send details.
Please reply here are tell us the scope of your plans. In the meantime, you can download the LithTech2 tools here:
http://www.bluesnews.com/files/nolf/tools/nolftools001.shtml