Handle: Slyrr
E-Mail: gregfisk@comcast.net
website: http://home.comcast.net/~gregfisk/

Junkyard Mech: PLAYER MODEL FOR UT2003/2004:

With the Liandri Tournaments well underway and extremely profitable, hopeful scientists teamed up with powerful military organizations from across the galaxy to build the ultimate robotic warriors to compete in the games.

Among these was Dr. Krevanjelo Nŭsté, criminal, renegade and mad scientist.  He contacted the Liandri robotics division with offers to build powerful android killers for the tournaments.  But the scientists were afraid of working with a homicidal psychopath, however brilliant he might be, and the military flatly refused to work with anyone who had no formal credentials.

They sneeringly refused his offers, and informed him that if he wanted materials and supplies, he was free to scrounge through their waste disposal facilities and junk reclamation yards.

Undeterred (or perhaps just too crazy to realize that he'd been snubbed), Dr. Nŭsté immediately set to work. Inspired by the Rustatorium arenas, he harvested machinery parts and materials from the junkyards and began to build a killing machine.  It was not long before he was finished, and then he unleashed his creation into the arenas - as durable as a refrigerator, as bright as a desk lamp, as strong as an alligator clamp, as flexible as a live wire and meaner than a junkyard dog.

The Liandri committee members were stunned when their finest, most highly trained and expensive droids and fighters were laid low by Nŭsté's bizarre looking contraption, a mech that was so cheap it barely cost one credit to make.  And any battle damage was easily repaired simply by gathering more junk and sending it back in to fight.

Affronted and embarrassed, the vaunted Liandri corporation tried to duplicate Nŭsté's cheap, efficient Junkyard Mech, but without success.  It wasn't long before they were contacting him with apologies and promises of more resources and materials in exchange for his brilliance, but his only answer was a resounding victory in the tournament as the Junkyard Mech walked off with all the marbles....

----------------------

Notes: The Junkyard Mech is my first ORIGINAL model (all my others seem to be based on famous TV / literature icons) and I hope you like it.  I wanted a weathered, and beautifully ugly hulk of scrap and refuse that was still nimble, agile and tough. Hopefully you'll find it as grotesquely fascinating to look at as I do, and keep looking because it's full of surprises and hidden messages. You'll note it's really made out of old appliances, tires, batteries and other miscellany, and if you keep staring at it long enough you're sure to recognize bits and pieces of him in your room or garage...

The monitor screen duct taped to the front has almost a dozen different taunts to flash at you, which I felt was a neater way to insult your enemies (and team-mates) than the generic taunt gestures which no one ever pays attention to anyway.  If you can think of any to add (I don't know how many it can support before it diminishes gameplay), pass them along and I can slip them into subsequent releases, but NO copyrighted material, profanity or obscenity will be considered.

Installation:  Just use the UMOD wizard, and the proper files should be put into their proper places. But just in case, you can also manually put in the files to their directories:

JunkMechSkins.utx = UT3K/Textures
JunkYardMech.ukx = UT3K/Animations
JunkVoice.u = UT3K/System
JunkYardMech.upl = UT3K/System
JunkMech.ka = UT3K/KarmaData

Then just pick the Junkyard Mech from the PLAYER screen. 

Attn: If you want to see the mech's DATA in the Player selection screen, then you must open your Xplayers.int file, (located in the SYSTEM directory) and add this line among the other player data:

JunkYardMech="Name:  Junkyard Mech|Age:   N/A|Race:  Artificial Lifeform||Data:|Built from discarded remnants and fueled by a rage only the abandoned can feel, the Junkyard Mech has proved more than a match for the most sophisticated droids and fighters in the tournaments.||"


Technical info for the curious:
Polys: 6400.  (Ouch - still, it was worth it.  It's not as easy as it sounds to cobble together different appliances into a convincing robotic form.)

Skins: Default and team colors.  The screen is shiny and glowing (so is the light bulb and the display panel on the video camera).  One may well ask, why not make the whole model shiny with specular shading since it's made of metal and plastic?  The answer of course, is that I considered it, and tried it.  But no matter how I looked at it, I just couldn't enjoy a model made of junk that was SHINY.  Seriously, when was the last time you saw SHINY junk? This stuff has been sitting out in the weather and rusting for ages, and it's not supposed to look 'pretty'. I may update it at some point with a patchy/shiny skin, but for the nonce, having the whole skin shiny just detracted from the screen and ate up more fps :)

Custom Sounds: Yes. The custom voice should be his by default. The Voice pack was made by myself, using my own favorite taunts.  I make no apologies for their esoteric nature :)  It has all the orders, commands, friendlyfire & acknowledgements for team play sounds, plus a few EXTRA ones that I felt padded out the roster for team games.  Specifically, 'ANNOUNCE FLAG/BALL LOCATION' and a few others, which are needed.

Animations: Custom skeleton - All original! Check out the spinning arm gears and the fan on back....

This model was made with: 3DSMAX, and UnrealEditor3.  The skinning was done in Photoshop and UED3.

Knows bugs/issues:  The custom skeleton took a lot of jiggering to get the ragdoll to work properly, and other forms of tinkering caused wierd behavior on dying.  When blown apart at the waist, the two legs are joined by a thin wire while the pelvis seems to vanish.  Not sure how to fix that - I tried fiddling with the effect sockets in UED, but it caused more problems than it solved....  No other issues that I can think of.

Special Thanks to:  Skullbox - who again served as de-bugger and advisor thru instruction on the www.planetquake.com/polycount messageboards.  Also thanks To Fraggin_Phun for his voice pack tutorial. 

 ----- Set up UT2003.ini and MD5 database for running a server -----

To use the new Voice Pack/Model in online games, you must provide the <YourPackage>.u file and the <YourPackage>.upl file to the server administrator. The server administrator must put these in their UT2003\System folder, and edit the UT2003.ini file by adding the package to the [Engine.GameEngine] section, as follows:

[Engine.GameEngine]
CacheSizeMegs=32
...
ServerPackages=JunkYardMech
ServerPackages=JunkVoice

Very important: The server administrator must also rebuild the server's MD5 database by running the following command in a DOS / Command window in the \UT2003\System folder (many thanks to ZYX2323 for sending this information!)

For original retail version: UCC MASTERMD5 *.U 
For patch 2136 version: UCC MASTERMD5 -c *.U 

If you don't run the ucc mastermd5 command, servers with cheat/hack protection turned on will stop you from joining the server. All sorts of bad things will happen (trust me), including corrupt connection messages (often seen only after the first game). This is a standard restriction that affects all voice packs/models, unless the server has added the .u file AND rebuilt their master MD5 table (or added the packed to the existing MD5 database).
Here's hoping EPIC can make this a little easier for their NEXT patch.......

PS - this information was lifted from the VOICE PACK tutorial readmes - with due deference to Fraggin_Phun.  
For more questions/updates on getting custom models into multiplayer servers, check his tutorials at:
http://members.rogers.com/fraggin_phun/UT2003_VoicePacks.html

Slyrr

Special thanks to the authors of the 1st Amendment -
Keep circulating the tapes
