Sentinel

Description:

The ADS-2 "Sentinel" automated defence system was designed to help defend large installations when available personnel are limited in number. It comes with everything necessary to set up a barrier of formidable firepower. This includes components to create cannon, and the Sentinel Deployer, which can be loaded with components and then used to construct a cannon on-site virtually instantaneously, or to repair or upgrade an existing cannon.

The Deployer can be configured to construct either of two types of Sentinel cannon:

- Heavy floor cannon: Mounted with the most powerful regenerative energy weapon that Evil Corp. has ever used for an automatic cannon and covered in tough armour, the floor cannon can withstand a lot of punishment, and dish it out too. The floor cannon has a modular weapon mounting system allowing various different classes of weapons to be used.

- Light ceiling cannon: By sacrificing power output, the size of this cannon has been reduced significantly, keeping its profile low whilst leaving enough room spare to fit extremely sensitive optical and auditory sensors. Not even the most stealthy of mice could creep past one of these.

Usage:

Use the Weapons of Evil: Sentinel mutator to get the Sentinel into the game. It gives the Deployer as a default weapon starting with no ammo, and replaces various pickups with ammo. It has the following configurable options, which can be accessed via the mutator configuration menu or edited in the ini file:

- Max. Sentinels per player: Limit players to having this many active Sentinels at once, individually for DeathMatch, team games and Invasion.
- Large crates replace: Replace one or more of shield, super-shield and super-health pickups with large (100) ammo pickups.
- Small crates percent: Replace this percentage of health-vial and adrenaline pickups with small (10) ammo pickups. The ones to replace are chosen randomly.
- Allow upgrades: Un-tick this to turn off the upgrade system and so play with only standard Sentinels.

Settings will be stored in a file called 'WoE_Sentinel.ini' in the 'UT2004\System' directory.

To actually place a cannon in-game, you must use the Sentinel Deployer, which can be used to place, repair, upgrade and remove your and your team's Sentinels, and sabotage enemy Sentinels. It starts with no ammo, so you must first go and pick some up. You need 100 ammo to place a Sentinel, so one large or ten small ammo pickups are required.

- Placing Sentinels: Press primary-fire on the Deployer. If you are facing straight ahead or down and there is enough room, it will spawn a floor cannon, which will appear a short distance in front of you and then fall to the ground. If it lands on a suitable solid surface it will activate. If it lands in water, or anywhere else unsuitable it will be destroyed, wasting the cannon. The cannon are tough enough to survive quite long falls, but being very heavy they will take some damage from anything but a very short fall. If you are facing up, and at a suitably flat area of ceiling not too close or far away, it will automatically attach a ceiling cannon to the ceiling. Both types of Sentinel cost 100 ammo to build.

- Repairing Sentinels: Simply point the Deployer at the damaged Sentinel from close range and hold down the secondary fire button. Sentinels are repaired at the rate of 15 health for one ammo. You can only repair Sentinels in team-games (including Invasion), not DM. You can repair any Sentinel belonging to your team. Sabotaging costs no ammo.

- Sabotaging Sentinels: Use the same procedure as for repairing, but point at an enemy Sentinel instead. Each time the Deployer sabotages the enemy Sentinel, it will cause some damage and there is a chance that it will be able to destroy an upgrade (if there are any). This is a good way to quickly debilitate a heavily armoured and shielded Sentinel.Sentinels do not automatically target you when sabotaging, so if you are quiet and stay behind their sensors you may be able to completely destroy them without being spotted.

- Upgrading Sentinels: Point the Deployer at a Sentinel at close range and press primary-fire. This will bring up the upgrade-menu from where you can apply upgrades to the Sentinel at a cost of some ammo. The top-left box lists the upgrades that can be applied. Click on one to see a description of it in the box in the right, including how much ammo it will cost. The bottom-left box shows upgrades that are already in place. Initially this will contain just the default weapon. After selecting an upgrade from the list, click on the 'upgrade' button to apply it. If you decide you don't want to upgrade after all, click on 'cancel'. You can only upgrade your own Sentinels, not those of your team-mates.

- Removing Sentinels: This can be done via the upgrade menu just like upgrading. Press the 'destroy button'. Destroying a Sentinel will return half its cost in ammo to you. You can only destroy your own Sentinels, not those of your team-mates.

Note that by default, the number of Sentinels any one player can have active at once is limited to 1 in DM, 3 in team-games and 20 in Invasion.

A special note for server admins: Even if you are getting the Sentinel into the game by some other means than the supplied mutator, I still suggest that you run the Sentinel Replacer mutator with all the replacement options turned off, so that the max sentinels and upgrade settings can be seen in the server browser.