Centauress Player Model and Dragon Skull Sword v1.0 Readme

(c) Jeremy C. Anderson, Nov. 2002


About the model:

Centauress stats:

	verts: 820
	polys: 1483
	materials: 3
	custom anims (vertex)
	#frames: 930
	skins: 1
	faces: 2
	team colours: red, blue, green, gold
	custom sounds: yes (galloping sound)

Sword stats:
	
	verts: 324 + 168(3rd person)
	polys: 538 + 282(3rd person)
	materials: 2
	#frames: 80

Centauress stuff

	This is my second player model for UnrealTournament (the orignal, not UT2003).  I hope you like it.  The concept isn't mine--I took the pic from some centaur webring site.  I'd cite the artist, but he/she wasn't listed.  It has more than a few problems (e.g., masked areas not being masked in multiplayer, the skins are complete crapp), but I just don't have the time to work on this any longer, and I wanted to release it before UT is completely dead.  With that said, there are a couple of nice features that I think make this player model and weapon a unique combination.  I have included all of the standard UT animations, but new sword-swinging animations as well.  This means that when using the new sword, the player model will swing her arms rather than look like she's firing a gun.  The only instances in which this doesn't work is when dodging, jumping and landing (since UT only uses a single animation frame for these), and duckwalking (it was hard enough to try to make a horse duckwalk).

	This model uses masking to hide parts of the model.  This means that for some polygons, painting them a certain colour will cause them to be invisible.  Here's the listing of masked polys, and the colours used for transparency:

ponytail: black (0 0 0)
hair bangs: black (0 0 0)
gauntlets: black (0 0 0)
skull/shoulder pad: lime green (0 255 0)


	This player model uses Advanced Model Support.  You'll need it for the model to work properly.  For anyone who feels like making a skin for the model (and please do, my skinning skills suck so very bad), I've set the face/torso, and arms sections to change with team colour and the horse section to change only with face.  But with AMS you can change that if you want.



Dragon Skull Sword stuff
(yeah, I'm not too original, couldn't think of a better name)

Fire: randomly chooses either an overhead or uppercut swing dealing 50 damage to nearby opponents.
Altfire: a horizontal slashing motion, 2 out of 3 times you'll get a headshot, but sometimes not, dealing only 20 points damage.  This has a slower refire rate as well.

Some people might be thinking that the sword damage is too high, but keep in mind that you have to get up close and personal with an enemy that is shooting at you with a sniper rifle, rocket launcher or flak cannon.  So it's not really an uber-weapon.  Anyway, I didn't want the sword to be too boring, so I added a little bonus feature.  When enemy players come near you, the sword will glow blue a la LOTR.  There's a warning sound and message.  This is useful in that it ensures no one can sneak up on you.  Conversely, you can't sneak up on anyone else either, besides your own teamates.  Bots use the sword OK, but they're not spectacular.  There is bot support for the custom sword swinging animations, so that's kinda fun.

	There are two mutators that are included for use of the sword: Dragon Skull Melee/Arena.  Melee makes each player's default weapon the Dragon Skull sword, but all the other weapons in a given map are available.  Arena (you guessed it) makes all weapons Dragon Skull swords.

Player models other than the Centauress model can use the Dragon Skull sword, but there are two reasons why you might not want to do this:

1. In first person, the arms swinging the sword won't at all match the 3rd person view (not such a big deal).
2. Other models won't appear to swing the sword at all, so it takes away from the aesthetics of getting your head lopped off by big frickin' sword.

But it's possible.

	In the future, I'll likely make a new sword for UT2003 and hopefully incorporate new reatures like blocking projectiles or other swords.  


Installation:

Just double-click the umod.  The rest is even easier.



Thanks go to Gusher (Prefab Lab), Cookie (Unreal Badlands), and especially Psychic_313 (Identity Crisis) for all the coding help.

That's it.  I've rambled on enough.  Hope you like.  

jer
jcanders@interchange.ubc.ca


