Legacy:Mod Ideas/ColorfulWarriors

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . with Floating Airboats, Giant GreenNalis, and Vehicular Combat

Hi, this is K_St_theJunior. I have just completed a umod SkinPack consisting of most of my "Colorful Warriors" skins (25 so far, v.2, with 4 never yet appearing at SkinCity), and it's already about 23 mb of stuff. It includes my GreenNali and WhiteNali skins, and even a "GreenNaliGiants" mutator that I've almost got right. If Atif Riaz ("eagleAR") is able to finish fixing it for me, I'll be posting this through SkinCity as a gigantic SkinPack in just a couple more days. (If he can't get it fixed for me, I may have to request help on that aspect from other coders.) Ralf at SkinCity in Germany has already sent me an e-mail indicating that he will be happy to post the gigantic ColorfulWarriors SkinPack for us, so this new mod I've envisioned already has a potential publisher at BeyondUnreal.com, I believe.

Anyway, I am visualizing the possibility of turning it into a mini-mod with the addition of my little mutator – plus some flying vehicles, if someone volunteers to help! If some talented volunteer coder could assist me with the transformation, I'd like to also add one "floating airboat" model to it – or better still, SEVERAL "airboats" of various sizes, ranging from small to larger. The smaller size would carry a player and maybe one bot aboard, visible in third-person view (via hotkey) with ChaosUT swords drawn and ready, or with ray-guns unholstered, letting them travel through the air, around any map, and attack from above whenever they come zooming down or jump off the airboat. The larger of the "floating airboats" (like big floating rafts or rowboats, but much more modern/futuristic in appearance) could hold maybe 5-10 players/bots aboard, all visible standing on the deck of the airboat with swords/ray-guns drawn and ready for action.

People seem to have a lot of fun using the Strangelove mutator to fly around, and the Quantum Fighter Jets mutator of Zencoder likewise, and they like the "Mobile Forces" idea of moving vehicles within UT. So I think this could be a lot of fun in a similar way, allowing fans to recreate the old "pioneer s-f" of the earliest s-f literature.

If Zencoder or anyone else would be interested in working on this for me (as volunteer work, for free) and sharing the credit, please contact me and let me know. This will be a free-giveaway mod, and I'm poorer than dirt right now, so your only real payment would be in appreciation from me and other UT fans. But let me know if you could help!

Anyone who submits a suitable-looking "floating airboat" mutator to me will be considered for inclusion within the future versions of the Colorful Warriors SkinPack/Mod, and I would be really happy to be able to include such flying vehicles within future versions of the umod. If you want some hints or pictures revealing more about what kind of appearance I'm aiming for in the desired airboats, I can send you that upon request.

Thanks in advance for any help that any coders or modelers out there might be able to provide.

Sincerely,

K_St_theJunior Aug. 2, 2002

Interested Scripters

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Discussion

DJPaul: What's the "GreenNaliGiants" mutator do?

K_St_theJunior: Right now there are actually 4 of them, "GreenNaliGiants," "GreenNaliGiants2x," "GreenNaliGiants3x," and "GreenNaliGiants4x." What it does basically is just to increase the size of all the Red Team bots while leaving all the Blue Team (and Green and Gold Teams) at normal size. By choosing only my GreenNali (or WhiteNali for that matter) skins in the Bot Selection window for all of the Red Team members, it lets you see Giant GreenNalis at 1.5x, 2x, 3x, 4x size. I'm a librarian, not a coder, but by playing around (– is 10-20 hours of frustrating and unsuccessful labor "playing around"?) with various substitutions, I finally got it half-working. At first, in my "alpha 1" version, the giants were sinking into the ground because I didn't know the right code terms for setting the collision stuff. Later, after another day's work, I contrived a new version ("alpha 2") that got the Giants working just fine; only problem is that the normal-size Blue Team members now float about 24 inches off the ground. That's what I've asked eagleAR to fix for me (since he's helped me once before with my Runebot skins), but he's not gotten back to me about it yet. EagleAR is Atif Riaz, by the way, and he's the ingenius fellow who created the Runebots mutator – when Human Head Studios execs kept insisting that it was just too difficult to make any bots for Rune! Personally, I think he did a pretty darn good job of it!

K_St_theJunior (update): The Colorful Warriors SkinPack mod (v2.0) is currently available for download from SkinCity and the BeyondUnreal high-speed servers. The file is CW_v2-0_SkinPack_Umod.zip and it has 25 skins inside it, and it is 24.3 MB in size at the present time. I have the GreenNaliGiants mutators working correctly now, thanks to an assist from Atif Riaz. There are 16 mutators included in the Pack, which allow Giant GreenNalis of 4 different sizes (up to 400% of normal size) to be placed on either the Blue Team, Red Team, Green Team, or Gold Team. I continue to hope that someone will show an interest in devising, as well, some Floating Airboat mutators for this mod!

Ars-Magna:Hi, I looked over your mutator idea, and unlike some of the other ones floating around at this point, it actually seems "doable." I'm no UScript coder though. I'd never much thought of the prospects of having bigger/smaller players. Would you make it so the player's view changes? Obviously a larger player would have a slightly different view than a smaller one would.

Tarquin: Just seen the new iterm on this on BU. Great to hear it's going well!

K_St_theJunior (to Ars-Magna): The bot-size mutator for teams (GreenNaliGiants) seems to be working fine now, so far as I know. My two sons and I have used it mostly with bots, where we usually put all the giants on the Red Team. As I recall, when you try playing as a character on the Red Team (with the Red Team GNG size mutator engaged, together with the right Xbots list), YOU DO GET the higher viewpoint of the giant character, in First Person view, and if you switch to Third Person view, you likewise see a giant version of your character. That part's already done, though. I hope what you were trying to suggest is that the Floating Airboats idea is "doable," because I'm still trying to find some bright volunteer to invent/design that for the CW Mod.

K_St_theJunior (to Tarquin): I'm happy that the CW v3.0 Mod is starting to come together. It should include a few customized maps made by SabbathCat and Luggage, but I hope to find some other map contributers as well! If you know anyone who's done some good maps and they'd be willing to convert the skybox textures to a red sky for a CW Mod edition of the map, please have them contact me! Parser, who recently devised the "WeaponMage" weapons-pack, has recently volunteered to make a set of new s-f weapons for CW Mod, and I'm very happy about that too. I've been hanging around the Identity Crisis forums a lot lately, and started one thread under "Models" called "Floating Airboats Needed For CW Mod," but so far no modeller/coder has jumped on board with a willingness to make the Floating Airboats for us. If anyone in the Wiki world is interested, I'm still hoping/dreaming that I can get someone to volunteer for this job... so let me know!