Quakeworld skins confusion

[OneManClan]

[OneManClan]

A: the skins are in pak1.pak
[credit: xavior]

[Spike]

with fte,
flocate skins/tf_scout.pcx
that'll say which path/pak they're in, if it can be found.

[OneManClan]

[Hijacking my own thread, but it still comes under the same the same subject so...]


Hey people.

I'm working on a new mod/feature which involves multiple player skins, including (eg) a different skin for each level of blood. It's working well, except for the situation when a player dies. Their corpse (which remains visible on the ground for a while after they have respawned) changes skin, and mimicks the skin of the (now respawned) player. This has always IIUC been a problem with Q1TF and spies, where if a spy respawns and disguises as (eg) 'soldier', his corpse (which stays on the ground for at least 15 (?) seconds), ALSO switches to 'soldier' skin - so the two are connected. What I'd like is to be able to use a new skin, specifically for player corpses, but am having trouble understanding the code.

Can someone explain to me how to change a corpses skin, as distinct from a (respawned) player's skin?

IIUC PutClientInServer() doesnt actually 'spawn' anything, just resets the players 'settings', and PlayerDie() also doesn't spawn anything, so how can there be a player AND his corpse - somewhere a corpse entity was made - which is still responding to skin changes in the living 'version'?


thanks,

OneManClan

[Spike]

There are players, with their colours and their skins.
And there are entities.


Each entity has a .colormap field. This .colormap field refers to a player slot.
When the player dies, the model and colormap of the player is copied over to a new entity (part of the bodyqueue).

When drawing the entity, the client looks at the colormap field. if its set, it recolours the entity according to the colour of the player indicated, and if its player.mdl then it also gets the player's skin too.
(note: vanilla glqw does not support colouring of models other than player.mdl).
The gamecode has no real control over the skin or colours used. Any checks (which are pretty common) are basically hacks for the simple reason that it cannot control skins on entities individually, it can traditionally only ask the client to update its settings.


There are some extensions that you can use, but you're not going to like them...
DP_ENT_CUSTOMCOLORMAP:
self.colourmap = 1024 + (shirt*16) + (pants);
That line will set explicit colours on an entity. This means that colours can persist on the corpse without changing if eg the spy changes his team colours.
This extension is rather NQ centric in that it ignores player skins - this is a good thing, as it means the skin won't animate on corpses, but you will loose your class-specific skins if you don't have a copy of that skin within the player.mdl and don't do .skin stuff too to match it, etc.
FTE has supported this for a brief while, but only on non-player entities (debug_pext_replacementdeltas should enable it on player entities also). No other QuakeWorld client supports this (including DP as a QW client).


Side note: with QuakeWorld protocols, players have a hardcoded .colormap field equal to their own player slot.

[OneManClan]

[Spike]