Anyone know how player skins work?

[Samus_Aran]

So my friends and I play coop all the time. We currently each have a solid colour so we're easily distinguishable from the monsters, e.g. I'm full yellow, my two friends are full red and full blue.

Now, recently I've gone and collected a few hundred player skins, and each of us have picked one skin each. We would like to be able to tell each other apart in the game with unique skins... problem is, how?

I can't seem to find any documentation on how skins work, where to put the pcx's (or I can make a wad or pak if needed), how players might go about choosing a skin in coop mode, if new QuakeC would be needed, etc.?

I can't figure out any of it, not even sure where to look. Google has been unhelpful.

We use the Dark Places engine, if that makes a difference.

[Baker]

Convert skin to .tga (semi-optional)
Skins are basically for Quakeworld, but you can make a single skin work with DarkPlaces.

Place in c:\quake\id1\progs folder (make it if required)

The skin must be named player.mdl_0.tga (convert skin to tga; maybe pcx works or maybe it doesn't ... I'm not sure).

The bad news: both of you are players. You can use only 1 skin.

Quakeworld is different and you might be able to do the above somehow with, say, ezQuake ... but I don't know the answer and likely you'd need to ask that at quakeworld.nu

Option #2: Ask at inside3d.com how to mod the QuakeC code to support what you want to do if you are super set on this.

[Samus_Aran]

Skins are basically for Quakeworld, but you can make a single skin work with DarkPlaces.

That would likely be worse, as we wouldn't even have colours to separate ourselves then.

The bad news: both of you are players. You can use only 1 skin.

Quakeworld is different

Are you saying that only QuakeWorld allows you to have more than one skin? I vaguely remember using impulse numbers to change skins, probably in some deathmatch version. I figured the same could be possible in coop mode.

likely you'd need to ask that at quakeworld.nu

Option #2: Ask at inside3d.com how to mod the QuakeC code to support what you want to do if you are super set on this.

QuakeOne.com's not good enough?

I may eventually learn how to do QuakeC, not sure how complicated it is, I've never looked at it before. Swapping skins is pretty basic, I figure someone must have already made a mod to swap skins.

Edit:

I saw one game that had "cl_teamskin name", but Dark Places doesn't have that. Searching around in Dark Places I found the "skin name" command, which the help for it says it will set the QuakeWorld skin. This might work, but I'm not sure what naming scheme QuakeWorld skins follow. Any tips?

[Baker]

I saw one game that had "cl_teamskin name", but Dark Places doesn't have that. Searching around in Dark Places I found the "skin name" command, which the help for it says it will set the QuakeWorld skin. This might work, but I'm not sure what naming scheme QuakeWorld skins follow. Any tips?

From me personally, only my prior tip

Quakeworld is different and you might be able to do the above somehow with, say, ezQuake ... but I don't know the answer and likely you'd need to ask that at quakeworld.nu

^ I don't know the answer. Any DarkPlaces features that are related to Quakeworld, I haven't the slightest idea.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

wouldnt it be easier to see how the terminator bot's all was able to use individuals skins and then figure out how it was implemented to recreate? like,for example I remember playing against a ninja turtle and a terminator,and other crazy characters all at once.

[Samus_Aran]

Convert skin to .tga (semi-optional)

As it turns out, Dark Places wouldn't load the skin replacements until it was .pcx, not sure why. For textures, .tga are fine for replacements, but apparently not for player skins?

/id1/progs/player.mdl_0.pcx

Edit 1:

Nope, even that doesn't work. The player skins do not align to the player model. I have even tried the Id Software base.pcx file and it doesn't align. The black areas from outside the skin are showing up along the legs and back of the player. No idea what Dark Places is doing. :-/

Edit 2:

After much mucking about, I have determined what shape the Dark Places skins follow, approximately 294x192 with 2 pixels on top and left, and 3 pixels on bottom and right. This is as close to correct as I can get it for standard Quake skins. If I make the area outside the skin white, there's still a slight white streak around the edges, so it's not the exact resolution being used by Dark Places. Not very noticeable if you fill the background with a colour that matches the skin.

Now I'm playing with upscaling these low res 8bit skins to 2048x1337x24bit and using various sharpening and scaling filters, it's improving the in-game look quite a bit.

[Samus_Aran]

If anyone is curious what I came up with, here's a before and after for one of the player skins I tried to improve. Make sure to view them full size or there's almost no difference.

Original Willits Skin:


Remade Willits Skin:


I used a mixture of bump-mapping and sinc scaling on the remake to give it a more 3D look with smooth curves.

[R00k]

self.skin = #
plain and simple quakeC, if the mod will permit.

why not just choose color 12 for all players?

why ego with skins?? how often during a battle do u turn 90 degrees to look at your fellow player and say "yeah baby sexxy skin!"

?? whatever rows your boat.

[Samus_Aran]

self.skin = #
plain and simple quakeC, if the mod will permit.

why not just choose color 12 for all players?

why ego with skins?? how often during a battle do u turn 90 degrees to look at your fellow player and say "yeah baby sexxy skin!"

?? whatever rows your boat.

I have been working on the QuakeC the past hour or so, and have the skin swapping code bound to keys and seeming to work fine... except I can't figure out the naming scheme of Dark Places for anything other than skin 0.

I have "/modname/progs/player.mdl_0.tga" and that works fine as self.skin = 0; but "player.mdl_1.tga" does not work for self.skin = 1;

As for your question about "why?", because my friends and I play tons of Quake 1 coop, and we want to be able to tell each other apart. The default low res player skin gets very boring to look at after a few thousand hours... especially when each player is bright red, bright yellow, bright blue, etc. so we can easily tell each other apart. Far better to have actual unique skins for each player.

Why does anyone try to improve the Quake 1 experience? Because it's more fun that way!

[Mr.Burns]

I'm not sure if it will work with quake world but we have occassionally used the multiskin client side mod with NQ over on the Flanders servers. It allows you to use an impulse (200 as i recall) to cycle through a variety of skins such as termintor, capt Picard, Predator, Duke Nukem, etc. Until Baker/Rook include a drop in/downloadable model facility in Qrack/Proquake perhaps this mod might help you out?

Hope this helps

Monty

[Samus_Aran]

I'm not sure if it will work with quake world but we have occassionally used the multiskin client side mod with NQ over on the Flanders servers. It allows you to use an impulse (200 as i recall) to cycle through a variety of skins such as termintor, capt Picard, Predator, Duke Nukem, etc. Until Baker/Rook include a drop in/downloadable model facility in Qrack/Proquake perhaps this mod might help you out?

Hope this helps

Monty

Unfortunately, the QuakeC to swap skins on impulse isn't the issue (that's working fine). The problem is the filenames for the skins. What does your QuakeWorld client use for skin filenames? I could try the same for Dark Places and see if it works.

[Baker]

Unfortunately, the QuakeC to swap skins on impulse isn't the issue (that's working fine). The problem is the filenames for the skins. What does your QuakeWorld client use for skin filenames? I could try the same for Dark Places and see if it works.

This for DarkPlaces ...

For a multi-skin model, the names are

quake\id1\progs\player.mdl_0.tga skin 0
quake\id1\progs\player.mdl_1.tga skin 1
quake\id1\progs\player.mdl_2.tga skin 2

For Qrack:

quake\id1\textures\bmodels\player_0.tga
quake\id1\textures\bmodels\player_1.tga
quake\id1\textures\bmodels\player_2.tga

Since DarkPlaces is never going to change, it'd be great if Qrack used the DarkPlaces naming convention and I'd volunteer to rename all the files in those Qrack graphics packs. One standard would be great.

[Samus_Aran]

Well, I have solved the issue after numerous hours of trying things... it's a Dark Places bug!

When starting a multiplayer game from within the Dark Places game, only skin 0 is loaded. However, for anyone connecting to a game, the skins are loaded properly.

The first work-around I figured out was to start a dedicated server, that way each player is connecting to a game (even the on running the server), and the skins load properly.

I talked to the main Dark Places author, LordHavoc, on IRC and he asked me to check if the "r_restart" console command fixed the issue, and it did. This command forces Dark Places to reload all of the models, and their skins.

So there's some strange bug in Dark Places preventing skins from loading properly when starting a non-dedicated-server multiplayer game from within Dark Places! Phew!

On the plus side, I am now ready to start working on a full Coop Mod with many new and interesting features! I'll post about it in the work-in-progress forum.