Player Models and Skins news

There are many influences behind the gameplay concepts in Sprags, Golden Eye and Perfect Dark for the N64, Quake, the mod PS07 for HL and most importantly Half-Life 1 itself.

One feature from Half-life Deathmatch which was absent in HL2DM was the player model colour sliders. To me this was one of the best features of HLDM. Now I'm not a fantastic coder, but I wanted something like this in Sprags. In the end I settled on a choice between seven set player skins. This is nothing compared to any colour on 2 channels for the model, but its still effective, and allows more detail per skin, for example the zombie and camouflage themed skins.

After the skin system was working I realised how easy it would be to then add extra models to each model. Currently there are 2 categories of attachments, masks and hats, with a player being able to select one from each category. Each then category has 4 options to select from, these can be seen below in the UI examples.

Informing the player of these options was quite difficult. I had a number of play tests in which players would stay on the default skin and then after playing for half an hour or so ask me, “how do I get the camo like your person has?”. This problem arouse from the fact that the menu code cannot be edited in the source engine, new ones can be made, but the existing option screens cannot be edited, and it’d be a hell of a job to remake the entire options menu functionality.

Luckily there is already coded button in multiplayer options which loads up another window, which gets its information from an editable SCR file solving the problem of additional variables. The first method I tried had this regular sized button labelled “Skin options” above the model drop down selection. As I said before no one seemed to notice it. Because of this I made it massive and obtrusive, and reorganised the whole multiplayer options so new players would not see it as the old HL2 menu, but something new they would have to pay attention to.

With some extra images guiding the player I think the end result is quite streamlined, or at least as much as is possible due to the limitations. The preview skins also change depending on the player model you have selected.

Here are some example combinations

This functionality allowed perfect integration with team play. In the Spragoon universe Spraggon George and Paul Tonich are constantly at war, the fight is carried out by their followers “The Children of Spraggon” aka “The Spragoons” and “Team Tonich”. So in team mode, if you are on the Spraggon Team your skin is set to white and your mask set to Sprags, and on the Tonich Team your skin is set to black and your mask to PT. Players can still change their regular models and hats in team mode, and as soon as you join a non team game it reverts back to your previous options.