Saturday 18 February 2012

Q3 Tutorial: Adding an Extra Skin

Our buddy "Doom" from the last tutorial has an extra unused skin. I think it's actually a texture for a Doom statue somewhere in the game, but we're going to make it into a new playable skin without writing over an old skin like in the last tutorial.
Let's take a look.
Doom Statue
As you can see, the first 5 characters are Doom characters., before there were only four. So now the first one is the Doom Statue skin, the second is our modified Default Doom, then there is Blue, then Phobos, then Red. The Phobos skin is kind of like what we're doing, making a character which is not Default or a Team model. But with all 3 of these guys now, that's Default, Phobos, and Statue, using any of them in a team game will always default to Red or Blue.

Ok so let's start: We need to get back to where the Doom model is packed.
Quake 3 Folder > baseq3 > PAK0.PK3 > models > players > doom
From in here we are going to grab a few files:
  • doom_f_statue.tga - the doom statue visor skin
  • doom_statue.tga - the doom statue skin
  • icon_default.tga - and icon we can use for doom statue
  • head_default.skin - the head mapping file
  • lower_default.skin - the lower mapping file
  • upper_default.skin - the upper mapping file
Now respectively for each file:
  • remains as is (you can change the file name if you like)
  • remains as is (you can change the file name if you like)
  • two things to happen to this, rename it to icon_statue.tga, and open it and de-saturate or modify it so it looks like a statue icon
  • rename it to head_statue.skin, open it and change the file paths to point to the statue skins
  • rename it to lower_statue.skin, open it and change the file paths to point to the statue skins
  • rename it to upper_statue.skin, open it and change the file paths to point to the statue skins
ow we need to put all those files in a folder called doom put that folder in a folder called players put that folder in a folder called models and then zip that all up into a package called doomstatue.zip
Rename the .zip extension to a .pk3, and place that file into either our mod folder that we made in the last tutorial, or place it straight into the baseq3 folder.
If you put it in the baseq3 folder, fire up the game and find the new skin.
If you put it in a mod folder, fire up the game, then run the mod, and then find the new skin.