The idea consists on duplicating a texture without having it's pixel map duplicated as well, so we make a WetTexture and specify the original texture as its 'SourceTexture'.
This brings a couple of limitations that need to be worked-arond:
- WetTexture palettes are reinitialized when loaded, so they must be swapped during runtime.
- WetTextures can't be loaded as multiskins, so we're going to need to create a little 8x8 dummy that animates into the WetTexture, then tell the WetTexture to animate into itself.
What about the modified color palette?
Simple, remeber the 8x8 dummies? These will contain the modified palettes, in order to preserve the palettes when importing them with UnrealEd, we make sure we save these palettized black 8x8 images as PCX files.
The sample skin is a Boss skin containing all team colors + 4 extra team color HUD portraits, which are applied with help of the same mod that takes care of swapping palettes.
Original BossSkins.utx - 2.66 mb
Custom BossSkins_XC_.utx - 415 kb
It is intended for future releases, to allow multiple boss faces in the same skin, with team color variations as well.
In the mod readme.txt file you'll find a short tutorial explaining how to set SkinPal up, how to use it's skin element autogeneration function to detect new special skins and tell clients which skins must be palette-swapped, and finally, how to actually create these skinsets.
Taking a look at the sample package is encouraged.
It needs to run in the client machine, so don't forget to add it as a ServerPackage
Release 1:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58384316/UT99/SkinPal_r1.zip
Screenshots:
