Zanaveth Ultra Suite (1.3, possible final version?)

[Saya-chan]

Two more pics, and finally, after a long time, available for download is the latest build of the mod. The file is still uploading by now...

[Feralidragon]

Doesn't work:

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Warning: Failed to load 'XNail': Can't find file for package 'XNail'
Warning: Failed to load 'XGravity': Can't find file for package 'XNail'
Warning: Failed to load 'Class XGravity.XGravityGunMut': Can't find file for package 'XNail'

You forgot at least the XNail package, and maybe some others.

[Saya-chan]

I only have one thing in reponse of that: D'OH!

I'll fix it ASAP

[Saya-chan]

OK OK, I repacked everything... link should be at first post in some few seconds.

[Feralidragon]

So here's my first impressions of this pack:

AutoMag

There isn't much to say about this weapon, is just a "modified" enforcer to work like the Unreal automag, but with more smoke and a new skin.

Napalm Gun

The flame effects are very cool, but I would sugest to change the skin a bit, it's too pink imo, it should be more bright red or orange, or both.

EMP Rifle

Again nice effects, and also nice skin. I also really liked the idea of the bright of the core relative to its remaining energy. Very nice idea.

Gravity Gun

Good effect, and above all, really good physics in the beam. A good thing about this weapon is that you can really smash your enemies with it. The secondary fire mode, isn't that original, but has somewhat a good effect, but it could be better from what I saw in the other weapons.
Also, good idea in the constant reloading of this weapon with ammo.

Titanium Ripper

Relative to the original ripper, it's not really a new weapon, rather an enhancement of the original one, but instead with the secondary fire melee mode.

Nailgun

A very original idea for a minigun, and I liked specially the nails meshes. They were simple, yet cool to see once they get in the wall. Yet, relative to the old minigun, the second fire is not original at all, and personally I am tired to see weapons which second mode is just faster with less accuracy, since for that we already have the standard enforcer and minigun.

Smilecannon

Well, this must be the most original weapon in the pack. While it has a very simple shiny skin, the fire modes are... guess what... SMILES! While it's not that fun to use it (imo), it's really original and gives a nice touch to the weapon pack as a whole.

Handcannon

Another rocket launcher, but this time is quite origina in this pack. The weapon position in 1st person is good, and the rockets movement and fire modes are something new for the game.
For me, the best weapon of the pack.

Mercury rifle

Good skin, good effect on the shoot, but it highly misses the 2 big points in what people like in a sniper: good wide precise zoom and the headshot message. So, the zoom is really tiny and honestly I saw better without zoom than with it. Also, the headshot never appears in the headshot case, and that ruined this sniper.

Redeemer

Original concept for a super weapon, rather than a nuke or total obliteration. The skin is nice and colourfull, while colorfull weapons look like the rainbow, and therefor people dislike them, since it is a Redeemer it gives a funny touch to it.

The pack as a whole

The good: It has nice effects, nice skins and nice sounds. Some weapons are really original, making this weapon pack not a clone of a compilation of other weapons, but a true new weapon pack.

The bad: I didn't talk about this in the weapons above, but I will say it here, since the problems are general:

1) - While it was a original idea to build a "realistic" weapon pack (where you basically have to drop your core/cell/etc and place a new one), in UT this kind of gameplay isn't what people expect when they play in the game.
This pack won't do for normal UT matches against other players or bots, because they are simply annoying this way, as the weapon pickups and ammo pickups are "realisticly small", but this way they are hard to see when you are on a new map, also hard to pick up in the middle of all the action, also the reloading is really slooooow in most of the weapons, making the whole gameplay slow and annoying, having no fun playing these. I mean, even CS has a faster gameplay than this.
Therefor, they won't do for MonsterHunt also (for example).
The only use I can see for this system is a custom single player mappack which "obbey these rules", but other than that, the gameplay isn't that good.

2) - I see you like a lot of particles. While particles look nice in some weapons, in other weapons they look like 7up bubbles. In your case this highly apllied in your previous weapon pack, but now it isn't the case. The case here, is that you used correctly your particles, but you used too many of them.
While they play cool in a bot match in Deck16, in bigger maps or more complex maps, or even in multiplayer this represents a huge performance leak. Use particles yes, but not too damn much, use them wiselly and remember this is an old game. If you want to use particles so badly without loosing performance, use Dot's native particles system, the problem is that with those you pack will only have support of botmatches/single player and Windows OS.
I got very often lag peaks with the EMP rifle for example, due to the abuse of wall fragments generation.

3) This isn't exactly a bad thing, but a bug report:
- I got several crashes with my sound when playing against other bots. I believe you used stereo wav for your sounds instead of mono wav. I say this because I tried to use stereo in my weapons, and they often crashed the same way, so I has to use mono only instead.
- I got a crash in the render also, 1 minute before I saw a bot stopped with the nail gun, but he and the weapon were completelly screwed up in their meshes and skins coordinates. This might be just an isolated local crash, or might be something regarding your weapon drawing mode. Just in case, double check any setting or coding regarding the weapon drawing, mesh manipulation or canvas.
- I had a ton of Accessed Nones regarding the function CheckBeam in the XGravBeam and XGravBeamS actors, but that should be quite easy to fix.

[Saya-chan]

OK people...

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Plans for 1.1:

 - Fix 'Accessed None' errors
 - Reskin most of the weapon models
 - Find a select sound for the nailgun
 - Akimbo automags
 - Faster reload times (unrealistical, but well, if that's what you want...)
 - Unrealistically big pickups (dang, what's your problem with proportions?)
 - Fix some unnoticeable bugs (like the fact that small particles from napalm just dissapear instead of animating when colliding with walls)
 - Change the speed of the automag
 - Add trail particles to handcannon balls, and make the balls bigger
 - Improve explosion effects
 - More precise mercury rifle

BTW, it doesn't work on multiplayer, doesn't it? If so... Dang! I really did a good work...

[Saya-chan]

I got very often lag peaks with the EMP rifle for example, due to the abuse of wall fragments generation.

Really? What's your sys specs? I never get any lags with this mod, nor even with SWWM Platinum.

[Feralidragon]

BTW, it doesn't work on multiplayer, doesn't it? If so... Dang! I really did a good work...

Unless you already coded replication blocks and settings in your mod, there's no reason to even try it online, since it won't work in that case.

I got very often lag peaks with the EMP rifle for example, due to the abuse of wall fragments generation.

Really? What's your sys specs? I never get any lags with this mod, nor even with SWWM Platinum.

The problem isn't really about system specs (I mean, Inteal Dual Core 1,8GHz, 2Gb Ram, GForce 7300GT, lots of Gb of free space in the HD).
The real problem is that UT is a very CPU intensive engine relative to newer engines which physics is handled by CPU while the visuals (polys and particles) are handled fully by GPU power.
Because of this, unless you use a native side particles system (which is included with newer versions of this engine in another games), you better not use that many particles at once, since while in UE2, for example, the particles are processed nativelly, in UE1 by doing UScript side, each particle is an actor.
So in case of massive sprite based particles, the fastest solution, yet the one which takes more time and patience, is making an animated vertex mesh, in the case of mesh based particles, the only way is really spawning some actors for the job.
In your case, the EMP spawns UScript based mesh particles, but instead of spawning some, it spawns a lot of them, so if it slows my system down in those moments, then imagine in other lower end systems. Also, this happens mostly when you're close to the effect, let's say about 64 to 128uu from the wall.
If you want to keep those particles, you should add a menu in your mod (from "Mod" menu), and add detail settings (which lower detail would spawn a very low number of those particles, while the highest would spawn the current number of them or even higher).

[Saya-chan]

I'll keep that in mind for version 1.2...

I'm just gonna release this mod as public right now on moddb. link: http://www.moddb.com/mods/zanaveth-ultra-suite

At this very exact moment, I'm still uploading 1.1, so check the link up there at the first post!

[rohitggarg]

Hi UBX...

Tried the V1.1 for the mod and seems to be a little too buggy

I don't know if i need to update any more files for that, but it crashes every now and then for

UpdateSounds <- UGalaxyAudioSubsystem::Update <- UGameEngine::Draw <- UWindowsViewport::Repaint.....

The last version was a little more stable than this one i must say.

[Feralidragon]

I reported those bugs -.- But they aren't even on that list to fix lol

3) This isn't exactly a bad thing, but a bug report:
- I got several crashes with my sound when playing against other bots. I believe you used stereo wav for your sounds instead of mono wav. I say this because I tried to use stereo in my weapons, and they often crashed the same way, so I has to use mono only instead.
- I got a crash in the render also, 1 minute before I saw a bot stopped with the nail gun, but he and the weapon were completelly screwed up in their meshes and skins coordinates. This might be just an isolated local crash, or might be something regarding your weapon drawing mode. Just in case, double check any setting or coding regarding the weapon drawing, mesh manipulation or canvas.

[rohitggarg]

Means if i switch to mono sound it will work??

[Feralidragon]

Means if i switch to mono sound it will work??

No, no lol
It means that is UBX who needs to fix his weapons. I just meant that I already reported that issue, but I think it wasn't even looked at, since it's not in his "fix list".
It's the sound is very buggy, leading to often crashes mostly when you play against bots, since some sounds are stereo and not mono, and it seems galaxy doesn't like stereo sounds, since I also tried when I was developing my mod, but they crashed the sound several times, to I used mono only. He should convert every stereo sound to mono as well, otherwise people that use galaxy will crash due to this.

Now either UBX uses a different sound driver (which might support stereo sounds perfectly) or doesn't test them properly before release.

[rohitggarg]

lol Yea now i get it.. I'll also try the generic audio subsystem maybe it works....

[Saya-chan]

It's OpenAL what you should use. You can get it with Oldunreal multimedia update patch.

Also, I don't have any problems with mesh render anyway, NEVER ever had them... anyway, I'm just uploading V1.2 which contains some new things you should check.

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legend:
- not done
X done
> rejected

Plans for 1.1:

 X Fix 'Accessed None' errors
 > Reskin most of the weapon models
 X Find a select sound for the nailgun
 X Akimbo automags
 X Faster reload times (unrealistical, but well, if that's what you want...)
 > Unrealistically big pickups (dang, what's your problem with proportions?)
 X Fix some unnoticeable bugs (like the fact that small particles from napalm just dissapear instead of animating when colliding with walls)
 X Change the speed of the automag
 X Add trail particles to handcannon balls, and make the balls bigger
 > Improve explosion effects
 X More precise mercury rifle

Plans for 1.2:

 X Reskin most of the weapon models
 > Add support to grab items for gravity gun
 X Maybe remove primary fire of gravity gun (it IS a ripoff from Nali Weapons, secondary fire NOT, it IS a ripoff from UBX 3, and that mod was mine)
 > A secret weapon to replace enhanced shock rifle on maps which have it on them
 > Maybe akimbo smilecannon is too much
 X Redesign explosion effects
 X Some few changes on SDW Lazor

Plans for 1.3:

 - Mod menu to adjust effect detail
 - Bugfixing (this should be the final release if all goes well)