About the invincible pawn, I noticed these properties while looking at the Pawn class for something else:
Code: Select all
var() name ReducedDamageType; //Either a damagetype name or 'All', 'AllEnvironment' (Burned, Corroded, Frozen)
var() float ReducedDamagePct;
Basically, try to set the pawn ReducedDamageType to 'All' and ReducedDamagePct to 1 (it goes from 0 to 1), and you should have an invincible pawn, however he can still be telefragged (for that only custom coding would avoid that).
About the players model/skin switching, if it's included in the map, no ServerPackages are needed. ServerPackages are only needed at all if the server doesn't send the package "naturally" (this only happens with stuff spawned dynamically by package, like in mutators, custom skins the server supports for all the maps, etc), and in maps the resources are always sent because the map "needs" them to load up.
I think the coding itself is not difficult (personally I think that an actor that you included in the map, that would add a mutator to the game in runtime only for that map, that would handle the skin/model switching would work just fine, since mutators have built-in functionality to "modify" the player every time the player respawns). Anyone with minimal mapping and mutator coding knowledge can do this I think, you could ask around if someone could do this for you.