Hello all! I conjured up 4 new ideas for mod/mutators. Ideas that can enhance or polish these ones are welcome! Any coders out there that want to materialize them? Please, read these ideas in their entirety in order to avoid confusion. Thanks! --TechStorm
1. chest'N'ut
. The basic arquitecture for the chest'N'ut mutator is as follows. All weapons (except class 1 weapons and enforcers), all ammunitions, and all kegs o' health that are strewn on the chosen level get substituted by locked chests that contain their respective items. For example, each sniper rifle gets substituted by a lock chest that contains a sniper rifle. Chests are color-coded so that you can easily infer their contents. Keys are randomly thrown over the map's pathnodes with bias towards locations that are furthest from all player starting points. Thus, for larger maps, no two key configurations shall start out the same.
. Naturally, all keys are color-coded as well. However, there never is more than one key of the same color. (Also, keys exist only if there is one or more matching chests in the map.) The main challenge is thus to seek access to the desired equipment while keeping it away from others.
. Players can carry no more than five keys at the same time. For the current player, these are displayed at the right-hand side of the screen without interfering with the HUD elements usually located there. For all other players, they are displayed as very simple small colored circles in an arch fashion over the character's head, outlined with a black line to make it easy for the eye.
. OPENING CHESTS. Players open chests by touching the chest that contains the desired equipment while holding the key of the matching color. At that point, the chest begins to open so that it takes about a second and a half to open completely. Only then can the contents be acquired. For permanent items, the chest then begins to close again with the same speed with which it opened. For equipment that respawns, the chest stays open until the moment in which the contents are scheduled to reappear, at which point the chest will irrevocably close so that the equipment is THEN respawned inside.
. If more than one player is touching a chest at the moment that the opening animation is complete, only the player that first touched it is entitled to obtain the bounty. If he or she separates from the chest while it is opening, even momentarily, the privileged status is relinquished to the player that second touched and keeps touching the chest, and so forth. Note that while the chest is opening, or while it is open, the contents can be acquired by any player, and not necessarily the one that has the matching key.
. If a chest is touched while it is closing, the chest begins to reopen as long as the contents are of permanent nature. If the contents are of the respawning kind, the chest will continue to close because the contents are not properly applied until it fully closes again.
. DROPPING KEYS. A keyboard button can be configured so that, when pressed, the player drops ALL of the keys that he or she is currently carrying. There is no way to drop only some of those keys. If a player dies, all keys are dropped instantaneously. Keys fall with speed and direction relevant to both the movement of the player and the movement of the incoming missile that killed the player (if any). The purpose is to try to avoid having keys falling too close together and thus making it too easy for others to grab consecutively.
. Keys that are not taken for a certain period of time (which can probably be configured), automatically translocate to a different and random pathnode, again with bias towards those locations that lie further from the players at the moment of translocation. This rule exists to avoid permanent inaccessibility of important keys.
. COLOR AND SIZE LEGEND. Chests are large for all equipment except for ammunitions, which are of a smaller size. The colors for the list below apply to both weapons and equipment. The colors chosen may not be the best, since they are listed only as examples, however, it is important that colors be easily distinguishable because the game needs fast paced reactions. Also recall that class 1 weapons and enforcers are never enclosed in chests.
. 3. GES Bio Rifle -- Bright Green
. 4. ASMD Shock Rifle -- Blue
. 5. Pulse Gun -- Yellowish Green
. 6. Ripper - Shining Silver
. 7. Minigun - Dull Gray
. 8. Flak Cannon -- Orange
. 9. Rocket Launcher -- Red
. 0. Sniper Rifle -- Black
. Redeemer -- Smoke Glass
. Kegs 'o Health -- Blue&White Stripes
. SPECIAL REDEEMER RULE. Since the redeemer is such a powerful weapon, there is no key that matches the color of chests that contain redeemers. Instead, any player that holds three or more keys can open redeemer chests. If the quantity of distinct weapons in the map are less than three (not counting class 1 weapons, enforcers, or redeemers), keys of random colors are included so that redeemer chests can be opened, even if chests that match these keys do not exist.
. SPECIAL OPTIONAL KEYMASTER'S RULE. A special chest that looks as if it was made of "purely shining light" is randomly placed on the level, following the same initialization and translocation rules as that of keys. This special chest can only be opened by players that hold five keys. Again, if the quantity of distinct weapons in the map is less than five (not counting class 1 weapons, enforcers, or redeemers), keys of random colors are included so that the special chest can be opened. When opened, a special "purely shining light" key is awarded, and all keys that are not of this category are taken away from the player and randomly respawned elsewhere with the usual rules. When the player has three or more of these keys, the player is granted the capability to open any chest. The player does not lose these special keys upon death, although he or she can throw away all keys through the use of the designated keyboard button. Players carrying three of these keys can still pick up two more keys for the purpose of blocking other players from obtaining certain things. Smart players should be careful not to acquire fourth or fifth special keys if they want to make use of this strategy. In addition, acquiring a key that is very important for a teammate to have can result in the player being forced to drop all of its keys -- losing the keymaster privilege in the process.
. PLAYABILITY. Naturally, this mutator works best on some maps and could play badly on others. In particular, maps that end up having chests that block small passageways that interconnect two or more areas that are not interconnected otherwise may turn out to be interesting or a hindrance depending on various factors, including player taste.
2. Skillful
. This mod/mutator was inspired by RPUT (Role Playing UT) and is similar to it, with a few interesting twists. I will explain the mod/mutator in its entirety in case you do not know the details of RPUT. Every player has three important factors that come into play.
. 1. Experience points. The player starts out with zero experience points. Each kill awards the player as many points as the level of the enemy. Likewise, if the player dies, the player loses as many points as his or her current level. However, experience points can never fall below zero.
. 2. Character level. The player begins at level 1 and can raise up to a maximum level of 7. The table below summarizes the awarded levels in relation to the current experience points:
. Level Experience points
. 1 0-4
. 2 5-9
. 3 10-14
. 4 15-19
. 5 20-24
. 6 25-29
. 7 30+
. 3. Skills. Unlike RPUT however, skills are not gradual. For this mod/mutator, you either earn a skill in its entirety, or you do not. There are six available skills. The first fourth mimic the relics, and the other two their respective game items:
. Strength (also known as Damage) -- Boosts the player's damage rate
. Constitution (also known as Defense or Shield) -- Reduces the player's sustained damage
. Regeneration -- Gradually heals the player over time
. Speed -- Boosts the player's movement rate
. Jump -- Boosts the player's jump height
. Stealth -- Grants the player partial invisibility
. ACQUIRING AND LOSING SKILLS. This is the interesting part. Whenever a player reaches the next level through the acquisition of experience points, the players are temporarily teleported to a training field. The animation that comes to mind is a vertical "beam-me-up" stretching with simultaneous translucent fading that lasts about a second and a half. The players then appear in a special training field that is made up of three parts. [Implementation notes: Please note that this field is client-side and determined by the mod/mutator: it has nothing to do with how is the main map constructed. Care must be taken to make the player inaccessible from the map for the duration of the "training session", without having the engine believe that the player has actually left.]
. The first part of the training field is a very small room with two kegs 'o health, two enforcers, and enforcer ammunitions to the max. The player progresses to the second part by falling from this room into the second one in such a way that return is not possible. The second room is a somewhat large undetailed open field. It can be circular, triangular, rectangular, hexagonal, etc. but it does not have any ramps, walls, lava pits, pillars, nor any obstruction. The field is literally 100% open. In it, an Unreal I monster pack greets the player with a difficulty related to the level that the character wishes to acquire. The pack should not be too easy, but it should not be so difficult that the player has to remain separate from the main map for an extended period of time, except perhaps for the last few levels. Both the room shape and the pack members vary from level to level and from game to game. There are no additional items and no time limit: the player must kill the assigned monster pack or die in the process. If the player dies, he loses experience points as usual and must necessarily reappear in the map with the former level because it is no longer a candidate for training in the new one. When this objective is accomplished, a door that had been permanenty locked opens up to reveal a small passage that splits into six different exits, each clearly labeled with the skill that will be acquired if it is taken. Exits respective to skills already in possession appear blocked with a permanently locked door. On exit, the skill is gained and the player is respawned back in the main map. As you can see, players get to choose in which order they want to earn their skills. Note that players always travel to training fields unique to them, there is no possibility for them to encounter another player in such a place.
. The player gets to keep the skill as long as he or she does not loses the level at which the skill was attained. For example, if the player chose the jump skill when he passed the trial for level 2, and chose the strength skill when he attained level 3, then the player will lose the strength skill but not the jump skill if he falls back to level 2, but he will also lose the jump skill when falling back to level 1. In addition, if the player attains a level that had previously acquired during the current game, the player needs not work through training again and the skill chosen for that particular level attainment is restored.
. Observe that an important strategy for this kind of play is to make sure that plenty of ammo is kept at all times, because arriving at the trial grounds without enough ammo can prove fatal.
. OPTIONAL TRAINING PORTAL RULE. Instead of having the player instantaneously teleport to the training field as soon as it is candidate for a new level, the player can chose to enter through a special training portal at any moment of his choice. For deathmatch maps the portal can appear at random and may necessarily respawn occasionally in order to avoid permanent inaccessibility. For domination maps, portals exist at every control point. In capture the flag games, each team has their own portal located either at the default flag location of their own base, and//or at the default flag location of the enemy base (for an added twist!). For assault maps, the portal is located at the respawning point for the attacking team, and at the target point for the defending team. These portals do not have a frame, and do nothing to the player if they are crossed with no training pending. If a player has more than one training pending when the portal is crossed, the player reappears in the map after exiting the training grounds in such a way that he or she is not forced to enter the portal in a consecutive fashion in order to work out the remaining pending level(s). The strategy in this case is different because the player now needs to keep an eye more on the enemy than on the ammo being carried.
3. Ghostfragger
. Ghostbusters meet Unreal madness. When this mod/mutator is in effect, physical player deaths do not account for frag points just yet because dead players become ghosts! That's right, whitish translucent versions of their former selves that, to make things interesting, can fly anywhere while in that state. However, ghosts can not make use of weapons, items or devices of any kind. Their mission as ghosts is to roam around for about 10 seconds. If they are not captured until then, they reincarnate anew. They respawn as if they had died (with the inventory reset), except that a frag point was never awarded.
. Ghosts can move through anything! Floors, walls, missiles and even players. Nothing stops them, except for one thing. For this mod/mutator, the class 1 weapon gets substituted by a ghost-capturing device. Like the translocator, it can be shot in any direction with a certain speed. They also "slide" when they hit the floor although the friction will make them to stop eventually. When the mouse is right-clicked while the capturing device has been thrown, the device opens and shines a bright light that captures all ghosts that come in contact with it. Captured ghosts are then considered totally fragged. The light pattern emitted looks like an inverted pyramid with a square tip instead of a sharp one, and has considerable reach (length). The light pattern lasts for about 2 seconds, at which point the capturing device closes and "respawns" itself back into its owner's property.
. If the player wishes to reacquire an unopened capturing device, they can simply left-click again. Picking up capturing devices by walking over them is not allowed because ownership protocols can make things unnecessarily confusing, or even hard to play with.
4. Running items
. This simple mutator awards all weapons, items, and ammunitions intelligence of their own. They quietly sit about looking like ordinary objects until they sense players approaching, at which point they stretch their own hidden legs and away they go! To avoid making the game too difficult, every respawned item begins out with moderate intelligence and get dumber with time the more successfully they are at evading player attempts to obtain them.
1. chest'N'ut
. The basic arquitecture for the chest'N'ut mutator is as follows. All weapons (except class 1 weapons and enforcers), all ammunitions, and all kegs o' health that are strewn on the chosen level get substituted by locked chests that contain their respective items. For example, each sniper rifle gets substituted by a lock chest that contains a sniper rifle. Chests are color-coded so that you can easily infer their contents. Keys are randomly thrown over the map's pathnodes with bias towards locations that are furthest from all player starting points. Thus, for larger maps, no two key configurations shall start out the same.
. Naturally, all keys are color-coded as well. However, there never is more than one key of the same color. (Also, keys exist only if there is one or more matching chests in the map.) The main challenge is thus to seek access to the desired equipment while keeping it away from others.
. Players can carry no more than five keys at the same time. For the current player, these are displayed at the right-hand side of the screen without interfering with the HUD elements usually located there. For all other players, they are displayed as very simple small colored circles in an arch fashion over the character's head, outlined with a black line to make it easy for the eye.
. OPENING CHESTS. Players open chests by touching the chest that contains the desired equipment while holding the key of the matching color. At that point, the chest begins to open so that it takes about a second and a half to open completely. Only then can the contents be acquired. For permanent items, the chest then begins to close again with the same speed with which it opened. For equipment that respawns, the chest stays open until the moment in which the contents are scheduled to reappear, at which point the chest will irrevocably close so that the equipment is THEN respawned inside.
. If more than one player is touching a chest at the moment that the opening animation is complete, only the player that first touched it is entitled to obtain the bounty. If he or she separates from the chest while it is opening, even momentarily, the privileged status is relinquished to the player that second touched and keeps touching the chest, and so forth. Note that while the chest is opening, or while it is open, the contents can be acquired by any player, and not necessarily the one that has the matching key.
. If a chest is touched while it is closing, the chest begins to reopen as long as the contents are of permanent nature. If the contents are of the respawning kind, the chest will continue to close because the contents are not properly applied until it fully closes again.
. DROPPING KEYS. A keyboard button can be configured so that, when pressed, the player drops ALL of the keys that he or she is currently carrying. There is no way to drop only some of those keys. If a player dies, all keys are dropped instantaneously. Keys fall with speed and direction relevant to both the movement of the player and the movement of the incoming missile that killed the player (if any). The purpose is to try to avoid having keys falling too close together and thus making it too easy for others to grab consecutively.
. Keys that are not taken for a certain period of time (which can probably be configured), automatically translocate to a different and random pathnode, again with bias towards those locations that lie further from the players at the moment of translocation. This rule exists to avoid permanent inaccessibility of important keys.
. COLOR AND SIZE LEGEND. Chests are large for all equipment except for ammunitions, which are of a smaller size. The colors for the list below apply to both weapons and equipment. The colors chosen may not be the best, since they are listed only as examples, however, it is important that colors be easily distinguishable because the game needs fast paced reactions. Also recall that class 1 weapons and enforcers are never enclosed in chests.
. 3. GES Bio Rifle -- Bright Green
. 4. ASMD Shock Rifle -- Blue
. 5. Pulse Gun -- Yellowish Green
. 6. Ripper - Shining Silver
. 7. Minigun - Dull Gray
. 8. Flak Cannon -- Orange
. 9. Rocket Launcher -- Red
. 0. Sniper Rifle -- Black
. Redeemer -- Smoke Glass
. Kegs 'o Health -- Blue&White Stripes
. SPECIAL REDEEMER RULE. Since the redeemer is such a powerful weapon, there is no key that matches the color of chests that contain redeemers. Instead, any player that holds three or more keys can open redeemer chests. If the quantity of distinct weapons in the map are less than three (not counting class 1 weapons, enforcers, or redeemers), keys of random colors are included so that redeemer chests can be opened, even if chests that match these keys do not exist.
. SPECIAL OPTIONAL KEYMASTER'S RULE. A special chest that looks as if it was made of "purely shining light" is randomly placed on the level, following the same initialization and translocation rules as that of keys. This special chest can only be opened by players that hold five keys. Again, if the quantity of distinct weapons in the map is less than five (not counting class 1 weapons, enforcers, or redeemers), keys of random colors are included so that the special chest can be opened. When opened, a special "purely shining light" key is awarded, and all keys that are not of this category are taken away from the player and randomly respawned elsewhere with the usual rules. When the player has three or more of these keys, the player is granted the capability to open any chest. The player does not lose these special keys upon death, although he or she can throw away all keys through the use of the designated keyboard button. Players carrying three of these keys can still pick up two more keys for the purpose of blocking other players from obtaining certain things. Smart players should be careful not to acquire fourth or fifth special keys if they want to make use of this strategy. In addition, acquiring a key that is very important for a teammate to have can result in the player being forced to drop all of its keys -- losing the keymaster privilege in the process.
. PLAYABILITY. Naturally, this mutator works best on some maps and could play badly on others. In particular, maps that end up having chests that block small passageways that interconnect two or more areas that are not interconnected otherwise may turn out to be interesting or a hindrance depending on various factors, including player taste.
2. Skillful
. This mod/mutator was inspired by RPUT (Role Playing UT) and is similar to it, with a few interesting twists. I will explain the mod/mutator in its entirety in case you do not know the details of RPUT. Every player has three important factors that come into play.
. 1. Experience points. The player starts out with zero experience points. Each kill awards the player as many points as the level of the enemy. Likewise, if the player dies, the player loses as many points as his or her current level. However, experience points can never fall below zero.
. 2. Character level. The player begins at level 1 and can raise up to a maximum level of 7. The table below summarizes the awarded levels in relation to the current experience points:
. Level Experience points
. 1 0-4
. 2 5-9
. 3 10-14
. 4 15-19
. 5 20-24
. 6 25-29
. 7 30+
. 3. Skills. Unlike RPUT however, skills are not gradual. For this mod/mutator, you either earn a skill in its entirety, or you do not. There are six available skills. The first fourth mimic the relics, and the other two their respective game items:
. Strength (also known as Damage) -- Boosts the player's damage rate
. Constitution (also known as Defense or Shield) -- Reduces the player's sustained damage
. Regeneration -- Gradually heals the player over time
. Speed -- Boosts the player's movement rate
. Jump -- Boosts the player's jump height
. Stealth -- Grants the player partial invisibility
. ACQUIRING AND LOSING SKILLS. This is the interesting part. Whenever a player reaches the next level through the acquisition of experience points, the players are temporarily teleported to a training field. The animation that comes to mind is a vertical "beam-me-up" stretching with simultaneous translucent fading that lasts about a second and a half. The players then appear in a special training field that is made up of three parts. [Implementation notes: Please note that this field is client-side and determined by the mod/mutator: it has nothing to do with how is the main map constructed. Care must be taken to make the player inaccessible from the map for the duration of the "training session", without having the engine believe that the player has actually left.]
. The first part of the training field is a very small room with two kegs 'o health, two enforcers, and enforcer ammunitions to the max. The player progresses to the second part by falling from this room into the second one in such a way that return is not possible. The second room is a somewhat large undetailed open field. It can be circular, triangular, rectangular, hexagonal, etc. but it does not have any ramps, walls, lava pits, pillars, nor any obstruction. The field is literally 100% open. In it, an Unreal I monster pack greets the player with a difficulty related to the level that the character wishes to acquire. The pack should not be too easy, but it should not be so difficult that the player has to remain separate from the main map for an extended period of time, except perhaps for the last few levels. Both the room shape and the pack members vary from level to level and from game to game. There are no additional items and no time limit: the player must kill the assigned monster pack or die in the process. If the player dies, he loses experience points as usual and must necessarily reappear in the map with the former level because it is no longer a candidate for training in the new one. When this objective is accomplished, a door that had been permanenty locked opens up to reveal a small passage that splits into six different exits, each clearly labeled with the skill that will be acquired if it is taken. Exits respective to skills already in possession appear blocked with a permanently locked door. On exit, the skill is gained and the player is respawned back in the main map. As you can see, players get to choose in which order they want to earn their skills. Note that players always travel to training fields unique to them, there is no possibility for them to encounter another player in such a place.
. The player gets to keep the skill as long as he or she does not loses the level at which the skill was attained. For example, if the player chose the jump skill when he passed the trial for level 2, and chose the strength skill when he attained level 3, then the player will lose the strength skill but not the jump skill if he falls back to level 2, but he will also lose the jump skill when falling back to level 1. In addition, if the player attains a level that had previously acquired during the current game, the player needs not work through training again and the skill chosen for that particular level attainment is restored.
. Observe that an important strategy for this kind of play is to make sure that plenty of ammo is kept at all times, because arriving at the trial grounds without enough ammo can prove fatal.
. OPTIONAL TRAINING PORTAL RULE. Instead of having the player instantaneously teleport to the training field as soon as it is candidate for a new level, the player can chose to enter through a special training portal at any moment of his choice. For deathmatch maps the portal can appear at random and may necessarily respawn occasionally in order to avoid permanent inaccessibility. For domination maps, portals exist at every control point. In capture the flag games, each team has their own portal located either at the default flag location of their own base, and//or at the default flag location of the enemy base (for an added twist!). For assault maps, the portal is located at the respawning point for the attacking team, and at the target point for the defending team. These portals do not have a frame, and do nothing to the player if they are crossed with no training pending. If a player has more than one training pending when the portal is crossed, the player reappears in the map after exiting the training grounds in such a way that he or she is not forced to enter the portal in a consecutive fashion in order to work out the remaining pending level(s). The strategy in this case is different because the player now needs to keep an eye more on the enemy than on the ammo being carried.
3. Ghostfragger
. Ghostbusters meet Unreal madness. When this mod/mutator is in effect, physical player deaths do not account for frag points just yet because dead players become ghosts! That's right, whitish translucent versions of their former selves that, to make things interesting, can fly anywhere while in that state. However, ghosts can not make use of weapons, items or devices of any kind. Their mission as ghosts is to roam around for about 10 seconds. If they are not captured until then, they reincarnate anew. They respawn as if they had died (with the inventory reset), except that a frag point was never awarded.
. Ghosts can move through anything! Floors, walls, missiles and even players. Nothing stops them, except for one thing. For this mod/mutator, the class 1 weapon gets substituted by a ghost-capturing device. Like the translocator, it can be shot in any direction with a certain speed. They also "slide" when they hit the floor although the friction will make them to stop eventually. When the mouse is right-clicked while the capturing device has been thrown, the device opens and shines a bright light that captures all ghosts that come in contact with it. Captured ghosts are then considered totally fragged. The light pattern emitted looks like an inverted pyramid with a square tip instead of a sharp one, and has considerable reach (length). The light pattern lasts for about 2 seconds, at which point the capturing device closes and "respawns" itself back into its owner's property.
. If the player wishes to reacquire an unopened capturing device, they can simply left-click again. Picking up capturing devices by walking over them is not allowed because ownership protocols can make things unnecessarily confusing, or even hard to play with.
4. Running items
. This simple mutator awards all weapons, items, and ammunitions intelligence of their own. They quietly sit about looking like ordinary objects until they sense players approaching, at which point they stretch their own hidden legs and away they go! To avoid making the game too difficult, every respawned item begins out with moderate intelligence and get dumber with time the more successfully they are at evading player attempts to obtain them.
