The Fair Team Skin ------------------------------------------------------------

Id's player skin makes it hard to tell what team a person is on from the
front, and that adds a needless complication to team games.  The problem
was well put by somebody on Usenet (sorry for the paraphrase and missing
attribution, this is from memory of a post from a few months ago):

    When someone comes charging around a corner at me in the middle of a
    team game the first thing I need to know is "Should I kill that?",
    not "Hey, is that Bob?"

Some trilobites take advantage of this deficiency in the stock skin,
setting their colors to mixed red and blue in a red vs. blue team game,
gaining an annoying advantage over more civilized players on both teams.

Here's a replacement for the player skin which addresses this problem.
With Id's skin the team's color is on the grunt's fatigues and the
player's color is on the armor.  I've modified this so that both the
fatigues and the armor are the team color, and I've set the shoulder
pads to be the player color.

I am not an artist, but the result is functional.  The body looks good,
but this is due to the way the original skin used the palette, as mostly
all I did was swap pixel values around mechanically.  The shoulder pads
are a bit gaudy (though this lends them a little bit of a Desi Arnas
thing which I enjoy).  It would be great if someone who actually is an
artist were to take this idea and run with it.

You can install this skin on your machine and have its benefits wherever
you play, it doesn't have to be installed on the server.

Availability ------------------------------------------------------------------

You can download it from

    ftp://ftp.gate.net/pub/users/roderick/tmskin10.zip

I'll be uploading the skin to ftp.cdrom.com, so it should be available
there and at the Quake mirrors as well.  I'm guessing it will be placed
in the graphics/mdl directory.

Installation ------------------------------------------------------------------

You have to have registered Quake to use this skin (or most any addon).

You'll need to play with a separate game directory, so create one if you
don't have one already.  You'll also need a directory called progs in
the game directory.  Put the fair team skin .mdl file in the progs
directory under the name player.mdl.  Eg,

    C:\TEMP> mkdir \quake\game
    C:\TEMP> mkdir \quake\game\progs
    C:\TEMP> unzip tmskin10
    C:\TEMP> copy tmskin10.mdl \quake\game\progs\player.mdl

Run quake with the extra switches `-game game' (or whatever).  If you
put these switches at the end of the command in the batch file you use
to run Quake (like

    quake %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 -game game

) you'll be able to override the -game on the command line; the Quake
binary uses the first -game rather than the last.

You can use this skin with a multiskin package, but you'll need a copy
of Meddle or Quakeme or a similar tool in order to merge them together.
(Authors of these multiskin packages are invited to use this skin in
their distributions (but as skin 1, please, otherwise there would be
little point).)  Eg,

    C:\QUAKE\MDL> unzip tmskin10
    C:\QUAKE\MDL> mdl -e t.bmp 1 tmskin10.mdl
    C:\QUAKE\MDL> mdl -i t.bmp 1 player.mdl	# save while inside
    C:\QUAKE\MDL> copy player.mdl \quake\game\progs

This could be spruced up using Meddle's scripting language, I've only
used Meddle for this one task so I haven't bothered to learn how that
would be done.

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$Id: tmskin10.txt,v 1.1 1996-10-15 22:22:07-04 roderick Exp $

Roderick Schertler
roderick@gate.net