Hack 99. Thrill to the Sights and Sounds of Zentation
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Zenon created this impressive Ascension mod. This is one of the best modded maps that has been produced to date. Based on Ascension, Zenon has altered many textures and added a number of cool effects to the level. He says that he picked up most of his ideas by examining other mods and finding how they work in game play. He credits the 7th Sanctum group and Re-animators INC. for inspiring him to become a modder. The Zentation mod includes cool textures throughout the map. These include bright red and black patterns on the floor and stone textures on the walls. It all adds up to an abstract art feel (see Figure 12-21). Figure 12-21. Looking down at the Zentation mod All the weapons in this mod have new looks and abilities. The Magnum is now called the Uzi and it is modified to fire like a Submachine Gun. The Submachine Gun fires needles and is called the NBG. The Needler is renamed the Riddler and fires Beam Rifle bolts. The Needler also has new rings of light emerging from the muzzle. The Sniper Rifle is renamed the PSG-6 Rifle and fires bolts of energy. When someone is hit with this rifle, a shower of fire engulfs him. The Plasma Pistol is converted to the Force Gun and has a new charging animation. When released, the Force Gun fires balls of lightning at the target. The modded Rocket Launcher fires two Wraith mortar rounds at once and is called the Dual Launcher. The Frag Grenades look like skulls and are called Skull Bombs. Plasma grenades are unchanged in appearance but they are called ZPlasma Bombs. The Shotgun is probably the most noticeable weapon mod it fires huge meteors and is called the Meteor gun. The meteors cause considerable damage; so, to balance it out, you cannot throw grenades while holding the gun. There is also a Warthog Gauss turret in the tall sniper tower. This turret is called a Dark Energy Gun. The Banshee has been modified to be transparent and its weapons have been modified to fire a beam like the Sentinel's beam. However, when it hits something there is a brilliant explosion. The Elite model is modified to look transparent with energy surging through its body. The Master Chief model is modified to appear black except for the faceplate, which is an eerie transparent blue. When Zenon put this map together, he started with the meteor gun as a basis to work around. He felt that this crazy weapon would get people's attention. Soon he found himself working on the other weapons just as hard to get a balance in quality. He says that he worked on the effects before adjusting projectiles and hex-editing the names of the weapons. The main programs he used were:
He used these applications to switch the effect dependencies with existing ones. For example, to create the new look of the Banshee, he switched the original model shader for that of the active camo pick up. The Elite's shader was switched with the Sentinel Beam's illum shader. For effects such as the Sniper Rifle, he switched the impact to a rocket liquid explosion and changed the prt3 property to fire. This created the illusion of liquid napalm. He found that the gravity lift used a strange distorted rippling effect. Once he discovered its dependencies, he switched a few of the pmov effects along with the prt3 to fire (see Figure 12-22). To fine-tune the effect, he played around with some other dependencies and the associated hex code. Figure 12-22. The Zentation modded gravity lift Many of the explosions required changes to the [deca] Decals and many of the [jpt] Damage Effect tags. This provided the scorch effects and added a sense of realism to the explosions. Without these changes, you can end up with massive explosions that don't harm anyone which is not so good. Many of the bitmaps that weren't already in game were created in Adobe Photoshop. They were then edited in Microsoft Paint using ATI's Compressonator program (http://www.ati.com/developer/compressonator.html) to recompress the files into DDS format. The look of the Halo ring was created in Microsoft Paint by taking the original ring and an image of an explosion and editing them. The ghost of the Pillar of Autumn was actually a mistake. When he blew up the image, it turned into a ghost-like texture as if it had been put through a filter. He liked the look of it so he left it in the mod (see Figure 12-23). Figure 12-23. A ghostly Pillar of Autumn looms over the map Download the Zentation mod from http://files.halomods.com/viewtopic.php?t=28670. |
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