Title : Advanced Tractor Beam Filename : h_atbeam.zip Version : 1.0 beta 2 Date : 6/27/97 Author : HeXeR Email : hexer@bestweb.net Thanks : id Software of course John Carmack for quakec Jonathan Avraham for the original Tractor Beam patch and the idea Type of Mod ----------- Quake C : yes Sound : no MDL : no Format of QuakeC ---------------- unified diff : no context diff : no .qc files : no - You can email me to get it... progs.dat : yes * * *NOTE: Please read before you start writing to me* * * About the Author ---------------- I've made a poisonous axe patch which was the only poisonous weapon ever to work in single player. Some other patches that I made were never released, they were good ideas but were almost invisible in the game. I loved the tractor beam idea so much that I decided to make the one that actually works. I like to hang at ChatNet's #QUAKE a lot (sure thing, because I'm the owner). If you want to contact me I am usually there in the evening. Had a channel called #GAMEZCHEAT but it never had more than 5 people in it. Anyway, come to ChatNet, type /join #quake and have fun in there :) Description of the Modification ------------------------------- For those who haven't tried the original Tractor Beam by Jonathan Avraham I dare you to try it and compare with this one... This beautifull patch will give you a powerfull feature, now you can pick up a monster or a player and drag it all around!!! But unlike the old Tractor beam patch it gives you more control! You can now increase or decrease distance between you and the entity you drag by pressing a key! You can no longer move a monster into a wall and get it stuck, much more bugs were fixed. Let's start with a story as usual... Imagine yourself playing deatmatch. You stand on a catawalk and your opponent approaches to you slowly. You find yourself in a trap, the door in front of you is locked and if you jump you'll have a hot lava bath. The only weapon you have is Thunderbolt with 5 cells. You quickly take out the thunderbolt and push a button labaled "Mode" on it. Your opponent takes out a nail launcher and starts shooting, suddenly he sees you firing a blue lightning on him. He tries to run away but he can't! He is frozen and will not move! In another seckond he realises that he is not standing on the ground, he looks down and finds a hot view of boiling lava above him..... aaarrrrggh he screams as you drag him farther from the catawalk. "Well, bye bye sucker!" you say and release the trigger... Next thing you hear is a scream and sound of boiling flesh as you opponent turns into a toast... ...Hehehe... :) How to Install the Modification ------------------------------- Make a new dir in your quake directory (ie c:\quake\tbeam). Copy this archive into that directory, then unzip it. Then from the c:\quake dir. type: quake -game archmage Technical Details ----------------- The controls of the tractor beam weapons are easy, just select thunderbolt twice and it will switch to the tractor beam mode. To decrease or increase the distance between you and the monster while dragging it press the "s" or "x" key several times, each time you press the distance changes a little bit do you have to press about 10 times to bring a monster as close as possible. Using tractor beam may be tricky sometimes: To drag a monster aim on it, hold the 'mouse look' key (it is set to in the cfg that came with the patch otherwise, in the default settings it is set to \ key.) and press fire, if the lightning beam went on the monster it locked on it and now you can drag the monster to any place you want. Move the mouse up while holding 'mouse look' (Shift) key and move the mouse to look up, you'll notice that the monster is now in the air, try to walk forward and backward, wherever you go the monster is dragged on the beam. The main trick is to always hold the monster a bit above the floor, otherwise it won't move because it is standing of the floor. Also the monster will not move if it stuck against the wall. List of control keys: <8> (Impulse 8) - Select thunderbold; thinderbolt/tractor mode switch (Impulse 21) - Increase distance (Works while dragging entity) (Impulse 20) - Decrease distance (Works while dragging entity) (N/A) - Mouse look (Can look up or down by moving mouse while holding) More tech stuff: The whole Tractor Beam code was written from scratch, I didn't use the original code as the base, it was too buggy and useless (sorry Jonathan). In the original code 'self.origin' was used to move an entity in the world (very bad idea) this often messed up the clipping of the moved entity and caused it to stuck inside a wall. Also in the original patch you couldn't move the entity forward or backward, this happened because the distance was set every call to the W_UseTractor function. In this patch the distance is set when you press fire, then it uses the same distance while dragging so you can move the entity to any direction. Anyway, this patch was a tough one and even with so much advancements it still has some minor bugs. NOTE: This patch was never tested in deathmatch, I suggest someone to try it on a server then email me and tell me how it went, you will recieve full credit in final version of this patch. Known Bugs ----------------- Sometimes a monster will hang in the air for several seckonds in single player mode, this happenes when it was 'frozen' while attacking. It happends in nightmare mode more often because the monsters attack more often. If you 'freeze' a Dog while it jumps, when you release it it will fly to the direction it tried to jump before, sometimes it will stay frozen in the air. If a monster dies in the air the corpse will stay there and hang...forever! If you encounter any other bugs that are not listed here email me. Author Request ----------------- If you have any new unusual and interesting ideas feel free to email me. Hehe, those ideas are sometimes more valuable than the code itself :) You can also find me at ChatNet's #QUAKE (irc.chatnet.org) Also, if you like my patches and you want me to join your clan feel free to contact me, note that you have to have a server otherwise you are not a real clan. Oh yeah, I loved the compilation patches "Fear" and "Killer quake pack" Fear had the old tractor beam in it, I think it would be great to replace it with this tractor beam patch! :) Well, seeya later quakerz :)