Color artifacts and a few other questions on playermodels

[Vic]

Hi. I have noticed that the default playermodels that I like the most (Military>Robot and HEV>Helmet) have some color artifacts on them (dots and spots of topcolor on the bottomcolor parts or vice versa).
https://sun9-127.userapi.com/c858028/v858028008/1550c1/rgEjv69QwuU.jpg
https://sun9-32.userapi.com/c204616/v204616008/3cc57/_YEbRPUCQnY.jpg
https://sun9-42.userapi.com/c854532/v854532008/1c7125/keOeUsizwDU.jpg
Can this be fixed in the next releases, please?

Also, why it is not possible to choose any color, including black and white, for example, as a topcolor/bottomcolor? For example, I'd like to make my Military playermodels to have the original black and white HECU camo pattern, but I can't.

Also, I'm wondering, what mod/game those ETAC and ASWAT models are from, and how exactly do custom playermodels work? For instance, if I'll install and use a custom playermodel, and connect to some random server, will the other players see it, and when, if yes? Or will they only see it if they have it too, or if that server has it? Because, when I'm playing on random servers, sometimes I see people with custom playermodels that are not included in Sven Co-op installation, and I have those playermodels available for use on all other severs after that, but sometimes I still see those default orange HEV>Helmet playermodels on people, and when my friend installed a model pack and connected to my listen server using a custom playermodel I saw him as an orange HEV>Helmet too...

[Sniper]

Those appear to be problems isolated to the models themselves. I'll add this to our bug tracker.

Regarding selecting any color or black/white colors:
The Half-Life engine provided a way to swap colors around for models, but it's very basic. You can't increase brightness. We currently have no plans to change this behavior. It's just a relic from the past. We'll probably revisit this in the future when we rewrite portions of the rendering engine.

The ETAC and ASWAT models are very old and have been included in Sven Co-op for many releases. I don't remember exactly when we first started including them, but I'm guessing around the year 2000.

If you use a custom player model, other players will not see it unless it is provided by the server or they already have it installed. If you're seeing a custom player model you're not sure about, the server probably gave you it when you connected.

[D.N.I.O. 071]

1) The color artifacts you see are the result of the wrong color being changed due to how the palette of the texture was set up (bottomcolor tries to take over topcolor, in most cases), as for the Helmet HEV model, that one uses a very old remap method which limits the color palette to 32 for each slider (top and bottom respectively). I will see if I can do anything about these issues.

2) Due to the way remappable textures work, being a literal change in the hue of a selected number of indices on the palette, it's not possible to alter their saturation or brightness. This is the same way it works on vanilla GoldSrc, so right now it's not possible to have black and white colors as options.

3) Both the ETAC and ASWAT player models should have a text file included within their folders to explain a bit of the history from the author himself.

The way custom player models work is each client needs to have them installed in order to see it, what servers might do is have some plugin installed that makes clients connecting to it download it (in this case they will remain inside the svencoop_downloads/models/player/ folder). Maps might also make use of player models and they can be included inside .res files which essentially are files that tell the server which files client have to download for that specific level.
So for you and your friend to see any custom player model you both need to install it in your copy of the game, otherwise you'll see the default orange HEV helmet model.

Hope this helped, and thanks for the reports.

[Vic]

1) Thanks for the answers and explanation on how exactly the color change works. It's a pity it is so, I hope it will be possible to choose any color for them in the future (personally I'd, probably, prefer the option to manually enter the color code in #RRGGBB format or something like that).

2) Wow, I haven't thought that playermodels bundled with SC could have personal readmes. Turns out there's a whole story in the one for the ASWAT model oO'

3) Okay. So, I guess, I was playing on some servers that allow their clients to exchange playermodels, since I got all those weird things like Uganda Knuckles, human silhouettes built from Tertis blocks and other crazy stuff which certainly have nothing to do with the mods I've played there (like R.E.S.T.R.I.C.T.I.O.N., Afraid of Monsters or Quake 1). And yes, they are all in the svencoop_downloads folder on my HDD now.

Now, If I am hosting a listen server, what files will my clients get? Will they get everything that I've added to my "svencoop" folder (all the custom maps, playermodels, and other stuff) or should I place those files that I want my clients to get when they connect to my game in some certain folder and place the other files that I only want to use for myself, but don't want my clients to download somewhere else or what? And what is the "svencoop_addon" folder for?

[H2]

Originally posted by Vic:

3) Okay. So, I guess, I was playing on some servers that allow their clients to exchange playermodels, since I got all those weird things like Uganda Knuckles, human silhouettes built from Tertis blocks and other crazy stuff which certainly have nothing to do with the mods I've played there (like R.E.S.T.R.I.C.T.I.O.N., Afraid of Monsters or Quake 1). And yes, they are all in the svencoop_downloads folder on my HDD now.

Now, If I am hosting a listen server, what files will my clients get? Will they get everything that I've added to my "svencoop" folder (all the custom maps, playermodels, and other stuff) or should I place those files that I want my clients to get when they connect to my game in some certain folder and place the other files that I only want to use for myself, but don't want my clients to download somewhere else or what? And what is the "svencoop_addon" folder for?

Clients don't transfer any content to servers other than the custom spray decal, those servers most likely rely on a server plugin that collects the name of your player model and adds it to a model precache list that gets sent over to players after the next map change, which as a result requires the server to keep a local repository of model files for transferring. A good rule of thumb would be that the server only sends over content that has been explicitly precached by the current map and/or any server plugins, that's about it.

As for the "svencoop_addon" folder, that's a folder meant to be used for custom content that is intended to override base content. In other words, the game looks for files in "svencoop_addon" first, then "svencoop", then "svencoop_downloads", so that's where you'll want to put client-side stuff like custom view models and such. :-)