Poison Dart Gun v0.6 - Adds a poison dart gun : shoots darts which cause
 health to gradually drain.

This patch was designed for deathmatch, it doesn't even work on monsters. It
currently is a .qc only patch, i.e. no new gfx or sounds, for two reasons :
1) Only the server needs to have it this way, and 2) I don't do art.
Eventually I hope to get someone who does .mdl's to make some for this (mail
me if you'd like to help) but for now it looks like the nailgun, and the darts
look just like nails (what a cooincidence!). It is not, however, just a
simple replacement for the nailgun, but an entirely new weapon; both can be
used in the same game. However, for now, picking up one means picking up both,
and they (and the super nailgun) share ammo. More on this later.

USING THE DARTGUN 

The dartgun is selected by pressing 4 with the nailgun selected, or by
the console command impulse 12. The dartgun uses nails, but has a much lower
rate of fire than the nailgun, and each dart does much less damage (3) than
normal, but each dart delivers a dose of poison to whomever it hits. For
every dart a player has taken, he/she has 2 points of health drained every
few seconds. Picking up a health box removes one dart's worth of poison (in
addition to its normal healing power) but can never fully cure a poisoned
player (once poisoned, no matter how many health boxes you pick up you'll
always take at least 2 points of damage every few seconds. Death by poison
counts as a frag for the poisoner just like any other kill; if someone dies
from poison after being hit by darts from multiple people (unlikely), the
most recent poisoneer gets the frag.

Eventually I hope to make and place throughout the levels dartguns and dart
boxes separate from the nailguns and nails, for the dual purpose of making
them separate weapons, and reducing the number of darts in play at a time
(in large numbers they can be very powerful), but for now picking up the
nailgun means picking up the nailgun/dartgun, a unified weapon which uses
the same ammo for both functions, which I understand is quite unrealistic.
Maybe it will help your suspension of disbelief/immersion if you think of the
dart gun as just an enhanced nailgun which has a builtin, inexhaustible
supply of poison which it can coat nails with before firing (which takes time,
lowering the weapon's rate of fire.) That is, until I improve it.

POISON/DAMAGE RESOLUTION

As stated above, the posion damage is 2 points per dart per (approx) 4
seconds (quake seconds seem to be a little longer than real seconds). This
figure, however, is open to debate. While developing this patch, I went on
EFnet #quakeed and asked opinions, and received widely varied answers.
Many people pointed out to me that there is a similar weapon in Hexen, which
I have never played, but I couldn't get a straight answer on how exaclty
the weapon worked in this game. Some people thought that there should be
no cumulative effect of multiple darts, that you should be either poisoned
or not. Others thought they should be cumulative, but not 1 for 1, i.e. 1
dart does 1 point, 2 darts do 1.5 points etc. etc. Other people suggested
that the speed of the poison gradually increase (you're hit, 10 seconds later
you get poison damage, then again 9 seconds later, then 8 seconds later.....)
Other people suggested just the opposite. What's your opinion ? Mail me with
suggestions (but please state whether you've played deathmatch with the patch
as-is; your opinion is much more valuable to me if you've actually tried it.)

CHANGES SINCE 0.6

No code changes at all, just separated out as much code as possible into
dartgun.qc, to make it easier to combine with other patches. I'm trying to
figure out how to distribute it in a diff type patch thing, but I've never
had occasion to do so before, so bear with me, for now you'll have to either
run the include progs.dat or combine the .qc's yourself.

That's all I can think of right now. If you have any questions, suggestions,
or would like to draw .mdls for the dartgun, darts, or ammo boxes, please mail
me.

Since I don't have a LAN to test this on, and this is the first released
version, it might turn out not to work, or even to crash (unlikely) when
used in an actual, > 1 player game. If it does, don't just delete it and move
on to the next patch, *mail me* so I know to fix it.

Oh, and, as usual, this patch is, of course, freeware. However, since I am
running a 486/66 8mb system, I would, of course, greatly appreciate any
donations you could give.

Also, as usual, if this patch, through some sort of bizarre accident should
cause your computer to explode, your hard disk to get formatted, your dog
to die or your wife to leave you, I am not responsible. These are, of course,
not likely to happen but if they do, it's your fault, not mine.

Lunatik
Kevin Bowen
kevin_bowen@juno.com
