Mod:			St. Vitus Virus
Directory:		stvitus
Released Version:	Beta 0.4
Test Version:		Beta 0.5
Website:		http://www.brimstone.com/quake2/local/mods/stvitus/
Author:			Jason "Woebane" Abbott (jasona@brimstone.com)

Notes

This is a completely server side mod. There is nothing to be downloaded for the clients. The clients should be fine if they are running version 3.19 or 3.20.

This mod will work on any standard Q2 map; but it works far more effectively on medium sized deathmatch maps. Maps that have no health on them will have no Health Depots generated on them. This will make for a different sort of game, but are still playable.

Changes from standard Quake2

Health Depots

All health in the game has been removed. The farthest two spots that health would have appeared on any map have been replaced with glowing permanent rotating Health Depots. If anyone touches a Health Depot they will be completely healed up, and they will be infected with the St. Vitus Virus. No one has to use a Health Depot, it's there as an option. Note, on some maps one or both of the Health Depots could end up in a challenging position (but I haven't seen any so far, and for those hard to reach locations you can often use the Nitro).

St. Vitus Virus

As soon as a player touches a Health Depot they are infected with the St. Vitus Virus. This virus will start to rend the player asunder within 90 seconds (in fact a little count-down timer will appear in the upper right hand side of the players screen). The only way to live longer than the alloted 90 seconds it to find the other Health Depot and touch it. That will just prolong the players life for 90 more seconds. Basicly, if you get the virus, you're hooked on using the Health Depots until you die. When the player's running low on time, their screen will begin to flash yellow.

The Irradiator

The BFG has been completely replaced in the St. Vitus Virus mod. In it's place is the faster firing, less ammo using, Irradiator. This projects a green beam much like the standard Rail Gun does, only it does far less damage than the Rail Gun. Instead, it irradiates the target. If the target is a player, they will continue to lose health slowly until death, or until they reach a Health Depot. The Health Depot will cure them completely of the radiation, but it will leave them addicted to the Health Depot until death. If the Irradiator misses a player and strikes a surface, that surface will flash and arc for a while as the radiation spends itself.

The Rail Gun

This Rail Gun is more powerful than your standard rail gun. It will actually penetrate several feet of solid rock before spending it's energy. This means that when an opponent dodges back behind a wall, a clever Rail Gun operator can still shoot them with a slightly less powerful shell.

The Mirving Rocket Launcher

This Rocket Launcher will always try to fire at least three rockets at the same time. These rockets aren't as powerful as your standard Quake2 rockets, and they are far less accurate. They also launch at a much slower speed than Quake2 rockets, but they accelerate in flight to a good clip. The Mirving Rocket Launcher is just a touch slower than the standard Quake2 Rocket Launcher.

The Blaster

If the player currently has Power Cells then the blaster will use those to increase it's damage slightly.

Nitro Depots

On some levels there will be one Nitro Depot (it currently looks like an ordinary adrenaline pickup). Once you've touched it you can use the cmd nitro command to run faster and even fly short distances. This will probably be toned down in later versions, as it's a little silly right now. It only lasts 10 seconds, but you can toggle it on and off to conserve your usage of it.

Deathmatch Spawn Points

Those annoying hexagonal platforms vanish 10 seconds after they are used.

Bug Reports and Feature Requests

If you have bug-reports or feature-requests, please mail them to jasona@brimstone.com.

Why

This mod was originally just me poking around the Quake2 code, trying a tutorial here and a tweak there, and then implementing the St. Vitus Curse because I was going to plug that code into a Holywars server (Holywars is a great mod, you should definitely check it out if you haven't already) to replace it's Heretic code. When I was done I had a faint idea of a mod so I glued all this together just to see how tough writing a mod is. It isn't. Try it. It's fun.

Contributers & Thanks:

Play-testers

Karl "Sun Ra" Bilawski
John "Tig" Marco
Neal "Zond" Kaplan
Geoff "Lictor" Webb
Liam Byrne
Ross "Hellen Bach" Baker

Id-Software for Quake2 and doing the whole DLL thing.

CheezHankrn of clan RHi for porting the DLL version.

Quake DLL Pages

Quake DeveLS and Quake Style

Tutorials

Specific Tutorials I'd like to thank (I might not have used all or part of these, but they did inspire and or teach me more than others while working on this mod):

FuzzySteve's

Menu System

Major Bitch's

Anti-Crash Functions, Exploding Body Parts, The Neck Stretcher, Ratapult

SumFuka's

Faster Blaster

Decker's

Statusbar

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