[WOTC] Mercenary Plasma Ghost Templates

A combined ghost template re-release of Claus’ Mercenary Plasma Weapons and it’s Faction Hero expansion with adjusted sound volume, slightly toned down FX, and cooked assets for a smaller file size.

I’ve re-adjusted the volume on the guns’ fire sounds so that they all sound more-or-less even with the vanilla guns, and themselves. Their sound cues also weren’t assigned a sound class, which meant adjusting your Sound Effect volume slider wouldn’t affect them in any way. All that needed to be done there was to assign the sound cues to the ‘SoundFX’ sound class.

FX-wise, i removed some of the emitters inside the various particle effects to help performance while still maintaining their visuals, you probably won’t notice my changes like 80% of the time. I’ve also reduced the brightness of the beams themselves so you don’t go blind whenever someone fires them (screenshots above were taken before i made this change).

Texture and material-wise, i’ve removed the seizure-inducing pulse effect on the Sword’s blade, and un-ticked the sRGB setting for all the UI textures that had it on. UI textures that have this enabled will cause them to look much darker than they should in-game.

Missing Packages Fix + Resource is probably still required, so if you encounter any issues with the weapons’ FX without it, get it.

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These weapons are a series of ghost templates that use Template Master to function.

A "template" refers to how the game’s various gear and weaponry (and some others) are set-up in the code. They’re called Templates interally as they run on the game’s Template System to make everything work.

A "ghost template" is a weapon that technically exists in-game but isn’t usable as a selectable weapon in the arsenal.

To make usage of this as simple as possible, use XSkin, toggle the Owned filter off, and apply the skins over whichever weapons you want.

If you wish to do manual config work instead, you can also use Template Master itself or Weapon Skin Replacer to set up something.

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— Mercenary Plasma Pistol (Pistol_MercPlasma)

— Driller Autopistol (Sidearm_MercPlasma)

— Mercenary Plasma Blade (Sword_MercPlasma)

— Heavy Ripjack (WristBlade_MercPlasma)

— Mercenary Plasma Rifle (AssaultRifle_MercPlasma)

— Mercenary Plasma SMG (SMG_MercPlasma)

— M-90 Ravager Bullpup (Bullpup_MercPlasma)

— Mercenary Plasma Shotgun (Shotgun_MercPlasma)

— Mercenary Plasma Cannon (Cannon_MercPlasma)

— Mercenary MEC Cannon (SparkGun_MercPlasma)

— Mercenary Plasma Sniper (Sniper_MercPlasma)

— Blazing Lance (VektorRifle_MercPlasma)

The names in parenthesis represent that weapon’s internal template name, which’ll be relevant to you if working with config files that require use of the weapons’ template names.

The categories they’re assigned to don’t matter as much as you’d think, and this especially applies to Primaries. Most of them are two-handed long guns that can be given skins cross-category without much issue. If you see a weapon and want it in another category, just assign it to a weapon inside that category, 90% chance it’ll work fine.

If using XSkin for this, you’ll want the Category filter off.

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— N/A.

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— Claus – Original creator of everything featured in this mod.