Intro Heaven's Devil is the clan model of heavens devil's quake2 division FoozE. It's a cutesy little devil, with a pitchfork and a halo. Originality Straight from the text file, "An ordinary heavens devil, more info on Heavens Devils can be found at the original heavensdevils homepage www.acc.umu.se/~hd/ ." Personally, I've never heard of a heaven's devil before, and there definately hasn't been anything in the Q2 PPM scene quite like it. The Model
The model is very simplistic, but flawless. Everything is well constructed, and deforms nicely. The model is split up into multiple parts, but you can't even tell without checking it out in a model editor. The poly count is very acceptable, while using enough polys to round out the shapes and allow good deformation. Although technically flawless, It's simplicity keeps me from giving it high marks- with such a simple model, having no technical flaws isn't much of a feat. The Animations
The animations are the high point of this model. The model was animated using skeletal deformation and inverse kinematics in Lightwave (which surprised me, for such a simple model), and they've been executed nearly flawlessly, and with a lot of character. Inventively, the halo is the weapon model, and it spins above the head, turns into an F (for FoozE) in the flipoff sequence, and dissappears during the death sequences (because weapon models do that). He flaps his little wings on the jump, and shoots his rockets out the end of his pitchfork. The taunt animations is mildly amusing, as he laughs and stomps his feet. A small problem is that he doesn't get quite low enough on the crouch animations, so his horns and halo wil stick up out of the bounding box (although I bet this was intentional, and could be kinda cute). Overall, the animations are inventive at points, but genrally a bit bland. Again, I can't give it too high a mark because it's simplicity makes it's execution no big accomplishment. Still, it's a better than average effort.
What can I say? It's got quantity, but not quality. 13 skins are provided, which all appear to be for individual members of the clan (this is a clan model, after all). No CTF skins are included. The skins are ultra simplistic, almost flat shaded. The regular skin has only 11 colors on the whole thing, compared to about 100 on a more detailed skin. It suffers the most in the technical department though, which the author excuses as a result of it being an effort dating back to the initial release of Quake 2, when matters such as skin size and wasted space weren't an issue yet. The skin size is not 256x256, and so it gets scaled down by 3d cards (not to any effect, since it's so simple though). The wasted space on the tris.md2 is a whopping 61%, which could easily have been avoided by some overlapping on the mapping. At least the weapon skin is only 32x32, but it still has 30% wasted space. It could have easily just been made a single yellow pixel, with 0% wasted space with the exact same end product. At least there's no errors in the mapping, and no seams show up in the game. A number of original sounds are included, and are kinda funny. A good effort here. Visible Weapons Support
Nope, and I kinda doubt it will. This guy would look pretty funny with a bfg in his hands :)
Pack Inclusion
The only thing that would keep this guy out is the wasted space on the skins, but the skins are so simple that the file sizes are minute, so it's not really going to waste any systems resources. I think it will make it in, I could be wrong though.
review by Dan Bickell
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