Intro This Unidentified Flying Object reminds me of a portion of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where an entire race of beings from an alternate Universe arrive to destroy humanity, only to be swallowed by a small dog. While UFO isn't quite that small, its pilots must be pretty tiny:-) Originality
UFO is the second representative from saucer culture to arrive at the quake community (the first being Grey). UFO is a really neat idea that unfortunately doesn't work well in standard deathmatch play. The Model
This is a simple, but clean looking model. The author states in the readme that UFO only took 2 hours from start to finish. Despite UFOs simple nature and animations, this is an impressively small developement time, and GiB has a right to be proud of it (I certainly would be).
The model weighs in at 548 faces, which is pretty reasonable. However, a cursery inspection of it revealed about 150 faces that could have easily been culled. In addition, GiB has integrated the weapon with the model, simply putting a dummy into weapon.md2. This makes it difficult to expand the model, with, say, VWep support (flying saucers with cartoonish rocket launchers mounted underneath would be cool!). The model fits the bounding box as well as one could ever expect a floating saucer to...pretty badly. This, with the UFOs simple nature (essentially a set of 3dsmax primitives), earns it a very low rating. The Animations
Instilling character into a rigid floating body is a tough challenge. To help ease the task, GiB makes intelligent use of UFOs weapon in the animations.
Unfortunately, the weapon animation is too subtle to be really noticed at low resolutions or frame rates, and the motions of the main hull are not exaggerated enough to complement the weapons motion (exaggeration, while unrealistic in the strict sense, is usually necessary in both classic and 3d animation when trying to express character to the viewer).
UFOs death poses are a pain in deathmatch. About half of them are ok, but the other half leave UFO lying upright on the ground, looking more or less like an alive and well UFO. Wasting rockets on a corpse is a real pain, especially when a live enemy is pouring hyperblaster into you at the same time.
Finally, the animations are not smooth - the stand animation in particular is quite jerky.
UFOs skins are simple but very well done. Unfortunately, they are also mis-linked (hence the low rating). I have hopefully fixed this in the distribution available for download (please let me know if I couldn't get it right either!). Sounds
UFO comes with no sounds. Visible Weapons Support None. Pack Inclusion UFO does not make the pack because of some of his death animations. It is not fair to play against a model that looks the same dead as it does alive. He also fits the bounding box terribly.
review by Dark
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