"Welcome to the future of communication! Now you can share info with friends, keep tabs on your enemies, follow your coworkers and rivals, or remember that vending machine down the street! A whole new wave of "networking" through a "social" medium entirely composed of razor sharp tracking darts.


*Disclaimer: The Mantis E&I Company is not responsible for any 'friend request' related accidents or deaths."


This is a remake of a revolver a made ages ago as part of my "Observer" Spy set. It is a CO2-based tracking dart gun. It's designed to fire FM transmitter darts that stick to targets and reveal enemy troop movements. Before my return to the workshop, this was the most popular item that I had produced. I felt a bit of pride about my craftsmanship at the time, but upon revisiting it, I discovered that the original gun was rather shoddily produced.

The most glaring flaw in the previous iteration was the attention to lighting. If you compare this version to the old, you'll plainly see where I flubbed the shading on the barrel and the darts. Another issue was how poorly it was rigged and animated. There was pretty much no way it was fit for TF2. These issues have been thoroughly corrected with this version.

As per norm, I've gutted out all the useless animations with this weapon and junked the view model. This version now operates using the c_model standard as per most other weapons in TF2. The view animations you see are stream-lined and synced up with the Spy's arms properly(as opposed to the jury-rigged version I was using before).


One thing that bothered me a bit while working on this item was how to handle the discussions. I've always been grateful and somewhat humbled by the number of people who are willing to participate in the discussions. In truth, this item is what really started the trend of adding stats to my items. I get a more well-rounded weapon when I design with stats in mind, and people tend to enjoy adding to the stat discussions.

I didn't want to throw away the old discussion, but I couldn't come up with a graceful way of transitioning between these two versions and carrying over the previous posts. Seeing as that discussion is several years old now, appending the old conversation onto the new discussion would be cumbersome or akward at best.

Instead, I combed through the old discussion and made a list of many of the dart ideas proposed by users. I then designed darts for each idea, shown in the images above. I neglected to finish the 12th dart. I'll get back to that one later.

Check out the discussion for more in depth info about the weapon's stats.


UPDATE:

I went ahead and finished off the last dart, the Pyroland dart. This was very close to being cut, as the idea itself was absurd. However, the more I worked on it, the more it captivating the idea became. It's essentially a dart filled with a noxious gas that causes its victim to hallucinate. The pin on the front gets pushed back when it hits its target, and releases a valve in the head of the dart, shooting the pressurized gas forward towards the victim. It started fairly simple as a gas dart... and then it kind of got away from me. Before I knew it, it had become 4 times as complicated as any of the other darts. I had to stop myself, as it was becoming more complex than the actual gun. Still, it was made just for fun/practice, and the ultimate result is rather charming.

Oh, and before I forget, be sure to shake the dart up before you fire it. The gas in the dart tends to settle into some very interesting shapes.

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[gamebanana.com]

Old Version: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=145414797