Gameplay

Dark Magic is a mutator that can be inserted into any current Unreal game.  It includes spells for single player or team player games.  As far as I can tell, it works with most other mutators I have found.  Dark Magic is an Arena Mutator, so it will NOT work with other arena mutators.

The Dark Magic Mutator gives everyone a spell book as a weapon, instead of the typical round of weapons.  All ammo and weapon drops in the game are replaced by spell scrolls to add to your book, Mana vials to gain more casting ability, or specials which will be added later.  As you pickup spell scrolls, the new spells are added to your magic book, and you can begin to cast them.  Mana vials work kind of like ammo, and give your book more "ammo" to cast.

Spells get more powerful the longer you keep them.  Also, the more you cast a spell, the more powerful it becomes.  And lastly, many spells allow you to pick up additional copies of the spell in scrolls to gain spell levels.  Most spells go from level 1 to level 10, with a few accept ions.  At level 1, the spell is very weak. At level 10, the spell is almost godlike.

Players with at least one level ten spell are called wizards.  Killing a wizard gives you one extra frag point for every level ten spell he/she owns.  It is important to kill off wizards as soon as possible, before they are able to completely dominate the game!

Using the spell book is simple.  The current spell selected is shown in your HUD display. Right clicking brings up a list of the spells you have in your book, and cycles to the next spell.  Continue hitting the right button till you reach the spell you desire.  The left button casts that spell.  There are two numbers on the spell icons. The number on the left shows you the spell's current level. The number on the right shows you how much mana (Ammo) it will cost to cast the spell.  Spells that are shown in grey are either already active, disabled, or you do not have enough mana to cast them.  After selecting the spell you desire, the other spell icons will fade away in a couple seconds.

Spells can take on many guises, and are not all "Shooting" spells Some spells make you invisible, make you fly, give you armor, freeze your victims, etc.  You will need to be familiar with all these spells in order to become a full fledged wizard!

Installation: 

UMOD Version:
Not much, run the umod, and you are basically done =)

Self Install Version:
If you are one of those people who have trouble with umod files, simply extract these files into your Unrealtournament\System folder.  There should be three: 

Put the two help docs in your Unrealtournament/help directory for future use.

Playing Dark Magic:

To play the Dark Magic mutator, simply add it as a mutator to the map of your choice.

You may also now select the Dark Magic Gametypes in the Gametypes window

Basic Use:

First and foremost is your spell book. Most things happen from there.  As you collect spells lying about, they are added to your spell book. For some spells, if you pick them up a second time, they add a level to the spell in your book.  

To cast the current spell: Use the Fire button, usually the left mouse button

To change your spell: Use Alt-Fire to pick a different spell. A transparent list of all your spells will appear on the HUD and scroll you to the next available one in your spell book. Keep hitting the Alt-Fire key till you get to the one you want.

 

Key Assignments:

There are two ways to set keys in Dark Magic.

Weapon Macro Keys:
You can assign spells to the ten weapon switch buttons that are normally used to switch between weapons, or keys 0-9.  The server will start you off with a set of default settings, but you can change them from there.  The typical Default Settings are

Key Spell
1 Select Disintegrate
2 Select Lava Ball
3 Select Lightning
4 Cast Protective Skin
5 Cast Regeneration
6 Cast Olympian
7 Cast Wings of Air
8 Select Stasis
9 Cast Camouflage
0 Cast Heal

To change these setting during gameplay, you need to bind keys to the "Select Change" and "Cast Change" buttons.  These two buttons allow you to change a weapon key to a different spell.  To assign these keys, go to the Key Settings Menu in the Dark Magic setup window.  the "Cast" spell macro key allow you to set a button to auto-cast a spell, without selecting it.  The "Select" macro button allows you to set a spell to be the active spell in the spell book. Both have their uses.  To set these button, simply click in the box area denoted, then hit the key you wish to assign there.

During Gameplay, after you have your two assign macro keys set, you can change the settings of a weapon key by doing the following:

  1. Go to the spell you wish to Cast/Select.

  2. Push either your "Cast" Macro button, or your "Select" macro button that you assigned earlier.

  3. Push the number key to assign the spell to.  

You will get a message in the message window letting you know the key was bound to the new spell.  These settings ONLY last as long as the current game does.

Other special Keys to assign:
YOU can also optionally set two other keys in the key settings window, for previous spell and next spell.  This works similarly to assigning the spell macro keys.  Simply click on the box and then hit the button you want to assign to each of these commands.  Your user file is updated automatically.

Adding Your Own Key Bindings:
There is also a Add you own Bindings set of buttons that let you create your own spell bindings in the user.ini file.  There is a section on The Keyboard page that is called Key Bind Helper. The way it works is this:  

  1. Click  the window button for Bind key.

  2. Press the key you wish to assign.

  3. Select whether you wish to Cast the Spell, or Select it when you hit this key, with the combo box below the key button.

  4. Below the Cast/Select box, is the list of spells. Choose the spell you wish to bind to.

  5. At the bottom of the window, you should see the console command that will be issued in your honor to set your key.

  6. If All Looks well, hit the "Bind It" button to add this key bind to your settings.

You can add as many of these as you wish. Unlike the weapon macros, these work just fine from the player side.

WARNING:  If you add a spell key to a key that does something normally in Unreal tournament already, it will NO LONGER do the old function! Have a care when re-assigning keys you use often in other games!

Other Settings:
There are several other settings in the Dark Magic window.  The spell Settings window allows you to pick which spells are dropped in the place of replaced items in a level.  If you want less spells, you simply turn off the ones you don't want.

The Settings page show several different switches for you to choose from.  You can leave weapons in the game by turning off remove weapons for instance. The same goes for Health stuff, Specials, and armor.  If you remove it from the level, you then have the option of replacing it with a spell or mana potion.  The round robin selection, if chosen drops spells in order from start to finish, instead of randomly selecting spells to drop. Some folks preferred this.  The last section allows you to chose whether killing people with maxed out spells gives you extra points, and whether or not you get points for maxing out the spells.

This should be enough to get you going for now. There will be some better directions to follow, I promise =)

Adding Dark Magic Types to Your Browser:

You can now add the dark Magic Game types to your regular server browser window, which should make finding servers much easier.  The process is not as straight forward as I would like though... here are the steps involved:

1. Got to your UnrealTournament/system folder. and open the file UBrowser.int add the following lines tothe list:

UBRowserDMAGIC=Dark Magic Arena
UBrowserDMAGDOM=Dark Magic Domination
UBRowserDMAGCTF=Dark Magic CTF

 

2. Next open the file Unrealtournament.ini Search down till you see the tag [UBrowserAll].  After the UBrowser section, paste this lot:

[UBrowserDMAGIC]
ListFactories[0]=UBrowser.UBrowserSubsetFact,SupersetTag=UBrowserALL,GameType=DarkMagicDM,bCompatibleServersOnly=True

[UBrowserDMAGDOM]
ListFactories[0]=UBrowser.UBrowserSubsetFact,SupersetTag=UBrowserALL,GameType=DarkMagicDOM,bCompatibleServersOnly=True

[UBrowserDMAGCTF]
ListFactories[0]=UBrowser.UBrowserSubsetFact,SupersetTag=UBrowserALL,GameType=DarkMagicCTF,bCompatibleServersOnly=True

3. Go to the section Titled [UBrowser.UBrowserMainClientWindow].  Change the entries for three lines, somethign similar to this:

ServerListNames[10]=UBrowserDMAGIC
ServerListNames[11]=UBrowserDMAGDOM
ServerListNames[12]=UBrowserDMAGCTF

 

After that, you will have three new tabs on your server browser, which should show you the Dark Magic servers currently up.

NOTE: Servers do NOT show up if they are just using the mutator. They need to be using the Dark Magic Gametype.

 

Running A Server:

First, the main question people ask is "My friend and I were going to play Dark magic together, but after I ran the server, I saw everything fine, but he got nothing!"  The answer is:  In your Unrealtournament.ini file, you need to add this line:

ServerPackages=DMUT

IN the appropriate spot. You will see it, there are a whole row of these.  IT is supposed to be added during the Umod installation, but it doesn't always work.

To Run a dedicated Server, I would suggest making a Batch file, that looks something similair to this:

@echo off
C:
cd \unrealtournament\system
:10
ucc server CTF-LavaGiant?game=DMUT.DarkMagicCTF -log=server.log
copy server.log servercrash.log
goto 10

 Name it Server.bat. I usually stick mine on the desktop. Run this batch file, and you should be set! The other game types are:

DarkMagicDM and DarkMagicDOM

Help on setting up the other parts of an online server is beyond the scope of this document. I would suggest going to the admin page from Planetunreal, it is an excellent resource to get you up and running with ngstats and gamespy in no time!

 

YOu can also, of course just run Dark Magic the mutator, and have the server listed under normal gametypes by using a line similar to this:

ucc server DM-Liandri?game=BotPack.DeathMatchPlus?Mutator=DMUT.DMUT -log=server.log

This will show up as a regular Deathmatch game, with Dark Magic as a mutator.  Some people may find they get more users this way.

If you run a Dark Magic server, lemme know and I will mention you on our page!