The Succubus Queen

So much has happened with this character, I think she deserves her own page. She started out just as a single boss mob for Abstraction, being the gem-keeping one of the Succubi, who were just farmgirls with wings, very little clothing, and a nasty disposition! They had been a shameless steal from the original Diablo, even to the point of copying their "die" animation.

Although the wings on the regular Succubi were non-functional, I had worked on adapting the Drakes' wings to other creatures when making the Balor for Abstraction, so I repeated that work with a copy of the Lara figure for DS1 and the hybrid became the Succubus Queen. I found a face texture that was a little bit Tyra Banks, and added a hairstyle that was originally intended for a Dark Elf for Hyperborea, and matched those with a gold-textured bikin skin, to get the SQ that became the little darling of Abstraction that we all love. She's just nine feet tall (and about 60 EEE).

The Queen got a life of her own when someone suggested making her a playable option for MP. To achieve that she needed all the other weapon animations (the mob only had two-handed sword) as well as a change or two to the mesh to let her "wear" armour. There are actually only two distinct body meshes, as I condensed all the armour styles into one, and provided an A0 mesh without (like a skellie). But the game still needs a separate mesh for each, so the armoured mesh is cloned multiple times. She only uses one boot and one glove mesh, as none of her armor covers either. Helmets, too, are a single model for all types (essentially reducing them to a headband) but since each has to be provided as a separate mesh, they are UV-mapped to suit the various textures available. The animations weren't too hard as I was able to get most of the work done using "merge animation" from the Lara model, and just had to add in the movement of the wings.

A choice of three skins is now provided, with complementary hair and wing colours. Although the monster version had her boots as part of her base mesh, she now starts the game in shoes, and gets the thigh-highs only when she puts on a pair of regular boots. Why the boots and gauntlets expand to fit her but other armour does not, is never quite explained anywhere, but it does appear to work that way.

I created the playable MP SQ as a mod to the Abstraction mod, possibly the first "mod-to-a-mod" for DS, but we have since gone to greater orders of derivation. Not long after the release of the Abstraction add-on, I also packaged her as a SP-playable character for DS and LoA, and now there is a BW version, based on that, but created by Ddlullu (Dan). A mod to a mod of a mod to a mod (I think).

An Easter Egg in Abstraction was a way to have the Succubi appear topless (or even bottomless) by typing in the correct cheat code. They had actually started out topless, as that's the way Diablo dressed them. The Queen was not exempt from the cheats, so she had topless and nude skins made, which principle I continued with the playable versions.

Stop Press!

I downloaded Dan's BW version and played through a game with it. I liked it, but felt it was incomplete. She didn't use ornaments, and the character selection screen didn't let you choose a skin or hair. I decided to mod Dan's mod (mod⁵ by now).

There were a couple of thing I learned doing that. One is that the texture on an ornament must be saved with the mesh, as the game seems to be unable to find it any other way. The other is that you can't refer to a texture in another folder when you create a gas file for it. I was hoping to avoid re-issuing the female armor textures for the SQ, but it just doesn't work. Since she doesn't use multiple skin colors for her armor, I only needed one set so I used the ones Dan had put together and set up the base skins to share that set.

That last point needs a little clarification. The textures all had a suffix of "01" so when I created the faces.gas I needed to use the same suffix for all her skin options, even though they are different shades. So she has skins b_c_gah_sq_skin_01_01, ..._02_01, ..._03_01 etc.

The image shows her in skin _04_01 and the Vigilant set. Nice ornaments on that!