Note: these are NOT finished (bad texture mapping, no shading on the hands), use at your own risk. anyone wanting to finish the job, feel free.

I've always loved the look of Mercurius' Tacticool models, but I could never really get past the whole shooting with one hand dealie. I also can't model for crap, so instead, I blundered about a bit and ended up smashing together the shotgun, grenade launcher and assault rifle with an arm from Arcaniac's models. I also changed the orientation of the assault rifle a bit and reduced the shotgun's size some.
All credit goes to Mercurius and Arcaniac.
...Neither of who I've been able to get in contact with, so if you guys see this and want it gone, just say so.

A bit of warning. When testing it, I did have my FOV increased from 90 to 95. It'll probably look fine at 90, but if not... There ya go.

Brilliant! Only one question: Is there an animation for the cocking of the shotgun?

Another easily fixable issue is that the hand model does not use gouraud filtering.  You can see the lines between polygons.  That's an easy fix though in the import front-end.

Thanks! Negative on the cocking. Like I said, I don't have any modeling or animation talent. I really just dicked around with it until I got it looking half-good.

Can we expect more dicking around? R & R & R's sexy EMP rifle/s could do with an extra arm.

And what of the one handed weapons? There will now be inconsistency as Archiac's arm model looks higher quality and has darker texture (the sleeve). I suppose it doesn't matter, there already is an inconsistency since Mercurius only applied his talents to half of the weapons.

Still, if you care for it I'd love to see an arm for the EMP rifle.

The first colour in the colour palette will appear transparent. Set it to pink so you don't use it accidentally. Or use a PNG. I'm not quite sure what the process is then, but it should be enough to replace the GIF texture with a PNG as long as NewDark is used.

I never would have guessed that. I'll give that a try, thanks.

Can we expect more dicking around? R & R & R's sexy EMP rifle/s could do with an extra arm.

And what of the one handed weapons? There will now be inconsistency as Archiac's arm model looks higher quality and has darker texture (the sleeve). I suppose it doesn't matter, there already is an inconsistency since Mercurius only applied his talents to half of the weapons.

Still, if you care for it I'd love to see an arm for the EMP rifle.

I tried the EMP rifle, but the textures don't compile with it properly. I've noticed that most are .gifs while the EMP rifle has a few .bmps. I've tried them as .bmps and converting them to .gif, but this always happens. I saw that when compiling it from .3ds to .e, it changed the .bmp extensions for the textures to .gif. I tried changing them back before compiling to .bin, but no luck.

The priority order is as follows, where the first has the highest override priority:

    .DDS
    .PNG
    .TGA
    .BMP
    .PCX
    .GIF
    .CEL

just use the png format for all textures and you will be fine. this will make the weapons incompatible with oldDark, but I wouldn't worry about that too much.

Great bit of insight there. I'm not sure why the lack of a hand never bothered me.. but now that I've seen these screenshots I know I won't be able to play the game without it.

I'm pretty sure it was messed up from the start, that is from Arcaniac's weapons pack.

Do I need the original Tacticool for this?

The black arm looks significantly worse, it would be better to fix the UV mapping properly.

As for the shading, that's an option on the material in the conversion tool.  Are you using 3ds2bin?  Just select "phong" (really gourard) or "gourard" for each material.

Great bit of insight there. I'm not sure why the lack of a hand never bothered me.. but now that I've seen these screenshots I know I won't be able to play the game without it.

Well the lack of left arm/hand to me is just the 'retro' graphics design of ss2, and it fits.

Having a static arm mesh, even if they were had proper lighting/looked natural wouldn't fit. To me they would look too rigid, unresponsive and fake.