Pulse Rifle

Pulse Rifle

The Pulse Rifle is a weapon that does not appear in the final version. It looks somewhat like a grey version of the Doom Plasma Rifle, but it has fins on its side and a computer screen on the top near its back. By default, the gun fires grenades just like Quake's Grenade Launcher does. In fact, the projectile fired by it is exactly the same as the one fired by the Quake GL, though the texture seems to be partially corrupted. If the player acquired "Pulse Bullets", they can switch between grenades and firing bullets by hitting the 2 key while the gun is out. If they want to switch to grenades again, they can hit the 2 key again. Whenever the 2 key is hit while the gun is out, the gun will play a cool animation where the barrel spins 180 degrees and fins on each side of the gun come out, then go back to the sides of the gun. When the gun is fired in "bullet" mode, it sounds exactly like the M41A Pulse Rifle in the Alien movies. The Pulse Rifle shares several traits with the final's Slugger, like being able to fire grenades and switch between firing a regular gun and firing grenades by hitting the key the gun is mapped to. The .dll file calls the grenades “Cordite Grenades”, which is what the Slugger's grenades are called. It seems very likely that the Pulse Rifle evolved into the Slugger during development. It is a very glitchy weapon that tends to crash the game whenever it is summoned via a cheat. This seems to happen much more often in E2M3 than in E1M3, though there doesn't seem to be a reason why. An early .bmp texture for the Pulse Rifle can be found in data\skins folder. It is much less detailed and browner than the one in the pre-alpha, as half of the texture is taken up by the flare from firing the gun. It looks pretty close to a weapon seen in very early Episode 4 screenshots, making it likely that the mystery gun is the Pulse Rifle.

weapon seen in early screenshots.