Legacy:Solid Snake/SoulKeeper Review

The Soul Keeper Beta Technical Review

Reviewed on the 27th of October, 2005

Homepage	http://thesoulkeeper.helm-systems.com/soulkeeper/
Type	Total Conversion
Genre	Thid Person Melee
Modes	Multiplayer/Rudimentary bot support

Introduction

This is the second one of my technical reviews, with the first one being the COR Review.

UI Interface

The Soul Keeper has kept more or less the same menu interface as UT2004 with a graphical update. They did make a 3D background however, and it shifts to different locations when you choose a different menu. However, what I found annoying was that these transitional scenes had to be watched every single time, before the menus could be accessed. This occured you you switched from the main menu to a sub menu. It was nice watching it the first few times, but the 50th time just got annoying. Possibly there is an option to turn it off... I didn't look very hard for it admittingly.

Log

The Soul Keeper wrote a somewhat large log file. Within 10 minutes of 'play', it generated a 1mn log file. While access nones may be not too problematic, it is better to remove as many access nones as possible from the script. This may increase FPS, but its dependent on the machine. Also noted that some log lines were written for debug purposes ... probably retains since the melee code came from Chaos UT anyways.

Control scheme

The only control scheme I found problematic was the horse controls. They felt ... a bit odd and overly sensitive.

Miscellanous issues

The Soul Keeper on extraction included all of the DLL files within the System directory which is completely unneccessary. It also suprises me why they had them there at all. While I am a little cynical and paranoid, I see no reason why to distribute them again. After all they came with the game in the first place. To this date, I don't know any mod who has received the UE2 source code to allow modifications to these DLL files. The other issue I am concerned about is security reasons...

Also what does SoulKeeper.exe do? I ran it... but it didn't do anything.

I then had a look around the directories and found a couple of files which made me wonder why they existed within such as 2k4menus.utx, AnnouncerEvil.uax, AnnouncerMale2k4.uax. There may have been more, but looking within these three files I didn't see anything changed within them ... but what does concern me is that they add up to 40mb's. This is totally unneccessary to have people to download these, when they already exist.

Maps

Some maps were built solidly and ran very well. Other maps were built a little strangely, with complex BSP architecture that should have been static meshes. While it may be an excuse to possibly have the more detailed for shadowing reasons, looking at the shadowing on the BSP I saw nothing special. It may even be better to convert these to a static mesh and then preprender shadow maps for them... it may help with some of the FPS issues on certain maps.

Skeletal Meshes

Looking within the skeletal mesh files, I found that there was no sort of optimizations done at all. Partial rigidization on a lot of the meshes could have helped with the FPS a little. However, as with mixed-rigidization it would be important to see if the optimization actually helps or if it doesn't. The only real way to test for that is to benchmark each model ... which could take a while to do.

Conclusion

Soul Keeper looks very nice and I do actually like the concept and the ideas within this mod, but I do hope they address some of the issues that I have looked at here. There are probably more issues relating to its construction, and I may go into them in further detail later on.