Review: StuffSwapper 3.1

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Jesco

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[ Transcript of review for StuffSwapper 3.1 | Posted by Shuri on 2003-06-27 | Score: 9.5 ]
<b>Some Info</b>
For those of you who are new to StuffSwapper, please check out the last review since it explains the entire concept of the mutator and how to use it correctly. If you want a one-line summary, it basically allows you to import weapons from different mods/mutators and play them all together at once.

<b>Some old rewards</b>
Let me point out that everything praised about previous versions of StuffSwapper holds true in this version. Everything that worked before, works now. Every reason for its high scores and being twice a pick of the week is still valid. This being so, I concentrated on reviewing only the new aspects of this very sweet toy.

<b>Fix That Weapons Priority List</b>
First, something I'm glad somebody finally did something about: A fix for the weapons priority list. When you occasionally have over 30 different full mods installed at the same time and around 50 weapon-modding mutators (like any other UT nut, I check'em all out whether I'm reviewing or not), your priority list becomes a disaster that you have to reset manually every couple of games. (Don't even ask about my ServerPackages list..) A workable automatic fix is included in this mutator. It's not perfect (perfect would be the code being fixed at the source, maybe in U2), but it does the job.

<b>Randomize</b>
Secondly, random weapons and pickups. Rather than configuring specific weapons to specific slots, you can set up lists of random replacements for every weapons slot, starting weapons, and pickups. The configuration is a little effort intensive, but it gives you nearly full control. After selecting "Random" from the weapons list, you are then given another menu to set up ten more weapons. After setting up the pop-up menu, these weapons will become the random weapons.

The only thing missing is the ability to include the default UT items in the random lists. You can either have the UT item, no item, or a mod item (random or specific). Now, after you get all those lists tweaked to your satisfaction, it's time to try'em out.

This features works nicely as it randomly changes the weapon at the selected spawn point. For example, say you made the Flak Cannon's replacement weapon random. Now, a weapon will be randomly picked from the Flak Cannon's "Random" list and will spawn at the place that the Flak Cannon normally spawns. It sounds a bit confusing, but once you use the mutator, everything should make sense to you.

The nice feature of StuffSwapper where it automatically selects the right ammo for pickup to go with your selected weapon works great also. This means that even though there are randomly spawning weapons, the ammo will match the randomly spawning weapons.

<b>Definitely check it out!</b>
As it stands in this revision, the random weapons items feature is quite amazing. Not only does this allow you to play with several mods/mutators at the same time, but you get to experience basically every single weapon in one game. There are a few bugs, however, such as missing the default UT weapons, and also there are times when item/weapon respawning seems to be a little bit off. Lastly there is one rather large bug with wepaon conflicts. When cycling through the random weapon list, it starts to fail on weapon conflict resolution. If you pick up another weapon, it's fixed until you grab a different weapon that takes the same slot. Then you get the new weapon with no ammo and you lose ALL your other weapons.

The bug is not really in StuffSwapper. I've been helping Shargl debug this problem, and it appears to be a problem with the original Unreal weapons. As long as those are not in the game, no other mod combination I could come up with caused a problem. It's probably a conflict between the UT code and the Unreal code for weapons. Shargl is working on replacing the Unreal weapons with a modded version of them, probably OldSkool. Until then, as long as you don't use the Unreal weapons, StuffSwapper is nearly perfect.

-Daemon

Note: Version 3.2 (link provided below) fixes many of the bugs mentioned in the review.

(Review transferred from Modsquad 1)