Category Technical Review

What is a technical review?

Instead of a review discussing how fun or playable a mod is a technical review will only focus on the technical aspects of the mod.

Some things of interest can be:

• User Interface
• Control Scheme
• Bugs\Issue, like:
  • log spam
  • craches
  • other glitches
• Gameplay design
• Code design (if possible)

...

Depending on the type of mod not all things of interest might apply.

How to write a technical review

First of all, a review should not be a flamebait. You should point out both the good and the bad things in a mod. But always keep it on a technical level, it's not about if you like the maps they included or the textures they used.

If you are writing your first technical review you might want to read the existing reviews to see what their focus was.

Discussion

El Muerte: SolidSnake made the first technical review and I think it's something good that can be done on the wiki. These reviews can give people some insight in things other developers think that a mod team did right or wrong. The above info might need to be improved.

Solid Snake: From my perspective technical reviews should only really focus as to how a mod was made rather than what the mod has made. Thus if you wish to write one, looking at their coding style is important, looking at the way they designed the structure of the mod is important (Do they have lots of redundant textures, models, packages?), looking at the way the game works (If task A is critical to a player, is it difficult/easy for him/her to do it?) and finally looking at the 'professional' aspect of the mod in that do the content actually match each other (do the textures look uniform ... an obvious one is where some textures are photos and others are hand drawn). A technical review isn't going to award a mod 9 out of 10 or whatever, but it simply discusses what you think they could do better, or was done wrong and what was done right. It is different compared to a normal review as such, and people who read this are going to be people who are interested in how mods are made. Your average Joe Schmo isn't going to care about these reviews...

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