Skout

Skout
Developer: Soft-Enterprises Publishers: BMS Modern Games Handelsagentur (DE), Lemon Interactive (EU) Platform: Windows Released in EU: 2000 Released in DE: September 1999 This game has debugging material. This game has a prerelease article

This article is a work in progress. ...Well, all the articles here are, in a way. But this one moreso, and the article may contain incomplete information and editor's notes.

Skout is a long-forgotten First-Person Shooter game where you play the titular lone fighter who has to rescue the planet Lugubrios from the evil Kybernoids, destroying the generator entrapping the planet and freeing its populace. Aiding you is your trusty (if somewhat sassy) drone bot, who is used to combat enemies and interact with Powercubes that help you progress through the game.

Sub-Page

Prerelease Info

English Mode

Soft-Enterprises stated on their now-defunct website that they were looking to get publishers to release their games outside their home country wherever possible, though the only other documented country of release was Poland.

Sometime between the release of the German and Polish versions, Soft-Enterprises created an English version of the game that was apparently going to be shown around to interested publishers, but nothing came of it.

For nearly two decades, this English release was presumed lost, having only been available as a partially-made text translation-only demo on the developer's website. However, it was recently discovered that the English version is present in its entirety on the Polish version of the game, with full voice acting and 99% translated.

One simply has to go into the game's options.txt configuration file in the main directory and change the language line from 2 to 0 (1 enables German, also included with the Polish release):

language            0

The option is also changeable in the original German release, where the menus had in fact been translated to English, but the game crashes when any dialog occurs in-game with English mode set. Below is some footage of the game with English mode enabled:

(Source: Albert Hamik)

Unused Textures

Crawler Development Texture

Hidden away in the released builds of the game in both Germany and Poland is a 256x256 texture of an earlier version of the Crawler enemy, which in screenshots from older builds of the game actually had the metallic texture applied to it, which is separate from the textures seen in the game's files.

Development Texture (Container ID: 1401009e)	Final Texture (Container ID: [insert here])	Early Crawler With Metallic Texture

Cheat/Debug Mode

Inside options.txt, add or edit the following line to 1:

cheat_keys          1

With cheats enabled, you're able to use the following keys (that overlap with a WASD layout, annoyingly):

Backspace - toggle wireframe rendering
Q - give all weapons
W - delete all interactables
E - delete all enemies
I - delete all pickups
O - disable AI
F - noclip
C - hybrid camera
B - beam drohne
Menu key - open the Log Window
End - noclip (also?)
Num Lock - toggle profiling overlay
Numpad+ - toggle profiling
PrtScn - disable waiting

Wireframe Rendering	Hybrid Camera	Log Window	Profiling Overlay

(Source: Prism019)