OddworldMap update: the map comes alive!

A while back I shared OddworldMap.com, an interactive map of every screen in Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exoddus. Until now every object on it was a coloured box with a name. As of this week, the map has come alive.

Close to 6,000 objects across the two games are now drawn as themselves. The sprites are read straight off the PS1 discs (just like the camera screens) and placed by the game's own rules: snapped to its grid, standing on the floor the game stands them on, at their own scale, facing their own way and tinted for their level. Then everything animates at the game's own pace.

What you'll see moving:

Working Mudokons scrub and chisel, take a break and turn around now and then
Sleeping Sligs and Slogs breathe and let off their Zzzs, awake Slogs growl and scratch
Sligs pace between their patrol bounds, pause for as long as their settings say, then turn and head back
Scrabs walk or run their beats and howl, Paramites turn and hiss, Fleeches crawl about or sway on their tongues, and moving bombs roll along their tracks
Slurgs creep, Greeters roll their rounds with the laser sweeping ahead, bats take off and fly their routes, flying Sligs patrol their tracks, and Exoddus's Glukkons pace about
Mines flash, and each UXB blinks the exact pattern its settings spell out
Meat saws and drills work through their strokes, motion detector lasers sweep their rooms, portal doves circle, hint flies buzz about, and Oddysee's lights all pulse together
...and more

And what's best of all... none of it is animated by hand. Each creature runs its behaviour as the game codes it, ported from the decompilation, and every pause and turn is rolled with the game's own dice (a table of random numbers read off the disc). What you're watching is each level going about its business before anyone has spotted Abe.

It's all switchable from the sidebar: "Objects as themselves" (or press o) brings back the old boxes, "Patrols" (or press b) holds the creatures in place, and you can hover or click any creature right where it's standing.

For the full experience (the closest the map gets to playing the game): untick everything in the Display section except "Objects as themselves" and "Patrols". The grid lines, names, arrows and wires go, along with the boxes marking the triggers and zones the game never shows, and what's left is each screen and its inhabitants as the game draws them. The map remembers the choice for your next visit, but you can hit RESET to put it back to defaults.

As before, none of this would exist without AliveTeam's alive_reversing decompilation, which every behaviour here is ported from. Special thanks to paulsapps' original alive project too: most of Exoddus's sprites on the PS1 disc are packed with a compression scheme that only its decoder ever handled.

If something moves differently from how you remember it, I'd love to hear about it, since I'm cross-checking it against the real games. Hope you enjoy watching Rupture Farms get back to work!

Try it here: https://oddworldmap.com/

u/mbobasti — 5 days ago

▲ 52 r/oddworld

I spent 8 hours killing the same Mudokon to find out how many casualties Abe's Oddysee can actually count

There's a RetroAchievements leaderboard for Oddysee called Kill 'Em All: "kill as many Mudokons as possible and finish the game". Most people top out at 87. The best anyone managed was 89, and it stood there for five years. The tool-assisted "maximum casualties" run gets 93 (with glitches), frame-perfect, no human doing that.

All of those answer the question "how many unique Mudokons can you actually reach and kill?" And they're all under the 99 the game ships with.

I got interested in a different question: how high can the counter itself go?

The known trick, in reverse

The famous exploit is the Mudokon count glitch: you push rescues past the game's 99 limit by saving the same Mudokons over and over. It's documented everywhere. But I couldn't find a single person who'd tried it the other way round.

There's probably a reason for that. The three Mudokons that make rescue-farming easy are standing together in the Scrabanian Temple, safe, convenient - but completely unkillable from where you stand! The one Mudokon you can kill over and over is one door away, alone, sharing a room with a Scrab. The famous glitch grew where the game made it convenient. I think nobody went looking in the awkward room.

The lone respawning mudokon being shredded by the Scrab

Eight hours

So I sat in the awkward room and killed the same Mudokon until my thumbs gave out. Every single cycle was an absolute slog. Starting from this specific door in the Scrabanian Temple, I headed inside, dodged the Scrabs and climbed up to the hidden area to jump through a bird portal. There, I’d trick the poor mud into walking off a ledge to be shredded by the Scrab below. But the kill was only half the work. I still had to survive back to the start of the path, exit out to the Temple, walk into a different door just to force the game to save the state, and then back. I did this over 200 times.

Eight hours later, I wrapped up my business in the Scrabanian Temple and returned to RuptureFarms. The counter read 255. The next kill wrapped it straight back to 0.

LCD status board reading -15 / 255

Where it falls apart

255 isn't really the answer, because the game stops letting you finish long before that.

The LCD status board computes Employees = 99 - casualties - escapees. In the TAS video above that's 99 − 93 − 1 = 05, and it renders perfectly. But the font code only reserves room for 3 characters. The moment that number reaches -100 it's four characters wide, and the fourth glyph gets written into memory it doesn't own; right over the header of the next block on the resource heap. The GPU hangs.

That's why my board says "-15" employees at 255 kills: 99 − 255 − 1 = −157, and the stray "7" wanders off to wreck things.

So the game doesn't break because you killed too many Mudokons. It breaks because the number got too wide! And only at the exact instant a status board is drawn on screen. In the temple you can farm forever. It's Return to RuptureFarms, where the boards live, that ends the run.

The answers, depending on what you're asking:

89 — most unique Mudokons killed by a human, and the leaderboard record for five years
93 — most unique Mudokons killed (tool-assisted, glitched)
197 — highest count where the board still renders cleanly (99 − 197 − 1 unavoidable rescue = −99, exactly three characters)
203 — the most I could reach the end credits with
255 — as high as the counter itself will go, but you're not finishing that run

203 out of 99 Mudokons. xD

Maximum 203 casualties without the game freezing before reaching the end

reddit.com

u/mbobasti — 2 months ago

▲ 153 r/oddworld

I built an interactive map of all of Abe's Oddysee & Exoddus

Hey folks! Longtime Oddworld fan here. I made a thing for us and wanted to share it: https://oddworldmap.com

It's an interactive map of the entire first two games. Every single camera screen is extracted directly from the game discs and laid out as one connected map you can pan and zoom around, with every object marked on top.

What you can do with it:

Explore both games (Oddysee and Exoddus) - every level, path and screen
See where every door, bird portal, express well and teleporter leads - click one to follow it to its destination, even across levels
Find and search every object: Mudokons, LCD status boards, levers, hazards, Sligs, Scrabs, you name it
Toggle collision lines and foreground layers, as well as measure distances (could be handy for the speedrun/glitch crowd)
Grab a shareable link to any exact spot on the map
Free, no install, and it works on your phone

None of this would exist without the incredible reverse-engineering work of the AliveTeam / alive_reversing project. I built the extractor and viewer on top of their decompilation. It's a non-commercial fan project, and it's fully open source.

Would love to hear what's useful, what's missing, or any bugs you spot. Hope it's fun to poke around.

u/mbobasti — 3 months ago

u/mbobasti