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/