"Of which we still have all the originals"

awe my gawd

I would live in a Turkish Prison for 6 months just to get a copy of those Graphics.

http://i51.tinypic.com/scanht.png

http://i52.tinypic.com/2i8eujb.png

http://i55.tinypic.com/o5xfdt.png

http://i55.tinypic.com/noh7ck.png

http://i54.tinypic.com/6h5i6h.png

I want high res sligs :fuzsad: but on the bright side at least it confirms the existence of those graphics :fuzgrin: and no doubt the rest of the games assets.

See? Told you they wouldn't lose it, neither the graphics nor the source.
Beta screenshots look very very good. They're too good to be fakes. The only thing that looks slightly suspicious is the Feeco screenshot. Is Abe supposed to continue by walking behind this pillar? (That replaced the lever and slam door)

At least this supports our Idea of an HD remake.

the last image seems to be missing the plants fg,as abe is actually sitting on it lol

Is 640x480 considered HD?..

It's SD, vs 640*240 which is LD I believe. (It isn't standard so you can't tell for sure) Color depth is also a HUGE improvement.
They can also rerender in higher resolutions.

I thought they didn't still have the original 3d scenes. The fb message says they have the original rendered images at 640*320, which is a good thing :). But, I'm sure ppl have said that they no longer have the original 3d scenery, which they would need to re-render everything. Sadly, 640*320 isn't high enough these days to re-release the game with high success at drawing in new players.. imo..

640x480 you mean. Are you sure they lost it? I doubt they would lose it if they didn't lose the HQ images.

no, i'm not sure... I thought that's what I've heard though ;/.. thanks for the correction.. a few posts ago, you need to correct your resolution too :P forgot to tell you. (unless I'm wrong, but that aspect ratio seems a bit too widescreen...)

The current AO/E is 640x240, 8:3 ratio, scaled to 640x480 in runtime, which is 4:3 ratio.
The 240 is probably LD (Low definition) and the 480 one is SD (Standard definition)

really? that's pretty bad quality ;O

Not that bad, but 640x480x24 looks significantly better than 640x240x15 (I'm pretty sure the color quality is 15 bit and not 16 bit, where the last bit is left unused)

I have now created a movie from this picture with sounds and music, like in gameplay:

whoa! elum gets blown away by blue rings lol ,is that the part where on the left should be the bees and up the red rings? edit:are there leftover cams like that one in the lvl file?

I'm not saying that 640x480 is HD (it's SD) but the character animations would be good enough to be put in a 1920x1080 scene with no upscaling.

I think it makes sense to re-render stuff from the original maya source in proper 1080p rather than botch some SD gfx into the game, since it would need a near re-write either way :P

Only problem is that would be even more effort and a massive task to get everything re-rendered :( Assuming they still have *all* of the source data.

NovaMan: It's an elum trap - it just kept the elum where it was until Abe disabled it.

Apparently their file archives are not very well organised. Bear in mind that when they rereleased AO and AE, they needed to ask fans for copies of the foreign language versions and manuals. Also remember that any files they have will be more than a decade out of date; the technology to open them may not be readily available.

Would they have compiled the games again before re-releasing them?

I don't know. It's possible they may have needed to tweak them slightly to integrate them with Steam, but perhaps that can all be done externally. All we know is that the reason why Acheivements were not added to AO or AE was because it was described as being simply too much work to set up an environment in which compilation was possible.

I imagined it should be deadly for elum.

Probably because translations were not directly developed by OI? And I doubt the format compatibility issues. Format compatibility isn't dropped that quick, especially in a market such as 3D modelling software.

You do realise it's been 13 years since Abe's Exoddus was released, right?

so ill go try to unpack scrabania.lvl to see if i can find anything old or forgotten in there like that trap,or a cam with it

As I said in a previous post, it was replaced in the puzzles by honey. Honey won't kill Elum, unless he drowns. That was a joke, by the way. Don't ask me how to drown elum. Jeez.

I'm working from my notoriously inaccurate memory, but I do think that they said that they had copies of all the versions of the game backed up. Makes sense they would keep them, even if they didn't port the translations in-house.

As for the format compatibility; I was talking about the compilation environment rather than the 3d models.

EDIT: Actually, rereading the thread, I think I may have been talking about both the compilation environment and the 3d models. I stand corrected. However, bear in mind that the backgrounds were not all modelled in 3d. Particularly in AE, individual elements were modelled in 3d and then assembled in 2d - we don't know how high the quality of their sources were but I suspect they weren't HD.

Compilation environment is pretty much irrelevant because they'd have to redo the environment-dependent parts will have to be rewritten anyway for HD support. Porting from one compilation environment (NOT platform) to another isn't a too complicated action anyway. Not sure about models, but there should be enough tools to allow converting them from an old format to a newer one.

The 3D-2D scenes are quite tricky though, but hopefully in the theoretical case they remake the game in HD they shouldn't be very hard to reproduce.

Only if you find the secret aquatic level with the amazing sea Mudokons, though.

What will kill a elum? a fleech or greeter.

No 2d platformer oddworld game has areas as crossfades to lakes where abe can swim and dive. Abe will kill be killed by underwater sligs or slig submarine. And then, there is no snow with ice in oddworld. Season corruption must happen.