Desktop Oddworld?
 

I had this idea a while back, I wanted to see if anyone else found it interesting. Hopefully, if it got enough interest, someone would have a crack at it.

The idea of this comes from a little desktop toy called Esheep. If you've messed with it and know what it is, you can skip the next paragraph.

Esheep is basically a cute little application which would create a little cartoon sheep on your desktop, and could be used multiple times to make multiple sheep. The sheep would occasionally interact with each other, and do idle animations, but would mostly walk around the environment that was available to them. They could also walk around on top of folder windows and such. If they walked off the side of the screen, they would reappear and fall safely onto a window or your desktop toolbar.

What I was thinking was; Seen as though we have the sprites, and sounds, would it be possible to make something similar for say, a Slig, that would patrol the top of a window if put there? Maybe even a Mudokon slave (scrubbing your windows) which it would occasionally beat as it walked past? Maybe it could even fall asleep or say 'What?' as you click out of it's sight line, and shoot at the cursor if it saw it click?

Just an idea for a little desktop toy, which could be expanded to include other things. Like Paramites, Slogs (which you could 'drop' meat or bones from your cursor for respectively), Scrabs, Greeters, Fleeches... you get it. The Esheep program demonstrates that, in theory, this should be possible, and the workload would be halved seen as though we've got the sprites and sounds. The only real effort would be creating the thing's behaviour to be as it is in the games.

Unfortunately, I'm no coder and I wouldn't have a clue where to start, so I'm hoping someone with some talent would be able to pick this up. Would anyone else see any interest in this?

That's an amazing idea

I think this is a cool idea

I like it :D Too bad I use Linux and not winblowz. It would be cool though.

For anyone possibly interested in this, the idea I'm basing it off is this;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESheep

I strongly recommend trying that program out if you want to see what I mean. Obviously it could be much prettier than that program as we've access to better sprites / sounds. Maybe to make things easier, one could reverse engineer that program so we know basically how it works? Again, I've no real clue about these things, just thoughts.

I also realise that the sprites will be small on anything but a small resolution, but I assume scaling them up wouldn't be so difficult.

I think that would be a very creative Oddworld thing to do.

I think we could use the sega styled sprites, that mudokon one by enchilado is very good, if we could get sprite cycles then put them together, and add action timers and stuff, it could work.

So... Are there any capable programmers here who have expressed interest in this? I'm here, expressing interest, but I'm not sure I have enough experience to build a program which can interact with the GUI of an operation system. Also I'm fairly renown for leaving projects unfinished...

Maybe I'll research into the Esheep engine and see if it would be possible to just change the sprites and sounds.

~Blessed be

It doesn't look complex but we need a set off sprites and motions and perhaps an interactive slig as well

Sprites and motions are easy. You won't need them until the base code is written and working. Interactive sligs should be written, again, once the base code is completed.
STM, if you feel that this project would lack complexity it would imply that you know roughly what to do. If this is the case; would you mind sharing what you know?

~Blessed be

Haha I never said that, you know I'm pants at everything besides game ideology, it was made obvious in Fillin's Proclamation XD however,I expect someone with good coding skills would be all right. I just said sprites is 1/2 of it.

FYI I started to play around with this, it shouldn't be too hard. The hard part is getting the ripped sprites together properly, and the collision WindowFromPoint() logic correct.

If I get it anywhere near working and loose interest I'll post the source.

That's good news, thanks Paul for taking up the challenge!
If you need the real sprites from the first game, I still have them from when everyone was playing with the .lvl files in a very old thread - if you haven't got them already I can send them over. Good luck!

EDIT: Found the thread, and realised you were the one who was decrypting everything for us in the first place. Oops! I'll still help in any way I can though :P

Im gonna try this :) The idea is amazing! So cool!

Quick question, do you still have the corrected pitch sounds that you ripped from the PS CDs in this thread?

http://www.oddworldforums.net/showthread.php?t=17514&

The specific link for the pitch corrected ones is broken. Just thought I'd ask as they could be useful here :)

Somewhere on this forum is a complete set of sounds for sligs and mudokons, we don't need the origional sprites do we?

EDIT: You got em GSplat, there fine though

Here is an image of my hacky test app.. with ESheep running at the same time ;)

Haha, that's cute! The sheep isn't quite sure of what to make of it :p

Once transparency is working fine on the sprites, they'll certainly stop looking 'hacky' and more lovely - at least, in terms of screenshots, hehe.

I'm guessing a logical path to take will be to have it move to the boundaries of the window, turn round, and walk back to the other, then repeat, regardless of what's going on around it. Then add code for reacting to stuff. I think once that step's complete you should send it to me for some delicious alpha/beta testing! :)

Wow, this is amazing. Unfortunatly I'm useless in scripting/coding.
P.S: I just got two of these little fellas running around my screen, they're awesome!

Here is my plan:

1. Improve the code base cause its a hacked mess
2. Do proper window to window collision detection and movement
3. Add transparency
4. Add a walking animation and make it move around

I have been looking at these thing run around my screen, jumping off the ceiling and all sorts of wild crap. And I also noticed a kind of menu bar when you hold CTRL and Shift and double click the Esheep. It shows all the commands and activities it could do. Could Paul do something with this?

Perhaps we could fish out some old sega style sprites from that thread instead of using the real ones. Then we could have like two mudokons and sligs. I was thinking of some motions, do you think this as well?

One mudokon comes and walks around before setting down and washing the window, he wanders around before getting shot by a randomly generated slig, birds fly away and then reappear and the process repeats. If you have two mudokons then they talk to each other like hello, hello, follow me, ok, far, lol

I think we need groundwork first. I agree (oh I rue the day), however, that we shouldn't use the original sprites. Unless anyone still has contact with Axyrl, we'd have to use Carnix's . I've underlined have because we don't have a choice, not because I think them inferior.

I downloaded eSheep earlier. It was a bit buggy in response to other windows and the animations were shoddy, but it was amusing. I'd love to have a little Elum walking across my screen while I do homework!

I can muster up sprite sheets something similar to Arxryl's work if need be. I know the sprites I currently have submitted to these forums are not of a style truly compatible with this project.

I find it a real shame that I also must agree that using the original sprites is a big no-no. Unless someone here knows something I don't, acquiring them is not worth the effort. That's really saying something. Getting those sprites has failed for over 12 years. I really don't believe it can be done any more.

Sorry for the bum-out. Now for a happier tone: I'm really glad to see Paul here. I may only know of one of his accomplishments, ripping a considerable amount of sprites strait out of the game, but I have faith that he can waltz through this project. Is it me or does he always look like he knows what he's talking about?

But yeah, wrapping up my post by referring back to the beginning; I'm still capable of making mediocre sprite sheets so if it comes down to using sprites of mine, don't hesitate to ask for new, better suited, ones.

~Blessed be

Wait, what? Using the original sprites is a big no-no because no one's ever been able to rip the sprites from the game, but you're glad Paul is on board because you're aware that he's ripped sprites from the game?

I don't recall the success of ripping all the Oddworld sprites, do you? Paul's attempt was just considerable.

This is so unless he actually can continue to rip the rest, which would come under "Unless someone here knows something I don't".

Sorry for not making that loop-hole obvious.

~Blessed be

IIRC, the sprites were successfully extracted in this thread here, by Paul.

http://www.oddworldforums.net/showth...highlight=.lvl

And I have them on my PC right now... so we do have access to them, not that we need all of them.

There are no action sprites in that pack. No walking, running, throwing, talking or other such images have been ripped.

That's why we should just use Arxyl's also, I never thought about an elum, nice one Phlyum

We can't use Axyrl's because we can't ask for permission as I mentioned (alluded to) earlier.

I can possibly whip something up on MS paint, but I can't really make things from scratch. Unless I have something to work with, I can't help.

http://a.imageshack.us/img804/8657/l...zespritesm.png
Would a style like this do the trick?

I can whip these up nice and quick, got some recolours for Abe sitting on my computer, and if you like them enough I may make a separate thread for them hosting loincloths. :P

If you don't like them they'll sit rotting on my PC, constantly deprived of clothing.

~Blessed be

EDIT: The black in this sheet doesn't show well on an Industrial theme. Open the image on it's own or change your theme for a better look.

I like those, there easy to blow up too. I can dig out some slig sprites but I have no walking paths or anything.

You can use these if you want but I've lost the walking motions so if you want to just take the mask you can

EDIT: Shit sorry for the double post I didn't see my last one.

I think carnixes sprites would be brilliant for the job. On high resolutions though, they would appear a bit small, that's my only worry.

I'll be releasing a new version of my lvl file converter soon which should convert all sprites (although some lack palette info)

Well Paul, I sincerely hope you succeed.
Although it would make the following relatively redundant...

I figured since you guys like the sprites I uploaded in my last post I'd do a little more:
http://a.imageshack.us/img594/7959/l...zespriteso.png

Does anyone else think the sligs need less forehead?

~Blessed be

Less forehead more tenticle haha.

Nice also, love how you signed the pic with blessed be! XD

I've managed to rip all of the slig sprites over in the LVL files thread (or it looks like all of em :P).

There is a lot of bugs in my floating window stuff, its getting on my nerves so I'm going to leave it as is.

I'll prob do this:

1. Add a system tray icon to set the number of sligs/a way to exit the app
2. Add slig walking, falling, hit floor, turning and idle animations
3. Release it along with the fugly source

Edit: If someone could do point 2 that would be cool (i.e put them all into one sprite sheet where all frames are the same size)