AO/AE HD images on the Steam store pages.
 

This thread on the Steam Oddworld forum is intriguing:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=1382154

http://cdn.steampowered.com/v/gfx/ap...g?t=1275939146 an additional image

At first I assumed that these screenshots were just how the game looked when fit for a 640x480 screen, but comparing it to other screenshots clearly shows that the graphics have been improved, Abe himself looks considerably different.

I'm not sure how long these screenshots have been up, but I've never seen them before. The other possibility is that these are just game artwork that looks almost identical to the game itself, but it would be very interesting if it was a sign of things to come.

In the VG247 interview, Stewart Gilray was asked if there would be HD ports of the old games. He said that anything they do on consoles (assumingly PC too) would be in HD, which makes the idea even more plausable. The only thing that seems strange is why thse images would be up on Steam, unless Valve/Lorne are teasing us with screenshots of the games.

(Now waiting for someone to tell me that these are 10 year old images from the games manual etc. :|)

Those screens are looking good, thanks for finding these. Hoping this is something new.

They look blurry enough to me that they're probably just upscaled version of old screenshots.

He was pretty vague on that point though, or even if there would be anything console-based. My presumption was that they were focussing on Steam right now but would consider consoles for future, new games.

I've had this screenshots for years:
http://oddworldlibrary.net/archives/...=SSAE0006.jpg1

like the other screenshots on this page that are higher res:
http://oddworldlibrary.net/archives/...php?menu=SSAE1

I'm going to be so disappointed if all they do is make HD remakes of the games.

Better than nothing. And they won't just do that.

If they're releasing achievements for the old games anyway, then making them run in HD seems quite likely but I still doubt it.

They won't remake the old games in HD, that would pretty much require every sprite, every graphic in the game to be remade from scratch. And I dunno what upscaling is going to do except make it look even more pixilated.

It still (in my humble opinion) doesn't seem logical to do a HD revamp of a game that only really lives on due it's own dedicated fanbase. Fair play if they are initially doing it to try and reboot the franchise as a whole but, surely standalone HD revamps doesn't live up to most expectations of the the 'JAW and Oddworld K.I.S.S.I.N.G' news we got the other week? There just has to be more to it all...

Edit: That really is promising to hear.

I did suspect that these had been up for a while... do you know what these shots actually are? I can't imagine them going to the effort of making shots that look this good for no reason: http://oddworldlibrary.net/archives/...=SSAE0011.jpg1

Yes. Just like I explained in the Beta thread, these are unfortunately fake. These are the old HQ images (640x480) poorly upscaled to high resolution, causing pixelation and blurriness.

I think those are shots from the PC version, that's what I was talking about when I asked you if the gameplay looks better on PC, Nate.

It really doesn't look better, it's the same resolution as the PS1 version and if anything it looks worse up close on a monitor than on a TV.

Ah well, it looks like HD Abe will remain just an idea. I'm still hopeful for some kind of update on the current PC Steam versions, other than just the achievements being added. As some people rightly said though, it would be better for OWI/JAW to work on new material than spending all their time and recources making the old games look nicer.

I don't think they would, everything was made in 3D Studio Max then rendered as a sprite right? So, with the power of technology today, I can only assume all they have to do is re-render the projects they still have, it may take a bit of time but maybe that's what they have been doing over the past couple of years?

Thats assuming they still have all the original 3D files.

I don't see any reason why they would want to toss those out.

They would need to use high resoloution textures too, which is time consuming. They would have to create the texture map then add it to the 3DS MAX file, then render it again. Just think how many screens there are in Oddysee, nevermind Exoddus, plus all the sprites and animations that go with it :(

I doubt they'd have to retexture anything. High texture and model quality was the advantage of having all the graphics pre-rendered. The main problem was probably just fitting those renders on the disc and into memory.. hence the low resolution renderings. The textures used in the renders were insanely high quality for the time, and I bet it would look darn good today as well... if it was re-rendered at a higher resolution.

It's been over ten years. Technology changes, files are lost. I'd be surprised if the original 3D files still existed considering both OWI and GT have been six feet under for some time now.

Considering that they asked fans for non-english copies of the games so that they could be put on Steam, I'd say their data storage and retreival process is non-ideal.

I don't think OWI did the translation and foreign voice acting in house. For AO and AE I believe GT Interactive did that, so it would make sense that OWI wouldn't have those files themselves.

It's only just occured to me, but how do you think Steam achievements are going to work on the Abe games? At the moment the games are so low res that the Steam overlay has been left out completely, if it was usable it wouldn't even fit on the screen properly. As part of the overlay, achievements will have the same problem.

People don't want to see a 5 inch low-res popup box cover half the screen just to tell them they've unlocked an achievement. Sure, they could do it with no popups atall, but that's really most of the fun with achievements anyway. It seems to me they wouldn't waste their time and effort on making half-functioning achievements, so they must have made some sort of change to the games first.

I believe the little popup box is customizable per game. For instance some games have it shown at the top of the screen rather than at the bottom because it would block HUD info. I think a similar level in customization could be done to the size. It's just that most modern games don't need it due to their standard high resolution.

yeah I don't think this would cause any major problem

They can't just size it down because if they did, they'd be working with very few pixels and chances are you wouldn't be able to read the text in the overlay. Like trying to draw an 8 in a block of 6 pixels. They might have to rework the original games to run at a reasonable resolution for the overlay to look decent, but that doesn't mean the game will look any better.

Here, I just made a mockup on how it would look as-is. I took a screenshot from Abe's Exoddus and then took a screenshot of one of the overlay pop-ups from another game. It's actually not so bad as it is, but the popups could be pretty huge depending on your monitor. Exoddus runs at 640x480, so if you have another game that works with the Steam Overlay, set it to 640x480 and that's exactly how the overlay would look in the Oddworld games.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...eamOverlay.jpg

So really, it would be good enough as is... it just wouldn't look that great.

These look like moded old screen shots:D

Why do these images even exist?