Munch's Oddysee PC Patch?
 

So here I was, getting itchy to get 100% achievements for MO and SW, only to find out after some reading that the Steam version of MO is still bugged out and has a number of achievements that are broken and can not be obtained, period.

These bugs have been fixed on the Playstation version. Hell, the HD version has been released on the Playstation. On the PC? We still have a shitty version full of bugs that is in bad need of updating but just gets hung out to dry for some reason. People are not happy.

Why does the Playstation receive all the love? Is JAW even planning on releasing a bug fix patch for MO at any point at all? I realize N&T is your prime focus at the moment, but come on.

This seems to be the most recent word on it.

arnold - MAR 27TH, 2014 AT 8:57 AM
Sad decision for not target on PC.
Please reconsider it.

Alf - MAR 31ST, 2014 AT 12:01 PM
Howdy, Arnold. We’re not working on the PC version right now, but we’d like to return to it later. No promises, but it’s definitely not dumped and forgotten about.


The most recent patch only came out in Feb when they wanted it out early 2013 so it seems that New n Tasty is definitely taking up most of their time.

It would be nice to see Munch HD on Steam but I can't imagine it being a huge priority.

I personally just want them to leave it alone altogether and worked on new Oddworld games.

Seems I was wrong. Stew addressed it yesterday on twitter.

Stewart Gilray ‏@stewartgilray Apr 7
@TheNoobyNinjaHD @lorne_lanning ... We're getting close with NnT now, so once we HAVE finished that I will be put resources on to Munch PC

Ah I must have missed that. Glad to hear they're at least going to return to it.

I've still never been able to play it :(

Is it really that broken? Sounds like the only things they fixed with the PC releases were the ATi/AMD video driver garbage (which really is because those cards suck for driver compatibility to be fair).

When asked about Stranger, Stew said "it was a more complex story. We suffered at the hands of AMD/ATI’s poor OpenGL drivers, and as 50% of the purchasers had ATI boards, they basically couldn’t run the game."

So I imagine it's a similar situation with Munch.

Thought as much, I could go on forever about AMD/ATi's crap driver support, either way, it sucks.

My game crashes randomly. it did it almost every time you got out of the first area.

Also, apparently they cannot fix the resolution for the old Abe games because the original PC code has been lost. To fix it would require them to reverse engineer the game.

I've always wondered if they have stuff just lying in the old OWI office. I highly doubt it but you never know.

Lorne has said on several occasions that data preservation is extremely important to him. So I'm assuming every piece of concept art and every asset ever made for Oddworld games are stored somewhere.

I don’t think so. Stranger was ported from the Xbox version of DirectX to run on OpenGL for the PC and PS3 versions. Munch was ported straight across* to DirectX.

If I remember correctly, Stranger was done in-house from the start, but the original PC port for Munch was done by a third party and JAW then had to go back and fix their shit.

* And by “straight across” I mean “from old-ass Xbox DirectX including all the completely incompatible hardware-specific API calls to new PC DirectX with proper APIs and brand new controller and keyboard/mouse support and multiple-resolution support”

Is all this difficulty rather specific to Oddworld or have other original Xbox ports had similar problems? (Like Halo for example).

The original Halo port would have (probably) run on the same DX version between Xbox and PC.

It's one thing changing platform, but retrospectively updating the codebase to deal with 10 years of API development is a pretty awful task for any team. Many ports of old games to new systems would suffer from the same stupid difficulty.

Every game is a bit different, though. Sometimes you'll get things like Jak and Daxter, which was written in it's own programming language called GOAL and had 10 different rendering engines.