High-Res Abe's Oddyssee & Exoddus

[oddidiot]

I've spotted a couple of screenshots from oddworld library of the original games in High-Res...
is there a way of getting these games to look this good? or do I have to sign up for a petition to get them to make a remastered edition?

[Alf Shall Rise]

Pretty sure those were just used as promotional images for the game way back when.

[Nate]

Also, good luck on that petition. If it was gonna happen, it already would have happened. And it didn't happen due to the various reasons discussed here.

[Phylum]

Can you call 640x480 high resolution?

It's hard to be sure with the sprites, but the backgrounds appear to be the same assets pre-compression. Sadly in the case of AO and AE compression involved vertically halving everything, which is why these look much smoother.

[Varrok]

640x480 is definitely a higher resolution than 640x240

[Phylum]

The assets are squashed, but does the game actually renders at 640x240. It does some pixel effects like blending, shadows and I think some hue shifting (at least in AE), and those might be done at a higher resolution than the squashed assets.

[Varrok]

As far as I know PSX version is interlaced. PC version had interlacing as an option, for increasing perfomance.

[Phylum]

Oh yeah the PS1 couldn't even do 480p what am I saying.

[Admiral Zaarin]

The assets are squashed, but does the game actually renders at 640x240. It does some pixel effects like blending, shadows and I think some hue shifting (at least in AE), and those might be done at a higher resolution than the squashed assets.

Actually it seems to be possible to render at larger resolutions. At least the game definitely accepts background files that are larger than 640x240. I've made a short mod for Oddysee a couple of years ago using Paul's editor and I remember that I used images twice as large as Oddysee default resolution and as far as I recall they actually displayed in better resolution in-game and I even had to size them down because they looked too sharp comparing to the sprites.

[abe619]

I always hoped that someone would mod AO and AE, perhaps with a technique like rotoscoping, there has to be a way.

And if it's too hard to do with the pc versions, perhaps there could be something like external sprite/texture packs for the ps1 versions on emulators or something, or atleast a filter (This last one is already possibly but doesn't look as good).

[Admiral Zaarin]

Edit: looked up my sources and it's somewhat different than I've said above: it is possible to display 640x480. Not much but still better then the original.

[Job McYossie]

please, say how

[Varrok]

Just. The PC game runs at 640x480. You can mod the 640x480 backgrounds there, with Paul's editor or something, I guess. Even if the original ones are 640x240, which is half as that.

[Paul]

The hi-res ones look better because they are 24-bit 640x480. The PC ones are 640x240 and use shitty MDEC/JPEG like compression at 16-bit. The sprites are even more gimped out - there are like 8 compression methods and all of them are either 4,8 or 16bit colour depth.

Compared to the PSX version PC data has twice the horizontal resolution in general. The ALIVE engine I'm working on will accept higher bit depth and higher res images. Also it reads both PSX and PC data so its easy to compare how they look side by side.

Edit: Also... my editor just scales any input image to 640x240, and the "Happy Oddidays" thing from JAW seems to use the original higher res sprites.

http://www.oddworldforums.net/showpo...3&postcount=51

[Fischkopf]

This is old...

Didn't we already have threads about these "screenshots" years before? It's like every few years someone rediscovers them and opens a thread. They are promotional screenshots that were made to look better than the actual game to give out to print magazines or to print on the packaging. There never was a version that looked like this. This was a common practice back then, for instance with Command and Conquer Renagade and Tiberian Sun.

[Job McYossie]

Didn't we already have threads about these "screenshots" years before?

and how many times have we discussed that AO is better than AE?

[Havoc]

and how many times have we discussed that AO is better than AE?

AE is clearly the better game, though.

[Crashpunk]

Let's not start this again.

[Phylum]

There's no reason these aren't shots of the actual game running on a PC with uncompressed assets. It's unlikely though.

[Havoc]

Let's not start this again.

We all know you agree.

[Crashpunk]

Well yeah duh. Exoddus is my favourite game of all time.

[FrustratedAssassin]

Exoddus represent

[Nate]

Next offtopic post wins a free infraction!

[Job McYossie]

Just got a car, that was interesting, can't wait to get a licence now.

[Nate]

Hope you enjoy that infraction, Job.

[FrustratedAssassin]

If she doesn't, does she get her money back?