Mac beta 4: Difference between revisions

Although no PC [[wiktionary:beta#Noun|betas]] are known to have been leaked, there are two alternate Mac versions that have shed some light on the development of Oni. One is a leaked beta, and has been called "beta 4" since its leak. It is unknown whether there were later beta versions or if this was the last one before Oni's release. The second is the German localization, known informally as the "Big Blue Box beta", or "beta 5", which is not technically a beta.

[[Image:Mac beta 4 Oni Get Info window.png|thumb|The application's version number is 1.0, as opposed to [[:Image:Classic Mac Oni Get Info window.jpg|retail Mac Oni]]'s v1.1, and its creation date is 11/14/00, which corresponds to the period of time that Oni was in beta testing. Also see [[History of Mac Oni]].]]

During beta testing in late 2000, a copy of the entire Mac version of the game was leaked, identified as "beta 4". Also leaked was a list of cheats. After Oni was released, fans were intrigued by the "[[Developer Mode]]" cheat "thedayismine", but found it did not work in their retail versions of Oni. Dev Mode did exist in beta 4, however it was assumed that the code for Dev Mode had been removed before the retail build was made. Later on, it would be discovered that the retail Mac (and PC) Oni still had a partially-functional Dev Mode, but the cheat that enabled it would need to be unlocked by [[History of Oni modding#Engine patching|engine patching]]; beta 4 is the only version of Oni observed to have Dev Mode freely accessible.

Additionally, this beta still had all the BSL functionality of the PC version; it had previously been thought that about 40 functions and about 160 variables were stripped from the code used to build Oni for the Mac, since the Mac version was finalized a bit later than the PC version. Having seen from beta 4 that these functions and variables were once present in the Mac binary, the community set about searching for them in the current Mac app at the time, Omni Group's OS X port, and found them. Through hex editing, pointers to active variables and functions that were not of much use were diverted to point to some of the hidden and more useful BSL abilities. Those changes brought the Omni app into effective near-parity with the retail PC version; the changes made were documented [[AE:OMNI|here]]. Today, the [[AE:FERAL|Intel build]] from Feral has restored virtually all the BSL that is present in Windows Oni.