Oni (PlayStation 2): Difference between revisions

Midway through Oni's development, in 1999, Take-Two Interactive purchased a stake in Bungie and became the publisher for the upcoming game. In addition to their investment, T2 stipulated that a PlayStation 2 port would be released alongside Oni for Windows and Macintosh. That port was created by Rockstar Toronto (known at the time as Rockstar Canada), and because the game had been designed for a PC with a hard drive, changes had to be made in order to load the game more quickly from CD-ROM. Even after this work, the PS2 version has been noted for its long load times.

Today, Oni runs well in the emulator [https://pcsx2.net/ PCSX2]. When using this emulator, load times are greatly reduced by placing an ISO of the game disc on your hard drive. You can also easily apply patches from within PCSX2 instead of having to buy a cheat device for your PS2, so this is the best way to run the game.

[pictures coming later]

* The intro on PC starts with the Bungie logo sequence and then plays the anime intro as part of one movie, but on PS2 there are two intro movies: the first contains an added Rockstar logo sequence (with a special Konoko-based presentation) and the original PC Bungie logo sequence; this movie is unskippable (but see "Patches" for a movie-skipping patch). The second movie contains the original anime intro.

* Karen in Training is using the dark-haired female cop model, probably a result of Rockstar's efforts to conserve resources due to limited memory.

* Some of Shinatama's un-subtitled instructions in the PC version of Training are subtitled on PS2, but not all. Some of these PS2 subtitles are abbreviated transcriptions:

** SNDD: "00_01_76 Be careful, Konoko! Some attacks are so powerful that they can stagger you even if you block them. Some super moves are so strong they can't be blocked at all!"

** SUBT: "00_01_76 Some powerful attacks can stagger you. Supermoves cannot be blocked."

** SNDD: "00_01_89 I'll activate a training drone to walk up and down the firing range. Fire at it to disable it."

** SUBT: "00_01_89 Fire at the moving training drone to disable it."

*...and some wording has been re-distributed between SUBTs. Presumably these changes were due to limited screen space.

** SNDDs:

::: "00_01_86 Shinatama: Perfect!"

::: "00_01_88 Shinatama: Let's try firing at some moving targets. Walk over to the table on the right. See the weapon lying there? That's a plasma rifle. Pick it up."

:* SUBTs:

::: "00_01_86 Shinatama: Perfect! Let's try firing on some moving targets."

:::"00_01_88 Shinatama: Walk over to the table on the right. See the weapon lying there? That's a plasma rifle. Pick it up."

* Instead of using "Trailer" and "Farewell" for the credits, the PS2 credits have completely different music. This is probably because [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od1ReWIxduo the PC credits sequence] is 171 seconds long (that is, the textual credits, not the whole outro), but [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhqg_MF6dM8 the NTSC version] of the PS2 credits is 156 seconds and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX0OGl2-WLA the PAL version] is 204 seconds. (The differing frame rate of PAL's 25 fps vs. NTSC's 30 fps cannot account for this 48-second time difference, and the credits themselves are identical; the PAL version simply scrolls the credits 30% slower for some reason.) To cover these credit sequences of differing length, a new backing track with a house beat was composed by Rockstar Canada staff. The NTSC version's music fades out arbitrarily as the credits end, whereas the track behind the longer PAL version continues on an extended (and eyebrow-raising) riff on female pain sounds from the game and ends with an actual coda.

* The text of the PS2 credits is somewhat different; see [[Quotes/Credits#PS2_outro_differences|HERE]] for details.

!Indexed name

**1,2

**Three short beep-like sounds (purpose unclear)

*We find the familiar [[GameDataFolder]] at the expected location, as well as the [[IGMD]] subtree (level logic scripts) and the instance files ('''level#_Final.dat'''). Raw and separate files ('''level#_Final.raw''' and '''level#_Final.sep''') are fundamentally the same as for Mac and Windows demo, except that they are tucked away into '''raw''' and '''sep''' directories. There is also a '''pal''' directory holding a set of '''level#_palette.pal''' files (one per level); in PS2 Oni, all the textures (TXMP files) use compact 8-bit storage (i.e., each pixel is an index into a palette of 256 colors), as opposed to Windows and Mac TXMPs which typically use 16- or 24-bit color.

*persist.dat and PERSIST.DAT are [[persist.dat|savegame/preference files]] of the little-endian variety (i.e., created in Windows or by the PS2) and are byte-identical to each other. Actual save data is stored in a standard PS2 format on the memory card (obviously the game cannot write to files on disc anyway). They might be a development relic of the PS2 port since they are much smaller than a PC persist.dat (also, one is named in all-caps like the other files Rockstar added to the game directory).

;Binary data

:The internal structure of '''level#_Final.dat''' and the corresponding '''.raw''' and '''.sep''' is compliant with the "VR31" iteration of instance files, although many resources were optimized for minimal storage space (textures use indexed colors, character animations has been split into a trimmed-down TRAM and an "extra" instance TREX that only exists for combat moves and such, etc). The few discrepancies between the PS2 implementation and the previously documented Windows/Mac versions are covered by the [[OBD:PS2]] page.

:Sounds are encoded using Sony's VAG format/codec, and (unlike for other Oni versions) their waveform data isn't stored in '''level#_Final.raw''' (see [[OBD:SNDD#PS2 implementation|SNDD]]). Instead the SNDD instances in '''level#_Final.dat''' contain links to '''SOUNDS/LEVEL#/SOUND.DAT''', which in turn references waveform data stored either in '''SOUNDS/LEVEL#/SOUND.SEP''' (raw VAG data without any headers) or '''SOUNDS/LEVEL#/SOUND.RAW''' (raw VAG data with minimal headers to allow the lookup of each sound). The three '''BINK#.VAG''' files are three beep-like sounds picked from Oni's resources; they have a VAG header and are valid sounds for VAG-capable apps.