European Mac releases

See History of Mac Oni for information on how the Mac game application has evolved over time.

The French, German, Italian and Spanish localizations of Oni for the Macintosh accidentally shipped with development-related files, namely:

• binary data for the Tool Mode editor (a set of level0_Tools.* files in GameDataFolder);
• rudimentary level logic for unreleased levels (subfolders of GameDataFolder/IGMD).

Discovery

When it was realized that a copy of German Mac Oni contained extra files, the community called this version "beta 5" because it was thought to come after the leaked Mac beta 4; but in fact the extra files would likely have come from Oni's pre-beta period. It was also called the "Big Blue Box beta" or the "BBB beta" (or "BBBB") because the copy of Oni came from a German four-game bundle called The Big Blue Box. However, all German copies of Oni for the Macintosh seem to have these files, as do the French, Italian and Spanish localizations. The U.S. release of Oni for the PS2 has the extra level scripts but not the tool files. The Japanese releases for Mac and Windows have the tool files but not the extra scripts.

Tool files

The tool files, which provide an UI for the in-game visual editor, as well as a set of "furniture" objects that can be placed arbitrarily in an empty level geometry, are discussed HERE.

Extra level scripts

There are actually two peculiarities about the level scripts in these releases: first, they're the Windows versions (the Mac scripts have a few minor differences in the boss fight of CHAPTER 13 . PHOENIX RISING). More importantly, there are scripts for additional levels not present in retail Oni: (a) test/demo levels used by the developers, (b) a level which was later merged into other levels, and (c) an actual cut level. In total there are 10 folders not present in the tidier retail installations: Airport_II, BGI, aop, cap, CZ, CZ_II, global (empty), pit, ats, and SR. The missing levels which 9 of these folders refer to, and what the scripts reveal about them, are discussed at Pre-beta content#Cut levels.

Game app

The game app's creation date is March 13th (French, German, Italian) or 14th (Spanish) in 2001, a month and a half after Oni's U.S. release date; this is because the app was built anew from the source code after localization had occurred, and contains changes necessary to make it work with the extended set of characters in these European alphabets as well as to change the hardcoded strings "Save Point" and "Syndicate Warehouse" to their localized translations. The game app itself has the same functionality, however, as other retail releases do; its version number is 1.1, just like the English Mac build of Oni, and access to Developer Mode and many BSL functions have been removed as in the English Mac builds of Oni.

Conclusions

In light of all the above, it seems that Oni's game data files were originally made available to the localization team during or before the beta period, but the source code for the game app was supplied after the Windows gold master, since separate files are present. The localizers did not understand which files were part of Oni's development and which were intended to be bundled with the game.