Pre-beta features
- This article is about changes in the game engine during development. To learn about changes made to the levels and other game assets, see the Pre-beta content page.
Below we discuss features that were cut from Oni before release. Features that were teased in interviews are not listed if there is no evidence of them in visual or textual form.
Multiplayer
See the Multiplayer article to learn all about the most infamous missing feature from Oni.
Blood, shadows, and bullet marks
These real-time stencil effects could build in intensity, as seen above where the burn effects are darker where Konoko continues to shoot the wall, as well as with the blood seen HERE.
One can see the system in motion at 0:53 in the 1999 trailer where Konoko's shadow appears as she lands, and morphs along with her movements; as she shoots an enemy, small droplets of blood can be seen spraying onto the floor. Another shot with real-time shadowing is found at 1:14.
The resolution of these dynamic shading effects was quite low, so possibly Bungie West was dissatisfied with its appearance. The system also seemed to have trouble crossing polygon boundaries, as seen on the floors in these two screenshots and elsewhere. By the E3 of May 2000, blood had been removed from publicly demoed builds. Matt Soell said that this was in order to re-work the effect: "Along with the marks left by bullets, blood will look much better than it used to." Bungie eventually settled for a generic round texture for character shadows and various stencil textures for the weapons' impact effects. The blood effect was totally removed.
The explanation for the cutting of blood was not technical limitations, but rather that it interfered with the hit flashes that players needed as cues in a melee fight, and also to avoid a Mature rating from the ESRB (and the equivalent bodies outside North America). Animated blood would have gotten Oni an "M" rating and limited the number of younger players who were allowed to buy or play the game. This was the first time that Bungie shied away from putting blood in their games, and the Marathon and Myth games had received "M" ratings, so this was a controversial decision among some fans. It's possible that Oni's new owners, Take-Two Interactive, had a different philosophy on realistic violence vs. marketability.
Lightmapping
Oni was originally intended to have detailed lighting produced through radiosity, as mentioned in Oni's positioning statement. An outside program would be used to pre-calculate detailed lighting solutions which Bungie West would then export as lightmap textures. These textures would be displayed on surfaces in-game via OpenGL multitexturing. The smoothly-shaded spotlights you see on these walls could not be accomplished through the engine's current vertex-coloring approach to shading (not without subdividing the walls into a ridiculous number of vertices).
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Here's a before/after from Musashi Manufacturing. In the original version of this area, the lights actually do something. The light and shadow give a greater sense of volume to the space.
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These are a couple tests that were probably rendered in-game. It may be hard to believe that this imagery came from Oni's engine, but the jaggies on the polygons mean that it is unlikely to be a product of the 3D Studio Max renderer like this anti-aliased rendering, and if one looks closely, blockiness is evident in some shadows due to the limited resolution of lightmaps. Up close this would be much more noticeable, as in this image (note the shadow on the pipe leading down to the tank).
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Perhaps one of the most striking before/after shots illustrating the effect that lightmapping could have had on the game is found in the Musashi lobby. The wall in the lobby area down to Konoko's right used to have illumination from two point lights on the wall, as well as dappled light filtering through the glass windows at the entrance. Now we simply have rectangles for light fixtures, with lens flare sprites slapped on top of them, and no light falling on the wall. Even the vertex coloring that replaced lightmapping in retail Oni doesn't seem to be used to the fullest extent possible.
Rigid body physics
Rigid body physics, more often referred to by fans using simpler terms such as "kickable chairs" or "movable furniture", were promised for much of Oni's development, but all furniture in the game is now static. Modders have uncovered the fact that there is code present in Oni for movable objects, but the collision is unpolished. Watch Konoko play with spheres and cubes. You'll notice that all movable objects are treated as spheres by the collision code.
Inverse kinematics
Inverse kinematics, also promised in Oni's positioning statement, was planned in order to allow complex melee interactions such as disarm moves. IK was removed when Bungie West found a simpler solution, as explained by Bungie spokesman Matt Soell here.
Rationale for cuts
When contemplating why various graphical effects below were removed, it's important to keep in mind that VRAM on graphics cards often ranged from 16-32MB at the time of Oni's release, and the game was likely developed with that range as a target. As Alex Okita later recalled, "we had one thing in mind when we were going into it, thinking that video cards would catch up. But then halfway through, Apple hands us this iMac, and our bar just sort of dropped on top of us. We're trying to figure out how we're going to get anything to run on it. They had this, I don't know – eight-megabyte video card or something? It was pretty miserable."
The PlayStation 2 was even more limited, with 32 MB of main system RAM and 4 MB of VRAM. Bungie West never blamed the PS2 port, which was performed by an outside studio, for any changes to the game or its release date, but considering the simultaneous release of the Windows, Mac and PS2 versions, and the small cuts made to content in the PS2 version on account of limited RAM, as well as Take-Two's emphasis on the PS2 version in their advertising, it's possible that there was (at best) a lack of interest on Take-Two's part in adding niceties to the PC versions which PlayStation owners would not be able to experience. Likewise, multiplayer was not a common part of the PS2 gaming experience in 2001 (the Network Adaptor being an optional attachment), so it might not have seemed worthwhile to extend development just to make multiplayer happen.
An anecdotal report here from a forum member indicates that Bungie may have had frame rate troubles as well with earlier builds of the game. Even watching the 1999 trailer, one can see segments which seem to be running as low as 10 frames per second. Hardy LeBel, the Design Lead, commented on Oni Central Forum that they had issues with performance due to the use of glass in some areas (see Pre-beta content § Decline in appearance for quotes). If simple glass was causing performance issues, we could imagine that performance was also a likely factor in killing some of the fancier features above.
Apart from all the above issues, we should keep in mind that Oni was rushed to completion. The game was taking far longer than expected to complete, and the Microsoft acquisition of Bungie happened three years into Oni's development. This required all staff to move to Redmond and work on other projects, primarily Halo. In the limited time remaining to them, the Bungie West staff put in serious crunch time in order to complete and polish as much of the game as they could, but difficult decisions had to be made such as cutting multiplayer and the unfinished BGI level. With that in mind, we could easily explain all cuts to the game as the result of rushed development without even needing to point to game systems' technical limitations of the day as a further rationale.