Level0 Tools

File:Tool mode - particle editor.jpg

During the development of Oni, Bungie West had an in-game editor for real-time adjustment and creation of entities in the game world. The UI for this editor was stored in files called level0_Tools.dat/.raw[/.sep]. The level0_Tools files also contain other resources that were used during development as well as textures that are seemingly relics not meant to be released. These files were first discovered in the German localization of Oni for the Mac, but have subsequently been found in the Mac versions of the French and Italian localizations as well as Japanese Oni for both Windows and Mac.

A standard Oni application will not actually load these files (in fact, Oni will explicitly state in its startup log that it is 'skipping the tool files'), but the function of the files was determined from examining their resources. If you're curious, you can download level0_Tools here. OniSplit can be used to extract the data into individual resources.

Here is an overview of level0_Tools' contents:

• Distinct furniture models (OFGAs). These are now "baked into" the environment of Oni's levels as generic AKEV quads that are merely flagged as furniture.
• WMDDs that were used by the in-game visual editor, a.k.a. Tool mode. This mode is not available in a "shipping" build of Oni, but Bungie West used a "tool" build of Oni to edit OBJCs and other BINA resources while in-game.
• Textures that were used for debugging or for other obsolete purposes. The most notable texture is probably the cartoon cat we have named Hapecat, a variant of the character who appears in a poster in Chapter 2, who has become something of a mascot for the community.

By replacing existing WMDDs in the game with tool WMDDs (and supplying the alternate PSUI intended for Tool mode), Oni was tricked into displaying the Tool mode windows, and the resulting screenshots have been placed on the OBD pages of any resource types that had editor window(s). A complete collection of the images in one place is found here. The labels on the elements in these windows were helpful in reverse-engineering the BINA formats.

Unfortunately the German localizers translated some of the Tool mode GUI into German along with everything else, not understanding that the files were superfluous to the game. Thus our first look at the UI was through the lens of how somewhat-clueless localizers believed the English labels should look in German. The discovery of the same WMDDs in the Japanese releases of Oni, where they were largely untranslated, gave us most of the original English text for the Tool mode UI that was previously missing.