Just curious.

Tyr · 04/07/08 17:04

I was not sure someone knew or knows (probably someone did, as I found it on the OniGalore Wiki). I was just surfing through google and oni websites searching while I found this
http://wiki.oni2.net/Bungie_West
This is a small description of the (old) Bungie HQ (doh )

But, in the (more than 100mb) 40min low-res movie:
http://hl.udogs.net/files/Gaming/Bungie … y2_big.mov
we see under more see members of the Oni Dev team, also Steve Abe, who recently joined our community
Next to that we see Steve demonstrate some disarm moves in Oni Beta (or Alpha?), in one of the levels we knew very little about:

Source: http://wiki.oni2.net/Pre-beta_content (scroll down to Pre-Beta Levels).

The Oni Footage can be found around 30:00 in the video

Anyways, I'm sorry if you already knew this or I just dug up some old dirt

Last edited by Tyr (04/08/08 00:04)

Iritscen · 04/08/08 08:04

Seeing as I wrote that page (well, stub), yes, I was aware of it. But only thanks to Ssg, who linked to the vids from his user page on the wiki. Not sure how many people have seen it.

Everyone should check out the gameplay demo if nothing else in the vids. You'll notice that another human is controlling the enemy character -- yes, they're casually using netplay without even trumpeting it. It kind of riles me up.

Loser · 04/09/08 10:04

26:14 - 26:19 in that vid:
Steve (as he starts performing disarms):So let's say...we've got Jim over there being a striker, let's say he's got a gun and...

Now talk about "no possibility to make netplay due to the lags, not even LAN one". X_X
I WANT THAT CODE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But only in a legal way ^_-

P.S.: Thank you, Ssg and Iritscen. You are awesome, guys.

EDIT: Plus that "Jim" guy seems to use dev mode (looks like he gets new and new gun via F7 command)
So...they had netplay only for themselves and even then they had to cheat. Simly, Bugie guys ^_^

Last edited by Loser (04/09/08 13:04)

gorilla325 · 04/09/08 19:04

man...desperate to see a full fledged Oni.....

Seventeen Seconds · 04/09/08 19:04

That "no possibility of netplay" talk is just how devs are obliged to communicate as part of a larger organization.

Whatever reason it was scrapped for (time, money, PS2 console, ignorance), you can't exactly criticize your own game pre-release by drawing attention to stupid decisions by management.

Corey Tamas covers the no multi-player question pretty nicely in the review of Oni he wrote for MacGamer, way, way back in the day.

Here's something else for you:

Michael Eilers, IMG Magazine wrote:

Perhaps one of the most puzzling disappointments of Oni was the AI behavior of the opponents. While they are excellent fighters, who use a variety of attacks and work well in a multiple-attack situation, they are also missing many behaviors and abilities that I actually had demonstrated to me by Quinn Dunki on my visit to Bungie West. She demonstrated AI characters that knew how to dodge gunfire and duck out of your line of sight, that recognized a dead body and ran for help, and that worked in concert to wear you down before finishing you off.

Guess which game got these features in the end? (HINT: check who Oni's AI engineer was)

Last edited by Seventeen Seconds (04/09/08 20:04)

Iritscen · 04/10/08 09:04

Wow, that's interesting, I never read that before. I do know one thing: something weird happened during production that I doubt we'll ever know the truth behind. Quoting an interview between Harry and Hardy:

2) I've read somewhere that they said the AIs would be able to dodge, run for cover, call for help and work in groups. So far, I haven't seen any of these! What happened to the AI?
Well, they can do some of that stuff, but mostly it's internal to the logic and not visible to the player. I'm betting that you pulled a lot of those tidbits out of a very old interview with a programmer named Quinn Dunki that used to work on the project. She made a lot of boastful claims about what the AI would end up being able to do that she couldn't deliver on.
3) Why was the AI called AI 2? As in ai2 _spawn in scripting?
Because Chris Butcher rewrote the AI system from the stuff that Quinn had put together. Since it was the second time it had been done Butcher's functions were all AI2 calls.

This brief exchange leaves a lot unsaid. But it certainly sounds like there was resentment between Hardy (the Design Lead) and Quinn, and maybe she was let go or ran away from the project. All we're told is (a) Quinn promised some stuff but the team didn't think it was working out, (b) some of those abilities are in the final code but need to be "unlocked" via hacking (like proper dodging of gunfire) because they're improperly implemented, and (c) Chris Butcher rewrote (butchered?) her work to produce the ai2_ calls we're familiar with.

Also, incoming from Harry's Oni FAQ at Oni Central:

9. Why did Brent Pease and Quinn Dunki leave Bungie West?
Nothing really is known about their departure.

Strange, indeed.

Update: Some quick research on Quinn that I never thought to do until now:
- She programmed AI on Full Spectrum Warrior in 2004, a game which one reviewer said has great cooperative AI for your allies.
- She's spoken at a few conferences on AI.
- She's currently a Senior Engineer at Pandemic Studios.

So, maybe Bungie West didn't want her, but that doesn't seem to be the case with Pandemic.

Bonus: Picture of Quinn attached, from one of the conferences she spoke at. Found it interesting because I never saw her face before.

Seventeen Seconds · 04/12/08 17:04

Chris Butcher also went on to implement the AI in the original Halo, which was a marked strong point in how Halo was recieved. I doubt that Bungie would hand over a next-level AI on a silver platter to Take 2 just because it happened to belong to a property they were unloading, and I wouldn't be surprised if they stripped it before handing it over. To take off the tinfoil hat, maybe it's because Oni was rushed out the door and the devs never had the chance or reasons to develop Oni to the same level as Halo's AI.

There was a script that gave the three TCTF cops on level 2 plasma rifles and attached them to follow you -- it feels a lot like the skeleton of your AI Marine allies in Halo. My big question is what exactly drove Brent Pease to leave, as from everything I know he was the visionary of the whole Oni project and seemed committed to seeing it through -- but as Leela once said (original Marathon!), "There are obviously many things which we do not understand, and may never be able to..."

Iritscen · 04/14/08 08:04

Yeah, no doubt the deadline rush on Oni was the reason for many issues and missing features that were promised. And I also think that the AI system was polished up and re-used for Halo, although I'm not a Halo player so I can't say for sure. I doubt, though, that Bungie would strip any code from Oni when selling the IP to Take Two. Assuming that Take Two actually had the code in the first place, I think they would have the whole package; otherwise, perhaps they only got the rights to the game, the intangible rights, and not any code at all.

What surprises me is the whole "she couldn't deliver on" quote. I mean, let's just delineate the features that were promised (or hoped for) and (sometimes debatably) not delivered on:
- multiplayer; this worked over LANs in pre-release versions even though it's not in the final game; cut due to deadline?
- the Iron Demon; we pretty much know this was a deadline victim because it was too hard to make it maneuver indoors and they didn't have time to fix it
- AI will recognize dead bodies and run for help; AI can run for help when scripted, but ignores dead comrades in the field; one reviewer says he saw it demonstrated in beta, though, so why isn't it in the game; was it removed simply because it made the game harder?
- AI will work together against you; well, they do team up against you very effectively; not sure what else this refers to in specific, but I feel like this *is* in the game
- AI can dodge and run for cover; this works fine, with some small hacks by Loser in place; he tells us the basic system would work great if it weren't connected to the wrong coordinate system; a pretty simple mistake that probably could have been fixed; another victim of the deadline?

So if we see that certain features were definitely cut due to time, and others were actually in the game but were unpolished or left unactivated, and we know that the game's story was also incomplete due to time, we can assume that all of the above problems were time-related. So here's my question: why does Hardy seem to place the blame on someone who left the project, as if she couldn't do the job, when the job probably would have been done if the game weren't being rushed out the door so they could hop onboard with M$? That seems uncool. For that matter, why did this game take so long to come out? I mean, I try to cut them slack for producing a complex game, but let's face it, the dev time of this game was pretty long. Four years? I think the fans first heard word of it in '97, and projects are always in development longer than the public knows about them. So if they had that long, and a whole office dedicated just to making Oni, it's odd that they still produced such an incomplete (albeit awesome) game.

Seventeen Seconds · 04/14/08 19:04

I think in many ways the game was just poorly presented. In terms of the "combat sandbox", Oni succeeded better than any game I think I've ever played, exceptions maybe being Fallout 1 and 2, which being turn-based don't put the same kind of pressure on the gamer. However, no level is a cool as grenade-jumping your way on to the rooftops anywhere and doing free-form exploring, there's never any long-range Mbow sniping (think killing Barabas on the TCTF roof from ground level), there's no "guiding" players to learn how to tackle a 6-on-1 (my fave fight in the game is collecting all the guards on the TCTF redux level and trying to win as stylishly as possible), no forced speed runs through laser traps (try not breaking stride or turning on the science prison), etc...

Oni unfortunately takes work until the possibilities open up and even then, perhaps I'm so used to working around the flaws I don't notice them anymore. Oni was pitched at the mass market rather than a niche market like SWAT 4 or Virtua Fighter. It's like pop music; you need obvious hooks or people won't bite, and unfortunately Oni does take some skill and patience to enjoy. Being able to share films would have gone a long way to show people what the game is capable of, same with multiplayer.

I will put on my tinfoil hat and say Bungie intentionally cherry-picked the best parts of the AI for Halo, just to keep the forum interesting. Excluding the main character, of course.

Iritscen · 04/15/08 08:04

Yeah, the combat definitely well-done, or we wouldn't be raving about it seven years later. They probably spent a long time getting it just right (although there are some arguable improvements that can be made, such as Loser's hacks, those are mostly philosophical differences rather than bug-fixes).

A lot of the ideas you put forth, though, would make Oni a lot harder, and frankly, it was challenging enough for me as is (and I think others feel the same way). I still to this day dread playing through Chapter 3, because of how easy it is to die between the savepoint after the Mad Bomber and the end of the level. But perhaps more non-linearity to the levels would have been nice.

Re: "poorly presented", you have to admit that they certainly hyped it enough, and its "anime style" was well-timed to take advantage of a new wave of anime fandom in the States. I don't know how much more they could have done on the PR side without driving people crazy. If only they simply had LAN play -- forget about Net play, just basic LAN play -- I feel confident that the game would have been a lot bigger. But one thing that would have helped the "presentation" of the game would definitely have been having more than two animated cutscenes. Imagine, say, the final scene between Konoko and Shinatama ("Your name is Mai Hasegawa..."), as anime, not primitive 3D models. As it was, the whole "anime" connection was pretty tenuous -- a brief opening with a girl who doesn't look like Mai and that has no story in it, and then an ending that leaves more unsaid and unshown than it says and shows. The emotional in-game cutscenes are all told with models that don't even move their mouths. So anime's great ability to convey emotion is wasted here.

gorilla325 · 04/15/08 09:04

it incredible after seven years, there're still new people trying to find this game. if only they could put multiplayer up, no matter what kind, this game would be hotter than now. Rune had multiplayer, and that was huge back then. its fighting mechanic was not even comparable to Oni. le sigh...

Iritscen · 04/15/08 11:04

It's a shame that the project to add multiplayer stalled. It's probably doable, but at this point even if it got back in gear, the game would probably be 10 years old before it was really working.

Oni Central Forum

#1 04/07/08 17:04

Just curious.

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#7 04/12/08 17:04

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