Tools for Oni 2: Death and Taxes

Iritscen · 02/19/18 14:02

(Well, these days we're calling it "Oni 2 (Angel Studios)", especially since the internal strings identify the game as "Oni 2: Rebirth", and "Oni 2: Death and Taxes" is kind of cheesy... but I digress. On the greater Internet, the developer build of this cancelled game has come to be known as "Oni 2: Death and Taxes", so that's what I'm calling it here.)

Below are a couple technical tools for players who want to see more of the unfinished game. New tools may be added here in the future.

First, the leak of the ISO was originally discussed here in 2016: http://oni.bungie.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3029

Since then, two things have happened:

1. I've done a little exploration of the launch arguments for the game, but there's lots of room for someone else to experiment and try to get more of them working. Launch arguments can be used to change settings in the game, and to load any level by name. They're documented here.
2. We've discovered, with geyser's help, that the Oni 2 disc actually has 95 "levels" (called layouts), not the 15 that are seen in the Load Game menu. Disclaimer: about a quarter of the 95 layouts do not work. Some of the ones that do are very small. But some of them are quite interesting. They're documented here.

So here are the tools that have been made for working with the Oni 2 dev build.
1. PS2 Launch Args. I had to assemble a kit (Windows-only) that lets me pass launch arguments to PS2 games in the emulator PCSX2.
2. Oni 2 (AS) Layout Patch Tool. This tool unlocks (that is, adds to the Load Game menu) the additional, hidden layouts. This makes it unnecessary to use the PS2 Launch Args kit if you are only interested in the "-layout" argument.

s10k · 02/20/18 06:02

This is interesting. Thanks for the time documenting this.

Iritscen · 12/17/18 10:12

Just a little update: a pull request of mine was accepted into the PCSX2 codebase, so the emulator itself now allows you to pass launch arguments to games. This makes my toolkit above, PS2 Launch Args, unnecessary. PCSX2 rarely releases new stable builds though, so you have to download a recent nightly build from here to get the launch args feature. Also, the feature has no GUI access, so you must call PCSX2 from the command line, supplying the argument...

--gameargs="-arg1 -arg2"

...as part of the invocation.

s10k · 12/18/18 05:12

wow that's great! Thanks for letting us know.

YellowExxhy · 12/18/18 17:12

Good work with this research, certainly will look deeper into it when I have the time

Oni Central Forum

#1 02/19/18 14:02

Tools for Oni 2: Death and Taxes

#2 02/20/18 06:02

Re: Tools for Oni 2: Death and Taxes

#3 12/17/18 10:12

Re: Tools for Oni 2: Death and Taxes

#4 12/18/18 05:12

Re: Tools for Oni 2: Death and Taxes

#5 12/18/18 17:12

Re: Tools for Oni 2: Death and Taxes

Board footer