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Map Survey

article by Ben Lincoln

The discovery of the HMCS Bitter by the Blood Omnicide team inspired me to do a complete survey of every "room" contained in the data file for Blood Omen to determine if there were any other lost secrets waiting to be found.

Unlike the later games in the series, I'd never done a full inventory of Blood Omen's area data. This was because it used a different game engine (meaning that the tools I'd used to that end for the two Soul Reaver games and Defiance would be of limited help) combined with the details of the way the data was stored (which made determining a complete list of "rooms" more challenging).

I set about reverse-engineering the filename-hashing algorithm used by Blood Omen, and discovered it was actually the most basic of any game in the series. After adding support for most of the game's filenames to Soul Spiral, I manually inventoried all of the areas.

While (unfortunately) it does not appear that there are any additional deleted areas present in the data file, I've posted the results here in the event that they are of some use for other fans of the series.

They may also be a curiosity for anyone who's interested in the technical aspects of the game. For example, several of the more complicated areas in the game (most notably the large central room in "Hell" beneath Avernus Cathedral, with its overlapping catwalk structure) were achieved by creating multiple copies of the "room" for use when the player was interacting with them in different ways.

The images below are intended to be used in conjunction with the spreadsheets that can be downloaded at the bottom of the page. For the most part, they do not depict the logical (to the player) layout of the rooms in the game. There are a few exceptions - the "overworld" map, the subsections of it that were copied to create the "past" and "return to the present" eras, and so forth.

Using a walk-through-walls cheat allows traversing between sectors without using doorways (which generally function like teleporters). Walking off the left side of a sector will cause the game to attempt to load the sector whose number is one lower. Walking off the right side will cause the game to attempt to load the sector whose number is one higher. Walking off the top edge will cause the game to attempt to load the sector whose number is ten lower. Walking off the bottom edge will cause the game to attempt to load the sector whose number is ten higher. However, attempting to move beyond the edges of the 10x10 grid that defines each map will cause the game to crash, because of the way the game engine counts. Attempting to access a sector which does not exist (shown as black squares on the maps) will also cause the game to crash.

An older version of the spreadsheet contained one "unknown" area - map 66, sector 39. As confirmed by Andrey Grachev, there is no such file in the game's data. The filename "M0006639.CMP" hashes to the same value (using the Blood Omen algorithm) as "IRON2MST.SHD", the sprite file which contains Kain's transformation from iron armour to mist form.

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Blood Omen - Maps and Sectors	57 KiB	1.1	2010-04-18	Ben Lincoln
Provided in Excel 2007 and Excel 97-2003 formats. This corrected version does not include the (nonexistent) map 66.

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Blood Omen - Maps (SVG Format)	293 KiB	1.0	2010-04-11	Ben Lincoln
The Inkscape SVG files used to generate the images in the Map Survey article.

Related Articles:
HMCS Bitter
Developers' Level Select

Last updated: 18 April 2010

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