I admit it's somewhat counter to what the game wants you to do: stumble helplessly through corridors that often look almost identical... but I'm not as young as I used to be and sometimes want to move through a game a bit more quickly then back when I had all the time in the world.

Shadow Man's mazes are beautiful and it's almost sacrilegious to ask about what I'm going to ask about:

Maps. There's a very rough one included with the game, but I'm talking about detailed ones that really tell you where you're supposed to go at any given point in the game.

Does anybody know about any? I had a quick look at google, but the fact that they published the rough one makes it almost impossible to find anything else :)

Not that I've found. There's not even very much in the way of detailed walkthroughs for the game anymore. It seems to be a game that's been woefully forgotten. I remember getting a free strategy guide when I bought the game on the N64 all those years ago, and it certainly came in handy, but it seems such resources are no longer available, so the only option is really to tough it out.

Having said that, I'm surprised at how much I have remembered of the game so far. I'm just finished the Gardelle County Jail level since the game released on GoG, and have gotten to that point much more quickly than I remember doing at any time in the past. Sure, I've been lost a few times, that's par for the course with this type of game, but have had a ball of a time getting there.

Would be nice, though, to have some sort of reference material to aid in those moments when I get lost to the point of severe frustration.

Interestingly, here's a quote from the game's manual: "In order to keep the gameplay satisfying and fulfilling, for most of the adventure you'll be completely on your own". That sort of game design philosophy has pretty much disappeared now, so I actually quite like going back and playing a game like this. Even though I've finished it half a dozen times before.

Anyway, maybe this GoG.com re-release will spark some interest in the game and those who know it best will start putting up some nice material for us.

Hehe, your memory is apparently better than mine... even the first sector got a bit frustrating for me.

I tried drawing a map of the swamp by day, but gave up, because even this relatively simple level has so many twists and turns that you usually end up somewhere totally different than what you expected.

Then I looked through the cheats, binaries and so on to see if I could find a way to disable collision detection or at least reduce gravity to make screenshots from above... Sadly, without much success. There's a config file in the data folder that appears to have such settings, but the game ignores it, no matter what debug options I enable. Plus, I can't find any occurrences of the strings used inside that config file in any of the binaries or scripts, so my guess is that it was used in the build process and then forgotten. The strings inside the debug menu appear in the EXE file, but there's not much else there besides what's already covered in the debug menu.

Another way would be exporting the LVL files, but I can't find any program to do it and dissecting it myself would take too long (I had a quick peek, but it looks to be built around a room-system that's not entirely obvious). The debug options also allow you to see the paths for the AI that could serve as a map, but I've got no idea how they appear in the LVL files yet.

Aside from that, the only way that I could think of would be recording a video with on-screen camera coordinates, then run it through OCR and finally use that to build a point cloud... but that's a LOT of work.

There is an official strategy guide. I think that might have some maps in it:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Official-Shadow-Strategy-Guide/dp/157840987X

Maybe we can convince GOG to give us a digital version of that...

That would be nice. In the meantime, I've tried the "capture coords on video approach" with VirtualDub and Tesseract.... the results are surprisingly good. I've written a small script to do a sanity check on the data (tesseract naturally doesn't get everything right, but it's still impressive) and render it to a image. Here's the result from a straight run through the first level. I really didn't explore anything, so it's not really just a proof-of-concept, nothing more, but I'll try to post a how-to tomorrow and maybe we can produce some good maps ourselves. Gotta work early tomorrow, so I'm off to bed now.

Wow, that's quite impressive for such a quick effort. Really Clever.

I'm afraid a 2D map is not going to cut it, though. The maps are quite convoluted with loads of bridges, tunnels, overpasses and the like. You do get 3D coordinates, though?

I'm also not sure how the coordinates are handled for map transitions, I think there is some streaming going on and in the worst case there may even be portals connecting separate map parts (similar to the old build engine games like Duke Nukem 3D).

Can you make it streaming, so you don't have to record gigabytes of video? That would be awesome.

Personally the only part where I really would have welcomed a map was in the early wastelands, after that the levels get more distinctive and you can find your way around more easily.

Edit: I think I may actually have that guide at my parent's house. I can try to find it this weekend and scan the maps.

Edit 2: Look what I found:
http://www.yiya.de/games/shadowman/index.htm

The problem is that apart from maps, you sometimes find yourself not knowing what to do, where to go... The objectives are not always clearly defined. The maps are fantastic, thank you very much, this will provide invaluable help!!!

I have the official Acclaim strategy guide, it has detailed maps and walkthrough so there isn't as much aimlessly wandering about, tells you what area you need to go to and when, you do have to revisit areas to get all the Voodoo items and souls. The guide has clean up phases. So say you get one of the Gads (Tatoos) that allows holding and moving the fire blocks, it tells you to go back to a certain area now that you have the required power to access the dark souls. Only downside to the maps in the book is that they don't tell you where you start on each map so you have to work that bit out for yourself

You need to collect all the dark souls, at least to Shadow Level 9 to be able to complete the game, Level 10 allows you to open the Shadow Gate at the top of the Blood Falls at the very start of the Marrow Gates, in there you collect the Book of Shadows and has a message from the developers. Behind this gate on the N64 version it has a second Violator weapon which is awesome for fighting Legion at the end, one in each hand obliterates his life bar, that is until it runs out of ammo!

You also get the Calabash right near the end of the game, you will notice in a few areas there's a black circular design on the floor, there's one just to the left after you come out of the tunnel just after your first meeting with Jaunty. The Calabash opens up these seals and they have cadaux and various other items in them.

So, once you have got through everything don't head for the final battle, go do the last bit of clean up and reach Shadow Level 10.

Those maps are really great. Should I still document how you can create your own?

I've recorded a longer video yesterday where I run through most of the first level (unfortunately, I went to Netty too early, so there's a bit missing behind the church) and the results are really surprisingly good...

I would be interested how you do this. I guess you make some sort of character recognition?

Didn't make one, just used Google's open-source Tesseract software.

It was really quite painless.

I enabled the debug menu by going to data\scripts\menus\english and replacing release.msc with debug.msc. Make a copy somewhere so you can restore it lateron.

I used VirtualDub to capture the video, but pretty much anything will do. Just make sure that the quality is good. I captured a 1680x1050 (my screen's native resolution) video using FFDShow's MJPEG codec at quality level 99. Don't worry about the video becoming too big... we don't need a high frame rate, 4FPS will be more than enough. The whole tour that yesterday's map was based on (the second one) ended up at about 2GB. You may have to set the capture mode to GDI to get VirtualDub to capture the game instead of your desktop, but that's really all there is to do.

Start capturing, open Shadow Man and go to the Extra/Debug Display options menu to enable the stats. Load the level that you want to map and just start running around. When you're done, close ShadowMan and stop the capture in VirtualDub.

Leave capture mode and re-open your video file. We need to clean the images a bit. Start by editing the video so that only gameplay-video remains. Go to video filters and add a null transform, greyscale and threshold filter.

User cropping on the null transform so that only the stuff after "CM Pos : " remains. In my case that means setting it to 206,96,674,906 , but this will naturally be different if you're using a different resolution.

Set the threshold at 88% and you should get a black image with white coordinates, nothing else. There may be a few broken frames when there's something behind the text that's really bright, but the sanity checks lateron will catch that.

Go to export image sequence and export in any format you like, just make sure that the minimum number of digits is high enough to hold the frame number of all frames.

Now, the text in the images was a bit thin, so I send the images through Paint Shop Pro's batch processor. This may not be necessary, depending on your resolution though. What will be necessary though, is converting the images to TIFFs so that tesseract can read them.

To make the text fatter, I blured the image using a GaussianBlur with radius 1.51. I then enhanced the contrast using a ColorAdjustCurves filter with mapping 42->0 and 56->255

No matter how you do it, after batch processing, you should end up with a bunch of TIFs.

Grab a portable release from http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/downloads/list and just extract it any place you like.

To use it to convert your TIFs you'll need a simple little batch file. Just open up your text editor and paste this. Save it as shadowocr.cmd to your tesseract directory. Obviously, if you're using a different path than me (shadman\ below the tesseract folder in my case) to store your images, you'll have to adjust that:

http://dest.at/sm/shadman.cmd

Also, create a file test.ini in the tesseract directory and add this:

http://dest.at/sm/test.ini

Now, run the batch file. You should end up with a file shadowman.txt that has all the coordinates in it.

Now you need my little script... it's not terribly exciting and badly written, but it works.

Save the following code as as plot.html and open it up in Firefox. It should work in any half-decent browser, but I haven't tested it yet. Open shadowcoords.txt and copy the content. Paste it to the textarea of plot.html and hit plot. You should get a map.

http://dest.at/sm/plot.html

Wow, great work. Thanks for the writeup.

No problem. It's good to write something like this down anyway, in case it becomes useful for another game.

Drawn one by hand when playing, the 3D-aspect isn't really terrifying.

My problem though is, I only found 499 cadeauxes. Bug? Or I got blind? Or they are in the Engine Room/behind The Mysterie-door? (Only those are left behind.)

Btw, I've marked all (except the Jail) on my map. Just in case.

PS: by luck I found a missed? duplicated? cadeaux, so I managed to 500.