Hmm...know of any good programs to convert my AVI's to MVE's, or a place I can get the MVE's?
You can get the original MVEs for FS1 and FS2 from here:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,42153.0.htmlTaylor, quick question about using mods ... is there anyway for me to tweak a mod.ini file so that I can use the mve files off the retail cd? The two hurdles to jump (that I can see) are
1. The retail CDs have the movies in the root cd folder, along-side old retail VP which should NOT override whatever media vps you're using with fs2_open
2. So far as I know, the modding system needs mod folders to be within the FS2 directory, making in difficult (on Windows) to point out to a drive such as D:\ or E:\.
Anything on the hard drive (whether it's in a moddir or not) will override anything on the CDs. Also, you can just not use the original CDs, but put them on a new blank CD instead so that it only has the movies on it.
The updated movie code (for Theora and MVE) will have better support for loading things off of the CD in a more predictable manner.
Also I'm going to add support for moddirs on CD/DVDs so that you can have all of your movies on a DVD, for all of your mods, and it will properly use the correct ones. Mod support on the CD/DVD will be a little different than how it works now however. On the CD/DVD you would have something like
D:\mods\mediavps (note the "mods" part). You won't have to actually do anything differently except put the mods under a directory called "mods", the game code will handle using that transparently and won't require any changes to the launcher or mod.ini files. The reason for this is that we are actually going to move to a directory structure like that for 3.7, and it's a lot easier to move things around on the hard drive than on a DVD, so we might as well go ahead and get it right now for CD/DVDs.
Can you tell me if that would work for linux users? And is there anyway to get it to work on Windows?
The mod.ini files only work in the Windows launcher, so they are useless under Linux and OS X. You are basically correct though, just create a symlink and use it like a mod directory. The only hitch is that it can't detect the changing of CDs. That means you won't be able to switch CDs while the game is running in order to get at the different movies. That is why I recommend just burning the movies onto their own CD. If you have a 80min/700meg blank then even the FS2 movies should fit on one CD. Or, just wait and have the burned onto a DVD once the mod support for those hits CVS. Then you could have your FS1 and FS2 movies on one disc, in mod directories, and the game will use the proper ones.
won't that make it nearly impossible for mods to have cutscenes?
kindly explain to me how a mod will use cutscenes once .avi support is removed?
Mods would use Theora instead. They don't actually lose anything, we are just standardizing on a single video format (AVI is not a video format) which doesn't work by way of horribly crappy hacks. They will need to convert any AVI cutscenes to Theora, but I'll offer to convert those myself if they have trouble.
Taylor, any details on the why Theora was picked... fast decompression, the compression/quality ratio, licensing etc.?
It's an open format, so we can integrate it directly in the game code so you don't need any additional codecs, or to install anything. We already use Vorbis, which is also integrated directly into the game binary, so this is just adding a video component and we don't have to bloat the binary with an extra audio format.
So basically it's: ease of use for us, no problems with licensing, great compression quality, small file sizes (smaller than DivX), works easily cross-platform.
