How good is this Theora? Personaly I don't like MVE...the quality compared to AVIs isn't that good and I don't like the idea of doing all this work with the movies just to have them compressed into a format with bad quality.
Theora has very good quality, on par with DivX at the very least. MVE is good, but it really depends on the movie. If you are coming from still frames (renders) or something (uncompressed AVI) then it's better, but converting it from something else will give absolute horrible quality.
Are there other possible codec that could be included into the engine?
If you have suggestions now would be the time to let me know. We aren't going to support 10 different codecs though, just pick the one extra that works best and that will be it. MVE will be supported since it's what the retail movies are encoded with. The additional codec (just the one, maybe two if one codec can't do all that's needed) would be for mods and TCs to have their movies in. Theora is a good choice since it has great audio and video quality, has no licensing fees, is open source (so we can actually include the codec in the game), and uses Vorbis for the audio which we already include in the game (technically: Ogg Vorbis is the audio side, Ogg Theora is the video side). We can't use DivX (because it's closed, and can use MP3 which we won't license) and we can't use XviD (because it's GPL and we can't use GPL code in FSO). Something like MPG1/2 would be the next choice, but it doesn't have the quality and compression that DivX/XviD/H.264/Theora do.
Feel free to add your thoughts to the movie/codec discussion:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,40047.0.htmlAs for Bumpmapping...*goes over to Taylor and DaBrain and looks at them like this*
I actually look like that, so the pic has no affect on me.
There is nothing to show bumpmap wise anyway right now so it doesn't matter either way. The test build isn't going to be uber secret or anything, just a bit crash-happy probably. That's the only reason I don't plan on making a big public test out of it all. As soon as bumpmapping is ready it will hit CVS. The test builds would only be for mappers to get the chance to test out what it can do, and point out any errors that I'm making in the rendering process. The build would do nothing different without the normal maps anyway so until those get publicly released there is nothing to see even if you had the test build.
I'm having severe sound effect - distortions. Like spaoisjdkrrrhhsssshshshshss. Not sure which effects generates it but it fudges the game up. Anyone recognize this and know a build without it?
What sound card do you have? Which drivers? What you are describing is what people tend to complain about when they are using an AC'97 card and old drivers. A driver upgrade tends to fix it for them.