Author Topic: ANI File Formats  (Read 14648 times)

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Offline mjn.mixael

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I've talked a bit with The_E in IRC about this issue and I thought it's time to get the rest of SCP in on the conversation.

As far as nice looking ANIs go.. we kind of have our hands tied. It's either the 256 colors of ANI Builder or littering your cbanims folder with hundreds, if not thousands, of image files.

The best solution is .ogg support for ANIs. I'm mostly thinking about cb_anims, but other ANIs could also benefit.

Another stop-gap method would be to allow FSO to read subfolders within the VPs so that EFFs could be put in data/cbanims/ANINAME, thus organizing the ANIs a bit. But this nothing but a stop-gap and not ideal.

Heck, I would even take ANIs bumped to 512 colors.. but I think that has more to do with ANI Builder than FSO.

I have no idea of the difficulty involved to code these things... thoughts? opinions? tell me to get out?
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Offline Galemp

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Nice looking, psh. I could care less what they look like. The fact is that FSPort now has over a gigabyte of high-res CB anis and the .ANI file format is far too inefficient for this purpose.

Ideally we would have some new container format that would interlace ANI frames like animated GIFs, minimizing compression artifacts, with 32-bit color support.
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Offline JGZinv

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Myself I'd like to see something along the lines of a format that has some kind of
animation/keyframe controls with it, ex. as actionscript was for Flash. That opens a door to
quite a number of things.
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Offline mjn.mixael

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I didn't even think about the keyframes.. for things like weapon and ship select ANIs keyframe ability is necessary.
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Offline The E

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* The E looks at the EFF description
* The E sees "Keyframe" keyword
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Offline JGZinv

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I do recall having a similar conversation in the past, but there are some open source flash like formats
available. I'd have to go dumpster drive to find the links again... and I've no idea how applicable they might be.

http://osflash.org/open_source_flash_projects

I'm not saying Flash/Alternative is the way to go, just more so trying to get thinking rolling.

@ The E I don't see any controls though related to the use of keyframes there.
It sounds like it's only being used as a marker.
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Offline mjn.mixael

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* The E looks at the EFF description
* The E sees "Keyframe" keyword

I know it has keyframe options.. Thanks.  :doubt:

How about pay attention to the topic at hand... if we went with YOUR suggestion of OGG... we would need some sort of keyframe control.

The ONLY problem with EFF.. is that the frames are in no way contained. When you are working with upwards of 50 ANIs that just isn't going to work. That's why it would be nice to get subfolder support so those could be used as a sort of "container".
« Last Edit: October 06, 2010, 12:14:38 pm by mjn.mixael »
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Offline Nuke

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i kinda think using ogg for these kinds of files would be a good idea. were not talking 8 frame interface animations and < 30 frame animated textures and effects, but animations longer that 30 seconds. a 1 minute long animation @ 30 fps 512x256 with dxt1 compression comes out to about 117.9 megs! thats huge! surely a video format could do better than that. surely i wouldn't expect ogg to be used during actual gameplay, eff+dxt1 is more optimal for that kind of usage, but long non-interactive interface animations should use a better suited compression scheme. you dont need to set keyframes for them (not to say that you couldnt). things like icons might be better off using eff+dxt1 or ani formats.
« Last Edit: October 06, 2010, 01:01:26 pm by Nuke »
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Offline Galemp

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It's worse than that. 2_cb_shivorefootage.ani, which is 660x300, 33 seconds long and 15 fps, is over 80 mb.
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Offline Nuke

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i dont think a container format is the answer. movie formats use cross-frame compression techniques to reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored. only parts of a frame that change drastically over the previous frame need to be stored.  individually compressed frames do not do this. it would be more optimal to use ogg i think.
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Offline Goober5000

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Ideally we would have some new container format that would interlace ANI frames like animated GIFs, minimizing compression artifacts, with 32-bit color support.
This.  This has been an open question in the SCP for many years, but none of the graphics coders have stepped up to it yet.

And EFF is not usable, for two reasons.  One, it's not a container format... command briefing animations (and most animations, actually) should be contained in one file rather than spread through zillions of files that must each be opened, read, and closed.  Two, it can't be streamed, and streaming is pretty much a requirement for cbanis.

 

Offline Nuke

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container format only wont reduce the size much. container format with compression might help reduce size, though it might cost some performance and wouldnt be as good as a proper movie format.  i still think we need to use a movie format for these kinds of animations. all they do is loop and we dont need anything fancy beyond that.
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Offline mjn.mixael

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Some play a certain number of frames and then loop... ala 1-25 then back to 15-25 and loop just those last 10. You can't do that with a video file.
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Offline The E

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No, you can't. You can, however, do it with two separate files.

And given how door anis work (for example) you'd need to switch between two videos in an instant anyway (one playing forwards, the other backwards).
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Offline mjn.mixael

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I'm all for using a video file. It's cleaner, smaller, and can look better than .ANI
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Offline Galemp

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I don't think we have any problems using .ANI for 99% of the interface art we currently use ANI for.

This discussion is for a new Command Briefing Animation format, since these are simple looping video files of a relatively high resolution and long length that are unreasonably huge in ANI format.
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Offline mjn.mixael

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I don't think we have any problems using .ANI for 99% of the interface art we currently use ANI for.

This discussion is for a new Command Briefing Animation format, since these are simple looping video files of a relatively high resolution and long length that are unreasonably huge in ANI format.

Agreed, so what would it take to get OGG support for cb ANIs?
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Offline pecenipicek

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why force ogg? why not use the likes of x264 and stuff.
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Offline mjn.mixael

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ogg is open source, the codec is already in the code somewhere... and did I mention it's open source?
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Offline chief1983

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yeah the fact that we already have it goes a long way.  And x264 is generally HD vid, and cbanis are generally, not.  Not sure if that makes a difference with x264's efficiency or not.  We _could_ look into VP8 support to go forward, but OGG would probably work fine here, and if we supported it generically, any video type should be playable there, not just Theora.
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