Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Lone Knight on June 06, 2005, 06:56:49 pm
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Hey all. I want to create my own movies for Command Briefings, but I can't even open the AC converter utility thing that I downloaded. How do I get it to work? I am running on a windows XP.
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its a command line tool, open a command window and type /? for help. or you can do things the easy way and just drop your first frame onto the exe. i think they have to be pcx files (all with the same pallette), with up to 4 letters followed by a 4 digit number starting at 0000, so if you drop xxxx0000.pcx onto the exe it should compile the animation from the current folder. dont quote me on this but i think theres another animation format you can use, unfortunately i dont know anything about that.
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.eff, but, except for the name I can't remember anything about it either...
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how does one go about creating an eff, what advantages do they have? ani is kinda bloated for big things.
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eff is a text file that desribes what kind of images are being used, and how many fps (IIRC). Basically an eff is a redirect for several (sometimes hundred) dds,pcx,tga files.
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intresting, would mean better 32bit animations for weapon effects. im assuming you point a texture to the eff, and then the eff to the frames. whats the syntax?
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The eff file syntax is just:
$Type: DDS (or image type)
$Frames: 32 (or total frames)
$FPS: 18 (or speed of animation)
With everything being pretty self explanatory.
And the file structure would be like...
data/effects/...
flashyeffect.eff
flashyeffect_0000.dds
flashyeffect_0000.dds
.
.
.
flashyeffect_0031.dds
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cool, thanks :D
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Can you use effs in CB anims now? I seem to remember that you couldn't when they first came out.
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Yeah, I remember too that they couldn't be used in CBs. But it'd be great if this wasn't true. :p
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Originally posted by karajorma
Can you use effs in CB anims now? I seem to remember that you couldn't when they first came out.
Nope, still can't use them for that. That's a different part of the code and those anis need better control that an EFF can provide, by design. EFF was setup to make creating/using effects easier and be optimized to take up less memory. EFFs let you use whatever format you want for the frames (as long as they are all the same format) so that you can choose the format which works best with what you want to show. You can have JPG for non-power-of-2 images and low disk space usage, TGA for best quality (but also most memory), or the various DDS formats where you can choose the quality vs. memory.
There will be a new format which can replace a standard ANI used for briefings, mainhall anims, talking heads, intel data, etc. It will use JPG for the frames and all be contained in a single file like ANI is now. Every one of these new files will be created to take full advantage of the animation system and be able to play forwards, backwards and ping-pong. Only some ANIs can actually do that now. It will only use JPG for the frames because it's the only format which satisfies all of the requirements. Those requirements being: non-power-of-2 sized frames, low disk space usage, quicker to download (smaller), variable compression to pick the best quality/size ratio to fit the animation. Compression rates are also frame independant so you can have some frames that are highly compressed and other frames that have hardly any compression to get the best quality.
Work on that was put on hold a couple of months ago since I needed time to work on other stuff. Shortly after 3.6.7 gets released though I'll go back and finish up the code. Hopefully this new format will work out for everyone.