[Skullar]

Hello people, I have a few questions, please give me answers.

1. Is there anything new on the glowpoint displacement bug ? I postet in the Sticky thread.

2. The code already supports cutscenes in Divx/Avi or what ? format ? size ? triggered what way ?
As campaign intro ?  Or extro after last mission finished ?

3. Any alternative formats aside ANI allowed for command briefing anis ? They take way to much space !

Thanks guys !
Michael

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Skullar
2. The code already supports cutscenes in Divx/Avi or what ? format ? size ? triggered what way ?
As campaign intro ?  Or extro after last mission finished ?

Basically anything that will play in Windows Media Player (via a codec not via something like ffdshow!) will work.

Anything called intro.xxx will be triggered on starting the game. Anything else is triggered by the campaign file. Click on the mission BEFORE the cutscene and add its name into the briefing cutscene box in the campaign editor.

As far as I know the only way to trigger a campaign outro is to call the campaign file freespace2.fc2 and trigger the end-campaign SEXP at the end. This also triggers the supernova though so it's not exactly advisable.

Wouldn't mind the possibility of outro cutscenes myself though.

[taylor]

Originally posted by Skullar
2. The code already supports cutscenes in Divx/Avi or what ? format ? size ? triggered what way ?

Only .avi and .mpg extensions are supported, everything else gets stripped off.  Any compatible format (ones that use those extensions) that is supported by MediaPlayer should work.  It's not difficult to add more extensions though so if something you want is missing then just request it.  Nothing but MPG1 format is going to be multiplatform for the foreseeable future though so have that in mind.

3. Any alternative formats aside ANI allowed for command briefing anis ? They take way to much space !

Not at the moment but I have a replacement/alternative in mind (JPEG format so it will give you a good size/quality ratio).  I should be able to hammer it out in a weekend but that will have to wait until after I get a few other things done.

[Tolwyn]

so it is currently not possible to add an outro to a campaign? Damn, this is indeed new to me.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by karajorma


Basically anything that will play in Windows Media Player (via a codec not via something like ffdshow!) will work.

Anything called intro.xxx will be triggered on starting the game. Anything else is triggered by the campaign file. Click on the mission BEFORE the cutscene and add its name into the briefing cutscene box in the campaign editor.

As far as I know the only way to trigger a campaign outro is to call the campaign file freespace2.fc2 and trigger the end-campaign SEXP at the end. This also triggers the supernova though so it's not exactly advisable.

Wouldn't mind the possibility of outro cutscenes myself though.

But it works with the nova?

(and why not add a 'no-supernova-endcampaign' sexp?)

[Grug]

Because:

lazines > effort?

[karajorma]

Have the credits appear in an in-game cutscene and stick the outro in front of that

Not perfect but better than nothing

[Tolwyn]

ehh... care to explain?

[Lynx]

He means that the credits would be actually the "real" last mission, i.e. an ingame cutscene, and the outro FMV would be played infront of that.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by taylor
Not at the moment but I have a replacement/alternative in mind (JPEG format so it will give you a good size/quality ratio).  I should be able to hammer it out in a weekend but that will have to wait until after I get a few other things done.

What about EFF? Isn't everything run through bm_* functions?

That'd also facilitate the use of DDS, or (if you really wanted a high quality briefing) TGA.

JPG, IMHO, has the most annoyingly-obvious-artifact rate of any other formats FS2O currently supports

[taylor]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
What about EFF? Isn't everything run through bm_* functions?

Yes but cmd anims go through the anim_* functions and EFF would be really crappy at that.  We can fake it with the bm_* stuff but it would have to load the entire animation into memory.  anim_* streams it so there should only ever be one frame in memory.

I'm going with JPEG because of the really big savings in file size.  We shouldn't need an alpha channel for those anims so the fact that JPEG doesn't support one is an immediate benefit.  A TGA version of intel_ancients.ani (28meg) would be nearly 154meg.  RLE compressed TGAs would help some but I doubt you could cut more than 15% (average) off the file size.  I don't know about you but there is no way I'm downloading 4-5 files like that for a mod.

I'm not going with DDS because of the power-of-2 restriction.  Intel anims for instance are 440x200.  You could use an alpha channel to fill the remaining space but that's going to count against the file size, which will likely be more than JPEG anyway.  Compressed DDS is still going to look bad but with JPEG you get to choose a quality setting and get the quality you need in the space you want.  Uncompessed DDS isn't going to have any size savings over TGA.

With JPEG you get selectable quality, in the control of the person making the animation to begin with.  It's supported by nearly all graphics apps and you could do a mass conversion from uncompressed TGA to JPEG pretty easily.  You get excellent space savings on disk which is great for downloaders and mod makers alike.  And you have no width/height size restrictions with JPEG.


And if you act now you get not one, not two, but THREE "SuperDuper Keen Ginsu" knives absolutely FREE.  That's right, FREE!!  This is a single post offer... act NOW while supplies last!!

(seemed a bit like a Ronco commercial so I went with it )

[Nuke]

i dont like motion jpeg either, it requires special codecs to work with and they aint exactly free. also it uses some funky framerates that arent really compatable with most video editing software ive used.

[taylor]

Originally posted by Nuke
i dont like motion jpeg either, it requires special codecs to work with and they aint exactly free. also it uses some funky framerates that arent really compatable with most video editing software ive used.

It's not going to be traditional Motion-JPEG.  It's basically a header which gives a basic structure and then a bunch of JPEG files stuck in after it.  It's going to work the same basic way as the ANI format but with the extra color palette and use less disk space.  I'm basing on SMJPEG (icculus.org) but without the audio component.  I already made sure that the libjpeg decoder we are now using in the game will handle this so it's just a matter of the animplay modifications and a few small changes the jpgutils to process a file from memory rather than disk.  You'll be able to specify any framerate that you want, I wouldn't think of imposing a limit like that.

And I'm not using the audio component because I want it all to be interchangeable in the current code.  The current code uses ANI which has no audio so all of that is separate.  It would be a mess trying to pick and choose what gets used when and I don't intend to write an entirely new movie playing system.

If there are other suggestions I'd be glad to hear them but I won't even consider AVI/MPEG/MOV or any other codec based format because of the cross platform issues.