Author Topic: Cut-scenes  (Read 5860 times)

gwal

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Cut-scenes
« on: 2006-01-25, 10:37:16 PM »
Recently I've been working on some cut-scenes for my game using a 3D modelling/animation program. The only problem with them is that they are avi files; some of which are 60 Megabytes in size. So I was wondering, does anyone know of a more efficient file type, and/or a way to convert avi's to it?

Here are a couple screenshots of the opening scene.
« Last Edit: 2006-01-25, 10:51:18 PM by gwal »

billybob884

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Re: Cut-scenes
« Reply #1 on: 2006-01-25, 10:50:19 PM »
60 uncompressed? you should try using the divx compressor

http://download.divx.com/divx/DivXCreate.exe
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gwal

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Re: Cut-scenes
« Reply #2 on: 2006-01-25, 10:52:24 PM »
i'll try that

durnurd

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Re: Cut-scenes
« Reply #3 on: 2006-01-26, 08:46:49 AM »
Big games often use the .bik filetype.  (http://www.radgametools.com -- It's completely free!) You would have to use a specific dll to play the files, but I hear that it's a particularily game-friendly component (i.e. synchronous playing with game action or loading etc.)

Otherwise, the DivX compressor is a pretty good codec for general-purpose movie storage.
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Re: Cut-scenes
« Reply #4 on: 2006-01-26, 09:44:37 PM »
I believe the WMV format exported by Windows Movie Maker (comes with Windows) would work and has reasonably good compression.

durnurd

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Re: Cut-scenes
« Reply #5 on: 2006-01-27, 11:14:22 AM »
Unless, of course, you're developing for Mac or Linux or Windows 95.  But otherwise, yeah, WMV could work.  I believe the reason big games don't use it is because they would have to license the software, and wmv doesn't have all the functionality of .bik files, whereas RAD is free, and was designed to be used as a movie filetype specifically for games.
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gwal

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Re: Cut-scenes
« Reply #6 on: 2006-01-29, 11:49:32 PM »
After trying all of these suggestions out, I decided to use wmv. This leads me to another question. Is there some way to 'embed' or put a video clip as a layer, meaning the clip is playing in the backround while the normal level graphics are in front?

bluemonkmn

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Re: Cut-scenes
« Reply #7 on: 2006-01-30, 07:12:52 AM »
There's no way to make it play in the background, but the next best thing might be to make it play off to the side.  You can specify the position of a video clip, and the position and size of the map display.  If you make the media clip non-modal, it should be able to play at the same time the game plays, but if you don't put it off to the side, it will overlap half the frames (I mean the whole frame half the time -- every other frame), depending on your video driver.  I'm pretty sure there's no way to make it show up in the background no matter that driver you have, though.  And I'm not even entirely sure that you can make it show up side-by-side.

If you could turn it into full-screen tiles, you could play the sound separately, but I doubt that turning a video clip into tiles is practical if the video clip was 60 MB to start with.  I don't think DirectX/GameDev will handle a 60 MB tileset.  It might be an interesting load test to see just how much DirectX/GameDev can handle (it can handle some things I didn't expect) but it might be a waste of time to try this.

gwal

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Re: Cut-scenes
« Reply #8 on: 2006-01-30, 09:08:53 AM »
Well, I guess I won't be able to put the cut-scene in the backround, but I think that playing it off to the side while the game is going on should still look pretty cool.

Eastfist

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Re: Cut-scenes
« Reply #9 on: 2006-04-06, 06:06:29 PM »
I wouldn't mind being able to run movies as backgrounds.  I've seen it done in Final Fantasy VIII.  Ah well.

I think cutscenes can only be used when it's crucial to the gameplay.  I remember this one game, called "The Bouncer," which was pretty much an entire cutscene.  You only play like 17 minutes of actual gameplay.  Now, luckily, we only rented it, because if we had paid $49.99 for a MOVIE, that'd be crazy!

I think it's practical to recycle sprites through in-game cinemas.  Saves memory.
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