getting FMV-s on wz 2100 ressurection project

[Chojun]

One reason why I am skeptical of doing new FMVs for Warzone (although it'd be great to have and put the differences we have about their release behind us) is that it would be hard to capture the original feeling of the storyline, and 2) effort should be put in the direction of moving the game forward, not duplicating others' work.

[kage]

One reason why I am skeptical of doing new FMVs for Warzone (although it'd be great to have and put the differences we have about their release behind us) is that it would be hard to capture the original feeling of the storyline, and 2) effort should be put in the direction of moving the game forward, not duplicating others' work.

but since we're not a finite organization consisting of members with defined responsibilities, it can't possibly hurt for someone to work on movies... and from what i've seen, the people most likely to be helping with movies wouldn't have been helping at all otherwise, so you can't consider it a misallocation of effort.

i been looking into this whole motion video thing and i really want to learn a bit for myself too. im thinking of getting some software to practice on such as maya and motionbuilder...
i dont have the greatest memory, but i have a bucketload of determination, so if i pick just one program to work with i can master it.

now. what would you guys reccomend i get into if i want a program that can help me both make fmv's AND work on in game models and stuff.
idealy i want something that is as commercial as possible, because if im gonna sit for hundreds of hours mastering a new skill, i may as well be able to earn some money from it.

i have heard of 3ds max, rhino, maya, Lightwave e.t.c but know very little about the market.
also what about programs like Beyond Virtual .
basicly i wanna learn just one program for now that will allow me to contribute to the war(zone) effort, and also allow me to benefit from it in the real world.

from what i've seen and heard, there are literally only two things that matter if you're working freelance: the format you deliver, and the skill you have. you can work with any program you want, as long as you convert it to whatever format someone wants it to be in. maya and 3ds max tend to be in the thousands of dollars (USD) for their best products, tend to have a mix of user-friendly and not-so-friendly-but-efficient modes of operation, and both have in-house scripting languages with varying degrees of usefulness. i don't know anything about rhino. blender is not very user friendly but focuses entirely on efficiency, so it takes a long time to learn but you can generally get things done a lot faster with that then with at least 3ds max (i've never used maya, so i can't speak to that). blender also uses python for scripting, which makes the scripting several orders of magnitude more flexible and powerful than the capabilities of what 3ds max and maya have combined, which is useful to know if you can program. last of all, blender is free and has comparitively rapid development compared to most commercial products, but i don't know enough to compare feature-sets on the whole, but i know that maya, 3ds max, and blender all have at least enough to do most things with, and each have many features that the others do not.

[Giel]

i have to reiterate that it would fall into fair use to (eventually) create some kind of conversion tool that'll rip the original rpl's into some other format for use with wzr, for those that wanted to use to originals... think freedoom vs the actual buyable "doom"... all the source ports that i've seen can use either, and those that bought the actual game can use either.

Looking at the mailing list I see there has already been put effort into providing a decoder for the RPL movies by Angus Lees. It seems rather tightly integrated with some OpenGL rendering code though. https://mail.gna.org/public/warzone-dev ... 00245.html

[kage]

wow... that's sweet.

well i know that some mplayer folks discussed an rpl decoder, but never actually figured out the format completely... if gus actually was able to watch an unmodified rpl within wz 2.0, then it means he's more or less completely figured out the format. if we can punch out an actual rpl spec, then a lot of other eidos gaming communities definitely would like to get their hands on something like an ffmpeg codec.

[Giel]

Actually AFAIK Angus based it off of these two documents: container specs and codec specs.

The codec specs are reverse engineered and posted to the dev mailing list in this message by Pierre Willenbrock. Looking at this first message by him I'm guessing that he disassembled the dec130.dll file and reverse engineered the dec130 codec specs based off of that assembly code.

As for the code Angus wrote. I think it might be best to modify it slightly. To have a better separated and less tightly coupled API. So as to sift the decoding portion of the code out into a decoder only API/library.

[MikaelB]

Hi everyone.

My name is Mikael and I'm a Java developer since many years.
As a private project, I'm currently trying to make a portage of the original game "Tomb Raider" (the first one) in the Java language. 

Recently, I worked on FMV movies that are included in Tomb Raider. I managed to implement a decoder for the RPL files. Codec used in the first Tomb Raider game is Escape124. But the next two games used the Escape130 codec too, as Warzone 2100. So I'll try to implement a Escape130 decoder Java version.

I'll try to check the specs posted in last message to see what's can be done with it 

[Kamaze]

And what's about the legal questions?
Anyways, only very few people do have the original WZ2100, and only a few of them will find the WRP.

But reverse engineering is not allowed here.

[GiGaBaNE]

i agree, besides any legal considerations, lets face it. Although we love them dearly, the fmv's from the retail version are actually rather crap and we would be doing the world a favour by making new ones..

as i have mentioned above im not really into the coding scene myself yet, but surely if a person has the skills to wade through someone elses work, it cant be much harder to make their own...can it?

[GiGaBaNE]

ok devs, im still learning but whats your thinking on things like;

NUT Container  ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUT_Container )

OpenAVS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAVS )

Mainly i ask because it seems to me that if we are gonna move forward to any significant degree. a definate choice needs to be made on the future of FMV's in warzone2100.

and it particularly affects me because im still trying to decide what skills i need to learn to be a part of the solution

[Giel]

But reverse engineering is not allowed here.

By what law ? The only nation that has laws prohibiting reverse engineering are the US (DMCA). And that only applies when it is used to circumvent copyprotection (e.g. DRM, CSS, etc.) which isn't the case here.

NUT Container  ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUT_Container )

It seems like a nice container format, but I can't really find any advantages of it above Ogg or Matroska.

OpenAVS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAVS )

Definitly not since it seems to be too patent encumbered. I'd rather use a codec like Theora.

Mainly i ask because it seems to me that if we are gonna move forward to any significant degree. a definate choice needs to be made on the future of FMV's in warzone2100.

and it particularly affects me because im still trying to decide what skills i need to learn to be a part of the solution

Personally I think you're best bet will be on an Ogg/Theora combination.

[GiGaBaNE]

im just sniffing around on the subject but....

Despite the popularity of the concept of reverse engineering with sections of the engineering community, the legislative position restricts reverse engineering of hardware and makes reverse engineering of software legal only under very limited circumstances in Europe. In the US, slightly more freedom is available to reverse engineers, but great care is still needed to avoid infringement.

Source : http://www.jenkins-ip.com/serv/serv_6.htm

[Giel]

I see nothing in that article that makes reverse engineering "illegal" in the case of the dec130 codec.

[GiGaBaNE]

i personaly dont know what is legal or illigal on the matter, like i said im just sniffing.
We might get better answers from THIS.. , if you have the stamina to read it, particulaly "Reverse Engineering in the Computer Software Industry"

[kage]

By what law ? The only nation that has laws prohibiting reverse engineering are the US

iirc, several countries in europe, especially norway, prohibit reverse engineering of all kinds, at least in regards to software.

i personaly dont know what is legal or illigal on the matter, like i said im just sniffing.

the question of legality only really applies to distribution of the original movies (not legal to distribute), since, as said, neither drm nor hardware is involved, though the issue might be different for some developers in europe.

dammit it, why my link not work right?

this board has html disabled, and for good reason... what you want is bbcode

Mainly i ask because it seems to me that if we are gonna move forward to any significant degree. a definate choice needs to be made on the future of FMV's in warzone2100.

the decision has pretty much already been made afaict: ogg/theora videos are already partially supported thanks to contributions from _gerard, and that support has been publically available for almost four months.

even if we were starting from scratch on the video code right now, i still think ogg/theora would be a good bet, as it supports everything we could actually possibly need (an arbitrary number of streams of any type, with no restriction on the number of streams of a given type, and good a/v/whatever sync amongst all of them). while nut does look good, the two real advantages it has over ogg, (better error resistance, and fine-grained stream seeking), don't really apply to our problemspace, and beyond that, nut is less mature than ogg from what i've seen.

Recently, I worked on FMV movies that are included in Tomb Raider. I managed to implement a decoder for the RPL files. Codec used in the first Tomb Raider game is Escape124. But the next two games used the Escape130 codec too, as Warzone 2100. So I'll try to implement a Escape130 decoder Java version.

cool. how similar does 130 look to 124, and how many versions of the escape codec do you think there are?

[Olrox]

   Why don't you do slideshows with sound? It would be much easier than making full animations and would not have the problem of "copying others work". The sound would only give necessary briefing, and the slideshow would bring maps, bases sattelite photos, enemy's new units and the like.

   P.S.: It's easier although not easy