FMV and Briefing transcripts.

[lav_coyote25]

the original file prior to compression was 68.4 MB (71,786,496 bytes) = alpha1 beginning_0001.avi ;D

just the way it appears - no sound etc...

[DevUrandom]

Virgil is exactly correct... What's missing and the problem is not the videos (atm), but the code...
If you want to burden the user with manually starting videos before the game starts... Do it.

i went looking for information.   
is this compatible with what we have now?

We use libogg and libvorbis to decode Vorbis encoded audiostreams in OGG containers, yes.
We could additionally use libtheora to decode Theora videostreams in OGG containers, but that would still require a videoplayer to play them.

The idea Virgil had with that external player is maybe not that bad...
We can call other system-programs from within the Warzone exe. So theoretically it would be possible to call something like VLC (which at least is Windows and Linux compatible; I don't know about Mac and BSD) to playback some videos.
I say theoretically, because:
- we would have to ship the player with Warzone, as we can't assume that it is installed on all machines. This means several additional MB of download size
- at least on Linux we would have to depend on the player (which itself requires several libraries) installed and with eg. Theora support enabled
- the playback window might interfere with Warzone's OpenGL window
- the player must be instructable to start a video in fullscreen mode and exit after playback

Still I am not convinced of that idea, since the download size of a video is not neglectable and there must be someone to upload all that data (me), which will take a while. Currently it takes me about 2h to upload a release, with some additional videos this would probably be tripled.
Other projects do fairly well without any videos, so I don't think this is an immediate requirement.

[lav_coyote25]

Still I am not convinced of that idea, since the download size of a video is not neglectable and there must be someone to upload all that data (me), which will take a while. Currently it takes me about 2h to upload a release, with some additional videos this would probably be tripled.
Other projects do fairly well without any videos, so I don't think this is an immediate requirement.

if thats all thats holding us up - i will help out in the uploading department - just tell me what needs to be done and the order to do it in.

if it requires compiling - is there a bat file to do this with???  so all i would need to do is the install creator thingy / or whatever you use to do that with. 

---

or better yet - what you said - do the cutscenes or whatever you wish to call them and upload them as they are completed, all it would take then is to agree on the format -  ogg vorbis seems to fit the bill.

[kage]

i guess i've missed something... we can use the videos now, or someone made new ones?

anyways, there's absolutely no reason you should have to package videos in cvs/svn, and, iirc, making a commit only uploads the things that changed, or at least, there's a way to do so.

at any rate, videos should be optional, and it's easy enough for bandwidth to not be an issue if we leverage bittorrent -- i'll be the first volunteer seed, and, while not extremely fast (not that it matters with bittorrent once we get more than just me), i can keep it seeded almost indefinitely with perhaps less than 2 hours of downtime a week (if not 2 hours a month).

another point: while most windows users let their system play the whipping boy to whatever wants to install itself, and often don't put up any fuss when they have 4 or 5 different media players installed, linux power users tend to take the exact opposite approach, and generally have a single prefered program for any given task. beyond that, when using autopackage, keeping the number of included pieces of software to a minimum is always good, since you are often going up against a distribution-centric package management system, and if install vlc via the warzone autopackage, after checking to see if it's there, the installer may well have failed to detect an installed copy that is present, and installed a duplicate, which, given that you maintain it yourself, is probably outdated.

easiest thing to do with linux and the other unixes is to provide a config option that lets you specify the media player command (in my case, this would be something like 'mplayer -fs -cache 65536 %f', where %f might be something that warzone replaces with the file path and name when calling this program). for security reasons you wouldn't want to implicitly use a shell to execute the command, but if a player really wants to do that, perhaps to cd to somewhere else first, they can specify the shell explicitly.

leveraging an external player is actually a really really good idea -- it would allow a user to pause, replay, change contrast (and whatever) with no extra work on your part -- you could just have warzone iconify itself and then run the program in blocking mode, so that warzone won't use up any processor time until the exec'd command terminates for whatever reason, at which point warzone's very next command is to uniconify itself (or whatever method is used to assure that warzone's window won't try to overlap with the media player, whether it was already running in fullscreen or windowed mode).

[Rman Virgil]

the original file prior to compression was 68.4 MB (71,786,496 bytes) = alpha1 beginning_0001.avi ;D

just the way it appears - no sound etc...

* Hmm..... going from 68.4 mb to 1.5 is impressive. What is NOT impressive is that what you did required 68.5 mbs in the first place !!!! Your graphic is real sweet but you can get that nice resolution in kbs.... so thats telling me that the scrolling text effect (5 secs ?) took some 68 MBs ? Something don't compute there for me...


* As an OLD frame of ref let me spec the WZ "Mangodai Trailer" I did in 2001: it ran 2.5 Minutes (not seconds), it had 24 distinct GFX taken from in-game, it had SFX, it had 12 diff transition FX, it had voice-overs, it had original music and text overlays, it was also a 256 palette (16 bit)...  ALL of that I compiled into a 5 MB .exe !!! which I distroed with the freebie 1.5 MB Player.

* Where I'm going with these calcs as far as the orig WZ CAM is simply this: 5 MBs x 36 = 180 Mbs ... not bad these days.

* (Of course these days many devs use the their game renderer/engine itself to create the cut-scenes instead of a sep CGI pkg.... this somewhat inspired by the Machinma movement. Course this tech predates Machinma if you look at an old game like Bungie's revolutionary 3D "Myth" (circa '98) wherein the player could save their games as 3D "Movies" for playback.... a tradition that has carried foward & can be found in state of the art games like Relic's impressive "Company of Heroes".)


* Just a prelim anlysis - RADtools does not SEEM to offer enough "bang per MB" to suit me.... BUT if you could do a 5MB compressed project that included the gamut of elements mentioned... I'd use it.

- rv

[Rman Virgil]

if thats all thats holding us up - i will help out in the uploading department - just tell me what needs to be done and the order to do it in.

if it requires compiling - is there a bat file to do this with???  so all i would need to do is the install creator thingy / or whatever you use to do that with. 

---

or better yet - what you said - do the cutscenes or whatever you wish to call them and upload them as they are completed, all it would take then is to agree on the format -  ogg vorbis seems to fit the bill.

* As far as what vid FF - my guess is that you work backward based on the VLC which is indeed TOTALLY cross-platform HERE

* "ogg vorbis" only accounts for audio..... If I'm not mistaken - I think simple .avis will work across the board - Check it out HERE


- rv

[Rman Virgil]

....................


* Outta curiousity I did another new frame of reference:

* Using the latest ver of HyperCam I shot an in-game WZ Machinma: 30 seconds @ 5 mbs (just game SFX)... standard .avi ... no spec comp..... which I trans as being able to do something real fancy with a running time of 15 seconds coming in at 5 mbs & that's as a fat .avi.

Cheers, rv

[kage]

* Using the latest ver of HyperCam I shot an in-game WZ Machinma: 30 seconds @ 5 mbs (just game SFX)... standard .avi ... no spec comp..... which I trans as being able to do something real fancy with a running time of 15 seconds coming in at 5 mbs & that's as a fat .avi.

entirely dependent on a lot of variables though... 640x480 video at 24-bit color uses 50% more space (when uncompressed) then the same resolution at 16-bit color depth, whereas 800x600x16 uses only 4% more bits for video then 640x480x24 over the same period of time. of course, this data only stores the color information per each bit, and does not consider any binary metadata that may be used for syncing, start-of-frame markers, etc.

[Rman Virgil]

entirely dependent on a lot of variables though... 640x480 video at 24-bit color uses 50% more space (when uncompressed) then the same resolution at 16-bit color depth, whereas 800x600x16 uses only 4% more bits for video then 640x480x24 over the same period of time. of course, this data only stores the color information per each bit, and does not consider any binary metadata that may be used for syncing, start-of-frame markers, etc.

* Yea, no doubt 'bout that. Good info.

* What I do is play around with what I call "acceptable quality thresholds" (visual + audio)...... plus I'll set-up for a 1-take (thus minimizing the post processing mb over-head inherent in combinatorial editing).

- rv

[psychopompos]

do we really need FULL fmv?
i know it would be nice for the intro, cam outro's & the asats mission.

but mission briefs could be much simpler.
the only real imagery needed being the in-game map with cross hairs to mark target locations, or images of the structures with better rendering.
outside that, use text for the brief.
+ this wouldnt cause the d/l file size to balloon like full fmv. + no need to flag a player to run.

[Rman Virgil]

do we really need FULL fmv?
i know it would be nice for the intro, cam outro's & the asats mission.

but mission briefs could be much simpler.
the only real imagery needed being the in-game map with cross hairs to mark target locations, or images of the structures with better rendering.
outside that, use text for the brief.
+ this wouldnt cause the d/l file size to balloon like full fmv. + no need to flag a player to run.

* I agree entirely.

* In fact I started working on just this approach 2 years ago & got about 30% thru the CAM when it became apparent no one was interested enough to even answer my questions about how to appropriately get it into the WRP distro - so I just dropped it as a waste of my time & moved on.

* I had no hard feelings about the incident because I thoroughly enjoyed actually creating the stuff....

* Howver  - fast-foward to the present moment.....

* We are seriously considering offering the original FMV Mission Briefs in our quite different distro-version of WZ 2100  (non-WRP, Win-Only) because according to all our research (& original source liberation facts) there are NO REAL legal obstacles to doing so.

* Also..... in our follow-up Campaign, WZ 2200, we will be including brand spanking new, full-blown, FMV Briefs. They will also not be unfairly cryptic like some of 2100's were, IMHO.

- Cheers, RV

[psychopompos]

cryptic?
i never found them to be cryptic, i slight tome of "we arnt really sure ourselves" but nothing i would call cryptic.
cam2's "intercept nexus commander" was annoying, cause i diddnt see where it was in the psx briefs

and where are you going to host the fmv. the fils size would be... well my c&c folder is 1gig.
torrent distro?

[Per]

* We are seriously considering offering the original FMV Mission Briefs in our quite different distro-version of WZ 2100  (non-WRP, Win-Only) because according to all our research (& original source liberation facts) there are NO REAL legal obstacles to doing so.

All that is needed is an email from AlexM saying that it was the intention to release all the data, including the FMVs, under the GPL. Everything else are details we can quickly sort out. Do you not have some kind of communication with him that you can use to resolve this ambiguity issue once and for all?