i can mirror the file as well -- you can send me anything of any arbitrary size, but any user downloading a file of more than 10 or so MB will find it painfully slow (i've got 45 KB/s total upload).
if my version is compatible, i can also work with anyone to set up my comp to help out in render-farming with blender.
bink video and a few others specialize in ultra-low decompression capabilities, but don't necessarily have good marks in file size or quality (the codec might have one, but not the other). since we're largely dealing with workstation-ish comps, and not pitifully slow consoles, the benefits of bink and similar codecs (even open source equivs) are not very useful to us, compared to say, xvid or, as dev mentioned, theora + vorbis, which will have the same quality as bink, but much smaller file size.
DevUrandom wrote:
And requiring an external tool might work with the GPL, but it looks a little bit ugly to me, esp. since I don't know how to handle the GL context on Windows when an external tool tries to do some fullscreen magic...
So my favourite is still the ingame cutscenes... Won't be photo-realistic, but someone might be able to get the graphics into a state where it looks ok even with detail-zooming.
granted, i've never done any of this with c or opengl, but i have dealt with similar circumstances (going from one fullscreen process to another, then back to the first), and imho, using an external player is the very best option. granted, it does look a bit ugly to have something like the windows media player gui pop up to play a video, and may lose some atmosphere provided by the game, but the player could very easily be user-configurable: as long as the player's binary could accept the path to the movie as the final argument, the user could customize, via command-line options certain things like --no-gui --fullscreen, or whatever player-specific equivs there are.
in regards to gl-context handling, or two fullscreen apps clashing: don't even bother... every operating system i have used has a syscall that lets you run another program while suspending the current one; once the child-process (the external movie player) terminates, the parent (warzone) is given cpu cycles once again and normal operation resumes. effectively, warzone would simply block until the external player was finished. i already know that warzone has no issues reinitializing the opengl context, since i frequently switch to another tty or sig STOP the program, and come back to it later without issue, so all you'd have to do to play an external movie is:
Code: Select all
close opengl context
"system" syscall user_movie_player + path_to_movie /* iirc, this is the one that blocks until the child process is complete */
initialize opengl context
afaik, opengl is fairly good at implicitly reinitializing itself, so you might be able to cut out two of those steps.
with an external video player, you've already got video playback, and you've already got controls that would allow the user to replay and seek around the video -- i've found often enough that i've wanted to watch a wz briefing again because i missed something: if you guys are thinking there's any difficulty in implementing playback directly in warzone itself, then i doubt you're going to want to try to implement playback controls of any kind, and at most, you might implement some kind of "replay video from beginning button", which isn't useful to a user if they missed something at the very end of a longer cutscene. also, you shouldn't necessarily assume that if an external player is used, that it'll be attempting to run in fullscreen mode -- there are many times when my relatively large screen (1920x1200) makes playing 640x480 video in games quite painful, as it looks pretty damned bad when stretched: in those times, it's usually nicer to view the movies in original or perhaps double size.
cutscenes rendered at runtime using the game engine have many benefits, but one potentially serious issue: any code update has the potential of breaking those kinds of cutscenes in subtle or serious ways, and the only way to make sure this doesn't happen is to check each of the cutscenes upon every major code release... videos, on the other hand, will either work or they wont -- if one plays, they'll all play.
Hatsjoe wrote:
BTW: Can i use a student licensed version of 3Ds Max to recreate those files? Cause that's all i got
depends on the license, but it should be okay, since student licenses usually prohibit commercial use, which this certainly isn't.
Hatsjoe wrote:
I ve done the "project comms" in max. Just the version that says "briefing commencing" it's just a 2.4 sec file but There are some other longer comms that use the exact same animation only longer so all those are actually done (if you like it that is) Chojun is going to host the file asap. So stay tuned. And i do believe that the best way to produce videos is by all using the same modelling tools etc. but if i have to do it in blender you can count me out cause that would take me 10's of hours to get used to the prog. However I believe that we can use max for a certain FMV and Blender for another. As long as both artists are working closely together since the end product of those people will just be a bunch of unprocessed images.
i'm a little bit rusty, but am moderately well versed in blender, and the interface is no burden to me. that said, if given direction under a good team-leader, i might be able to make some good stuff. i've never done anything near this level of scope, but as long as i'm not working on it alone, i'm fairly persistant. in other words, if you guys get something going, i'll help out in the 3d stuff, as i have a strong interest in making the videos. only problem is that i can't create textures or other 2d art that are worth anything, so you can't count on me for that. i might also be able to help out with voice acting, but i have really shoddy equipment and can't afford better, so the quality probably wouldn't be anything worth using.
also, i think it's unfair to ask the devs to implement, or even start on any kind of video playback capability for warzone before we get to work -- they've got a lot more that they're handling than just what we want them to do. have complete confidence that if we come out with some really good stuff, then someone will step up and find a way to put them into warzone.
whippersnapper wrote:
btw, really curious - what is the downside to outputing an .avi to be played back on the cross platform
OSS VLC Media Player ???
below are the downsides -- take note that these aren't the downsides of vlc itself, but are the downsides of requiring a specific video player.
- requiring vlc itself doesn't provide signifigant benefit over any other media player, as most of them have the same capabilities and command-line startup options
- if we forced it, then we'd have to package and maintain it, which is no small amount of work, and it'd make for a much larger download
- many systems already have a video-player installed that will cover the minimum required abilities for playback of any movies we create -- granted, it's something that a player will have to configure by hand, but then, that's not very difficult, as we can provide a "browse" box for windows and mac users to quickly configure their players, and if a linux user is capable of installing wz in the first place, they know enough to be able to tweak the warzone conf files by hand.
- i can't speak for everyone, but while vlc is an excellent video player, i've got another one i prefer much more, and i don't necessarily like having gtk2 dragged onto my linux system as a dependency.
- would take extra work to detect if vlc is already installed on the system -- a process which often creates false negatives (says it isn't there when it really is), in which case installing two copies of the same thing is really annoying, and may destroy user customization already in place, or might install to a seperate location and remain unable to access the user's customizations.
Hatsjoe wrote:
Furthermore it has motivational (<= is that even english ? :s)
yes, it's english, and it's spelled correctly too.
cybersphinx wrote:
Giel wrote:
WARNING LOTS OF WORDS HERE, READ ON YOUR OWN RISK
Gee, thanks for the warning, I almost thought it was just dirt on my screen. Hey, that wasn't nearly as much as Kage writes sometimes, now I'm dissapointed!
yeah, i'm disappointed too: for a minute i thought i'd found someone who can put people to sleep just as well as me.
