Cutscenes

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Zen3001
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Zen3001 »

That sucks, ruins some stuff I had imagined but I get your point. I'll experiment arround with what ever I get then
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by wildweasel »

The RoQ player from Quake 3 was brought up at some point, several discussions ago. I wonder if that's worth pursuing by some third party?
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Rachael
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Rachael »

RoQ would be considerable. I can't make any promises, and keep in mind there's still a LOT of negative sentiment towards this feature, but if someone does it, and does it right, it might be enough to get it.
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Graf Zahl »

Zen3001 wrote:That sucks, ruins some stuff I had imagined but I get your point. I'll experiment arround with what ever I get then

Just so you know: libavcodec, which is the standard for video decoding is 60 MB of DLL files - that's totally unmanageable. And that doesn't even factor in the patent issues with this library.
It'd suck if that pile of baggage had to be tagged along for all eternity.
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Rachael
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Rachael »

One of the biggest problems with video files is that everyone has their own ideas for creating new standards, new methods of compression, whether better than what's already in use or not, and new ways of encoding said files. Big media corporations have a vested interest in monetizing the medium as much as possible, so as such they maintain patents on it and when their patents expire they invent a new format or codec - standards be damned! And the longer that it's possible for them to monopolize the players that can support these files, the better.

I personally think that the standards for earning a digital patent should go up much higher. Not be impossible, but I think the patents we have for computer software should stop being as pervasive as they are today, because they are so horribly abused.
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Graf Zahl
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Graf Zahl »

I wonder how long they can continue inventing new standards. We have already seen with audio encoding that this isn't endless. I've never had any need for AAC decoding, for example, it's either MP3 or FLAC (or very rarely Ogg Vorbis), so who needs a better lossy codec anyway?

At some point the codecs whose patents have expired just become good enough. What has driven video encoding over the last 20 years was to reduce bit rates for ever increasing resolutions, and even here we are close to the saturation point. 8K makes little sense outside of those technophile circles where make-believe is the main driver of ever less significant improvements.
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Reactor
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Reactor »

What about playing an animated GIF once? You can convert a video to animated GIF relatively easily, and somehow the game could play them when appropiate (intro, outro and stuff). You can record the sound effects into an audio file and it'd start the same time the GIF would play.
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Rachael »

That's really not a solution. That's just providing a half-assed solution to a legitimate desire for a feature and ultimately won't really help the people who want it because it just works around the solutions that are already available, anyhow. And I say this as someone who still vehemently disagrees with the feature.
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Reactor »

I know, but if someone needs a cutscene so bad, and there are no video options available, this is the most GZDoom can achieve. Sure, a Bink video module would be much better, but if Graf Zahl says there'll be no video support, we just have to deal with it. An animated GIF would be perfect for the intro logos, however, you won't really need anything more advanced for those.

Instead of cutscenes, I'll stick to the classic "storybook solution", where a pageable set of PNGs would represent the cutscene, with standstill pictures and text, so apart from the few logo intros when the game start, I never really longed for video-support.
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Gez »

I know the GIF patents have expired, but come on.

At least go for APNG, so that you don't get the 256-color limitation of the GIF format.

But really, anything you can do with an animated image is a thing you can do with [wiki]ANIMDEFS[/wiki].
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Reactor »

APNG? What the actual f...? I never heard of this before!

Can GZDoom handle in-game APNG graphics?
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Graf Zahl »

Animated GIF and APNG would be nice features for animated textures. I wouldn't ever consider them for cutscene movies, though.
Reactor wrote:APNG? What the actual f...? I never heard of this before!

Can GZDoom handle in-game APNG graphics?
No. It'd only read the first image in it as a regular PNG.
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Matt »

Rachael wrote:I know I am not the only one with this sentiment, but I realize I still may be a vocal minority about this:

My biggest concern about this feature is it introduces the possibility of a more "modern" styled mod that resembles recent games. Sounds great, right? Not really. In my opinion, many of those games are nothing more than glorified, semi-interactive, playable movies.

I don't want that in GZDoom. Little short 3-5 second cutscenes I don't mind, and those can be done easily in ACS. But this feature is a true pandora's box - if you put it in, you will definitely reap what you sew. Maybe it might not be that bad, but I rather like GZDoom the way it is without that. It IS an engine limitation, but it's one that forces you to be more creative about how you tell a story. And I see nothing wrong with that.

I don't like in-game cinematics, I never did, and it's not something I want GZDoom to have.
I'm just happy that at least one of GZDoom's main devs thinks this!

Gez wrote:I very much prefer cutscenes done with the engine, because they don't take me out of the game. FMVs where the world and characters look nothing like they do in-game have a way to violently break the consistency of experience.
Also this.


(Personally my favourite way of handling non-interactive story during a game is Doom's post-episode text and screens, with everything before play being relegated to the manual...)
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by fakemai »

Matt wrote:I very much prefer cutscenes done with the engine, because they don't take me out of the game. FMVs where the world and characters look nothing like they do in-game have a way to violently break the consistency of experience.
This even bites Thief 1 and 2. Like, the cutscenes to introduce each level's objectives are fantastic, but the "main" ones that establish parts of the story feel a little out of place. So of course Thief: Deadly Shadows had the bright idea of only having "main" cutscenes and making them even worse-looking.
Reactor wrote:Bink video module would be much better
No open encoders, while open decoding support only exists in ffmpeg. There are actually options that aren't covered by restrictive patents or tied to massive dependencies like ffmpeg, I'd point to VP8/VP9 (video) and Opus (audio) as examples of that. Even then, I also question the value of the feature, or demand for it. Personally, most of the Doom mods I play are simpler gameplay and/or monster modifications that work with the official maps and don't give me a lot of extra stuff to worry about. Stuff that plays like Doom but different.
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Re: Cutscenes

Post by Matt »

I really like Diabolus Ex's mission briefing.
Graf Zahl wrote:Just so you know: libavcodec, which is the standard for video decoding is 60 MB of DLL files - that's totally unmanageable. And that doesn't even factor in the patent issues with this library.
It'd suck if that pile of baggage had to be tagged along for all eternity.
And then there's also the bloat you'll start seeing in the mods - we already see all sorts of nonsense with 10-map episodes taking 80MB+ because of a dozen full-length high-quality MP3s the mapper felt just had to be there for the full user experience, how much worse would this sort of thing be with full video support?
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