Let's Go To The Movies

[This post was copied from the jerkstop thread for context.]

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After thinking about this for a while, I am prepared to conclude that the area description boxes (! of all things !) are behind jerkstop if I can get three independent verifications that it's gone from 7.8 from people who normally or at least occasionally suffer it. So far it looks that way for GA82 (which is probably the strongest indicator being as he is the classic victim) and sirchet (a sometimes victim), and gazra is testing it now or soon.

My guess is that the tutorial popups (which is what are hijacked for use as area description popups) involve some sort of internal call to the .dll that is binding things up. I've had a bit of verification of this idea based on the discovery that tutorial popups will pop up on tutorial maps even if there are no tutorial critters on those maps and their associated scripts that invoke the popups. (This was happening most recently under Welkwood Bog, which maps used the original tutorial map numbers.) While this doesn't point directly to jerkstop, it does point to 'something going on' behind the scenes that we're not aware of. The solution, then, is to not re-use the tutorial maps and to not invoke the tutorial popups at all.

I am perfectly fine with that as a measure to eradicate jerkstop, because it will mean we don't have to screw around with moving the Hommlet map and thus reworking the worldmap and losing Hommlet's worldmap satellite locations. As for area descriptions, we can kill two birds with one stone on that score: we've always intended to make first arrival area movies, so now we can just make the area descriptions the movies. (They'll be actual movies and have nothing to do with popup boxes.) They'll be similar to the slavers movie, with static text and a picture to go along with it. This approach is not spectacular but we are not really capable of spectacularity with movies anyway, and I would rather do something reserved but well instead of ambitious but off the mark. At the worst they will be no worse than the popups as far as the appearance of quality goes, and probably a bit of an upgrade. So this way we will have area descriptions in the form of movies with a bit more flare and style, the movies we always planned, and no tutorial popup boxes to screw things up. Plus the slaver-style movies are not difficult to make, so it's a win-win all around.

Area movies will include all the major worldmap locations (and the shopmap) that either already feature movies or had featured popups:

1. Shop map
2. Hommlet
3. Emridy Meadows
4. Moathouse
5. Nulb
6. Temple
7. Welkwood Bog
8. Hickory Branch
9. Verbobonc

The other worldmap locations (Decklo Grove, Moathouse Cave Exit, Ogre Cave, Imeryds Run, Temple satellites, Verbobonc Cave Exit, and Hommlet Quarry) are either minor or ancillary locations and don't really need intro movies.

Areas that already have movies (Hommlet, Temple) will either have the area descriptions movies appended or just played in sequence.

The images in the movies will be pics distributed with the game (bonus GoG materials), so they will be 'official' and of high quality. The descriptions themselves will remain unchanged, being text from the module.

These movies, unlike the old batch, will be part of the full/real modpack and will be distributed with the game. I don't think data/bandwidth issues are really significant anymore in 2013.

Lastly, the tutorial itself will probably return to the modpack, being as those maps and the popup system won't be hijacked anymore.

Second from lastly, we will probably go back to the former worldmap configuration that reassigned some of the lesser locations to NC locations. That way they can have clickable locations again, and we will work around that weird thing that arrived with the change where Imeryds Run would appear prematurely as a known location. (I never figured out what was causing that, but it wasn't an issue with the previous iteration, so ...)

All in all, if this all proves true and comes to fruition, it will be a major accomplishment and victory for Co8, on par even with the lag issues. It was very depressing to think of our finished product shipping with good old venerable jerkstop in v8.

:thumbsup:

 

Above post was copied over from its original location in the jerkstop thread for context.

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So, movies. As per above, we are no longer going to have popup boxes for area descriptions to avoid jerkstop. Instead, we will have movies to do that, which will satisfy our longterm yearning to have 'official' intro movies for all the major worldmap locations, just in time for the full release of the modpack in v8.

When you think of Troika ToEE movies, you think of three basic types (not counting the damned logo movies):

1. the Hommlet arrival movies, the Temple arrival movie, the skull movie, and the Zuggtmoy movies (all rather brief 3D animations)
2. the intro cinematic (a sophisticated 3D movie with all kinds of animation)
3. the vignette movies and the death movie (rather basic 2D movies that mostly pan around the screen and have little or no animation)

Co8 movies (both the old optional ones and others like the Slavers) have been mostly like the third type - they either have limited animation (actually just panning) or no animation at all, static images played back in real time with audio and text and maybe some transition effects. We are not a sophisticated production house, so basically the limit of our animation capabilities is to pan around on the screen.

Until now I had believed that endlides - the images with text and voice audio that play at the end of the game - were of limited use, because calling one from dialogue like a regular movie would only display them for a second. Basically this meant they could only be used as endslides for the endslide/endgame mechanic. I was wrong however, because it turns out endslides can be displayed for however long you want, with the duration being determined by the duration of an accompanying .mp3 audio file.

This means that we can substitute endslides for our movies.

What are the advantages of this?

• Movies take up a huge amount of space. I recently redid the Slavers movie, for example, which now carries a payload of something like 400 MB. That's almost the size of the rest of the entire NC modpack. Not all or many are that large, but they're still formidable altogether. Endslides by comparison are tiny, because they are not really movies. They are just a single .jpg image displayed for however long, whereas a movie is displaying about 30 images (or frames) per second. Furthermore, we can never really get Bink compression to the specs that Troika seemed to get. I'm not sure if maybe license holders or clients get better compression or what, but our own movies are always larger in data size than Troika's while maintaining the same quality level. (More compression degrades image quality, and there is a definite cut off point for acceptability.)
  
• Slides - being static images - actually display 'cleaner' than movies. They just look sharper and clearer.

The Co8 movies, particularly the new ones, are basically slides masquerading as movies. They are just static images with audio and limited animation. Therefore there is little reason to have them be actual movies when there are alternatives, like with slides. So, the upshot of all this is that I think we're going to make all the Co8 movies slides. This will save on space and actually make for a more pleasant viewing experience in terms of image quality.

This will have no effect on the existing Troika movies, although it might be interesting to see if we could eliminate the need for modeswitching by changing some of them. But that's another matter.

More to come later.

 

I assume that's how (or similar to how) Troika did their 3D environment movies (like the throne elevator one), where they have a camera cruise around their 3D maps. Didn't you make an app for that or something?

 

I like the guitar track.

The movie is neat in its 3D aspect, but as you say, the textures are kind of polygonal. That's no fault of yours I'm sure, but it basically looks like an in-game session of a 3D game like NWN with noclip turned on.

Two things I learned about game movies a long time ago are that 1. they should be different than the normal game perspective (e.g. if you have a 2D iso game like ToEE, no one will thrill to seeing a 2D iso movie), and 2. they have to up the quality appearance level (e.g. no one will thrill to a movie that doesn't look any better than their in-game experience). Those two things pretty much always hold true for pro game efforts. We've never really had the ability to thrill anybody with movies here, but we can at least be respectable by acknowledging what we can't do well enough and sticking with what we can.

I learned all that the hard way lol - made a lot of crappy movies in my day (even the optional ones that are still available here are kind of crappy, which is partly why they never made it into the modpack). At some point you reach a level of experience with creative stuff where you're able to be honest with yourself about what's good or not, which is really mandatory for a group effort like ToEE, where marginal content can drag everybody else down with you.

Sorry for the tangent lol.

 

Woot! I figured out how to play a queue of slides (like with the endslides) without ending the game. It's one of those things that appears obvious after you get it, but not necessarily before when you are smart-challenged.

To set the endslides, play them, and end the game, the zuggtmoy script uses this:

Code:

set_end_slides( attachee, triggerer )
game.moviequeue_play_end_game()

with set_end_slides() being defined in utiities.py (it's a script that consults various flags et al to see what the state of the game is) and game.moviequeue_play_end_game() apparently being an internal function. This is all well known. My great fear however was that the only thing that function would do is play the slides and end the game, the latter of which we don't want to do when just playing slides here and there throughout the game obviously, but it turns out (zOMG!) that

Code:

game.moviequeue_play()

without the _end_game bit will just play whatever movies are queued and return you to the game. So, we make a custom script to queue whatever movies we want to play and add the play command like so (this is for the Temple description, where there are four slides that must play after the real Temple movie):

Code:

def temple_movie_check():
	if (game.global_flags[610] == 0):
		set_temple_slides()
		game.global_flags[610] = 1
	return


def set_temple_slides():
	game.moviequeue_add(412)
	game.moviequeue_add(413)
	game.moviequeue_add(414)
	game.moviequeue_add(415)
	game.moviequeue_play()
	return RUN_DEFAULT

The def temple_movie_check() just checks to see if the movies have already been played so you don't see them over and over again. And the script is attached to the generic spawner that appears on all worldmap locations. The end result is that when we first arrive at the Temple, the Temple movie plays, followed by four custom slides that serve as the area description.

So, what's the big deal? Well, there really is no 'big' deal, because we could do the same thing by simply playing a succession of movies with the game.fade command, like so:

Code:

game.fade(0,0,412,0)
game.fade(0,0,413,0)
game.fade(0,0,414,0)
game.fade(0,0,415,0)

However, a big weakness with that method is with the damned mode switching. On my machine at least, my monitor wants to switch modes between every movie and slide played. But when you play a queued group of slides, it doesn't switch modes until after they're all done. This is win, given our growing mode switching fatigue.

Consequently, we'll probably use this method to play all first arrival Co8 slides, rather than the 'Movie: xxx' method in MapList.mes, because that method will only play one movie and also loves mode switching.

 

No. That's not something that's controlled by any ToEE scripts, but rather your system and monitor. All we can do to that end is make it so that the game doesn't ask to play a movie (and thus switch modes), which is what the disabling intro thing in TFE-X does.

To be clear, the game does still cause a mode switch for endlides. It's just that with the method above, it will only do that at the start and end of the queue, not between each slide.