Jump to content

Cinematics


Recommended Posts

Sweet! It's nice to see an overflight of more complex / non-barebones test terrains B) Should be quite impressive to behold, especially if one has only seen screenshots so far!

Props to Andrew for the operational cinematic camera and to Christoph for the sweet maps and putting this together :shrug:

It is a bit laggy at times, though - is that because your system can't quite write the video in real time? What are the specs?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Specs:

-Athlon 64 3200+ (Venice Core)

-1024mb Ram 400Mhz 2,5

-Sapphire Ati Radeon X550 ( B) )

You can check the animations yourself, I think I've commited "new world animated", so just start atlas, load it, go to cinematic, select track01 and path01 nad node01 and click start.

Imagine this with particles and triggers (moving units etc)

would be ubercool :shrug:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Having looked at the details a bit, it appears it should be fairly straightforward export video from the game (/Atlas) directly - then it could ensure there's a consistent framerate by moving the camera slower than real-time, which would avoid any jerkiness. (In particular, the FFmpeg library seems to make it reasonably straightforward to create video files (e.g. MPEG4 AVI) - even high-quality MP4 is going to be much smaller than a series of PNG or JPEG images, and can be easily loaded into a video editing program for later processing, so it should be quite a usable solution). I think it would just require splicing a few bits of existing code together - I'll poke around with it tonight to see if I can get something that works :shrug:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I recommend we release a couple of videos for our New Year's round-up.

Yup, that should make them giddy. Give me a week's notice after the cinematic is completed, and I can put a music track to it for extra effect (even if we have to put video+audio together in a video editing program - should be worth it).

However, we should take care to make sure that such a New Year cinematic is absolutely flawless, and as polished as our screenshots.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That would be pretty cool. With triggers and unit AI we may be able to export some scenes of fighting or gathering from the game (I can work on ways of doing this if you want). Even if we don't do that, a flythrough through one of our maps and maybe through a town would be pretty nice.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Would it matter if we had to cheat to make it flawless? In particular, there are ugly issues with shadows and reflected objects disappearing around the edges of the screen (because they're outside the view of the normal camera, and so they're not drawn at all, even though they're still affecting visible parts of the scene) - I believe Nicolai was working on some code to fix that but hasn't finished it. We can avoid that problem by making the game always draw everything even if it's not visible on the screen, which makes it go a lot slower but gives the correct appearance - it's just cheating a little bit :shrug:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, if FFmpeg or whatever is integrated to the editor (I'm sure scenario designers would love to be able to render cinematics into movies) I don't think it would matter if there is a disable-tricks flag, since it's expected that rendering a movie wouldn't be real-time. (Plus it probably would be lower res too.)

Awesome videos, Christoph. You make me want to have a decent video card even more. :shrug: (Integrated Intel chips are evil!!)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've committed some changes that add a 'record' button to the cinematics display - select a track, click record, choose somewhere to save (the file probably should always be given an extension of ".mp4", else I have no idea what it'll do), maybe change the bitrate (the default is just about bearable), then it'll generate the video. Be careful not to do anything that will disturb the window while it's rendering, and eventually it'll finish and you can view the output. (Well, you might be able to view it - I don't know what video players support .mp4 files. I've just been using VLC which does everything I tried and, most importantly, has an unskinned interface.)

It's far from polished, but it should at least work a bit ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nice Philip!

In my opinion the lags are not my fault.... they starts when the camera is flying a curve...the cam doesnt move it stumbles there...

EDIT²: If you do this high timescale+high framecount thing mentioned in the tutorial it is no problem :D

And atlas crashed after some frames at my cinematic-tutorial-map, dont know why ....

EDIT: If I reduce the settings it works...

And we have now another great feature....

The first official 0ad-benchmark :D

My comp needs 39sec for celt-snow on 25frames/1200bit ;) The movie takes 11sec, so (25*11)/39 = 7 frames/sec

Would be cool if we can change the resolutution too ;)

Edited by m0l0t0ph
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I modified the cull camera to increase its field of view and hopefully capture more objects, without having to capture absolutely everything. I'm not sure how this affects performance, because my own performance with fancy water is very slow, but maybe someone with a faster computer can try it on the next build and see whether it slows things down. It appears to capture more objects though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Awesome.

This is very nice. The only problem I noticed is that for some reason, my VLC shows green squares on the first few frames of the videos I make, but QuickTime doesn't. I assume it's VLC's fault.

Perhaps this mplayer warning is related.

[mpeg4 @ 0x87e000c]warning: first frame is no keyframe

The first frame is probably encoded fussily so some players do and some don't display it. And since (I assume) that video codecs store differences between frames, that would explain the green (or black in my case with mplayer) squares at the beginning.

(For the record, it plays fine in xine and totem (gstreamer) for me, but not in mplayer.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...