Cinematics

[m0l0t0ph]

Here I'll collect some of my cinematics.

Crits and comments are welcome

Maybe later we can put them together to a trailer. I'll also do a little tutorial in the near future

Download 1,2mb

[Paal_101]

Most impressive! The technology works and now is the time to make use of it

[m0l0t0ph]

and here is another one (from new_world_animated-map)

Download 2,0mb

[janwas]

Sweet! It's nice to see an overflight of more complex / non-barebones test terrains 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

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?

[m0l0t0ph]

Specs:

-Athlon 64 3200+ (Venice Core)

-1024mb Ram 400Mhz 2,5

-Sapphire Ati Radeon X550 ( )

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

[Wijitmaker]

Very nice Christoph I'm really liking that. Yeah a tutorial would be great.

[Ykkrosh]

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

[m0l0t0ph]

Sounds great

[arissa_nightblade]

Those movies were absolutely awesome!

[Mythos_Ruler]

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

[Vaevictis_Music]

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.

[Matei]

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.

[Ykkrosh]

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

[Dnas]

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. (Integrated Intel chips are evil!!)

[Matei]

We can probably cheat . A more efficient way to do it might be to just increase the clipping frustum on the reflection and refraction cameras by some fixed amount (one way to do that is with Field of View I think).

[m0l0t0ph]

Another cool thing is, that the videos are made without enabled AA or AF, which would make them a lot prettier...(Atlas crashed when i tried to enable it for it, but 0ad normal works quite fine with it...)

[Ykkrosh]

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

[Matei]

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.

[m0l0t0ph]

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

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

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 December 5, 2006 by m0l0t0ph

[m0l0t0ph]

here is the tutorial-cinematic, rendered with atlas Download 8,6mb

EDIT:

nick: wfg

pw: wfgmembersonly

Edited December 5, 2006 by m0l0t0ph

[Paal_101]

Awesome work Makes me wish that I could justify a new graphics card.... but not in the middle of the school year.

[Matei]

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.

[Wijitmaker]

Sweet, there are some issues with it... but thats mainly compression and video card issues that are probably out of your control. We'll get you some triggers soon hopefully and then you can go make all sorts of nifty movies

[m0l0t0ph]

yes, I've made this tutorial-cinematic, imagening a rider running this street to the city, that would look really cool

[Dnas]

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.)