Free Allegiance Forums

`ym cort /laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" />

the rest of this post is just a nice work comment.

p.s. if you need any out of game 3d animation done to explain points. e.g. show a ship flying to the side of a mine field, or showing precise positions of things, perhaps with lines showing flight paths, or cones of blocked scanners etc

madpeople wrote:QUOTE (madpeople @ Feb 13 2007, 12:13 PM) `ym cort /laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" />

the rest of this post is just a nice work comment.

p.s. if you need any out of game 3d animation done to explain points. e.g. show a ship flying to the side of a mine field, or showing precise positions of things, perhaps with lines showing flight paths, or cones of blocked scanners etc

Cool rendering! I like the idea. What are you using to generate those?

The first video I'm working on is a quick game overview; the next will likely be a detailed "first five minutes" video, explaining probe placement, escort, and so on. A training video on probing could use an overhead view of a sector with indications of paths between alephs and good locations to position probes.

Another video on signature management would have an overhead view map with ships and probes in the sector. The probes would have their "sphere" indicating how far out they'd detect a ship of 100% sig. Then, do two more renderings, showing what the probe range would be at 50% and 150% signature. I'm sure I'll find more places where I could use rendered stills and such!

I can splice in AVI format in just about any codec, as well as panning/zooming across high-res bitmaps (which might be even higher quality than an AVI splice).

Can you make stills up to HD (well, 1440x1080) or higher, easily?

its in 3ds studio max 8

does this answer your question - note the window name in the picture
(same scene as before, the full .bmp of that image is 87.8MB)

i can render in any size i like, and i can render .avi in any size i want.
(though the above picture took a couple of mins to render on a 2.8Ghz p4)

one problem, i will need someone to provide me with allegiance models in .3ds format (convert with milkshape)
i only have a few (giga gar, giga + bios scout, bios fig, giga lxy int, rix dest, giga tele, giga miner). and my copy of milkshape has expired.
the rocks in the picture are my high poly ones.

i just replaced the textures for rendering with high res ones so the giga gar should look better than it does above. (the rocks were using highres anyway)

madpeople wrote:QUOTE (madpeople @ Feb 13 2007, 11:05 PM) (same scene as before, the full .bmp of that image is 87.8MB)

Uuuuuh, just use PNG... It's lossless, too.

(PS: Whatever you use to create PNGs (Gimp?), please update it. You recently posted a PNG that was ten times as large as it should. If you want to reply to this, please PM, I derailed this thread enough already.)


-- Cort

New Video Update!

I have a 6-minute 31MB sample video at FileFront.

Also: there's a lower-quality-but-faster-to-view Google Video version here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4548405926611866849

Please download and test this; I'm hoping to generate AVI format that will work on most folks PCs without needing to resort to installing codec packs or such. This particular version is 800x600 at 30 frames per second, 500KBit Windows Media V3 in an AVI file.

VideoLAN (VLC) crashes, but Windows Media player and WinAmp both work OK with this one.

I have a 1MBit version (60MB or so) but that's probably a bit large for a "test". Perhaps the final release will be a DVD ISO image or such.

wow, that so didn't feel like 6 mins, you could quite easily watch 30 mins of them without noticing you had spend so long.

i think doing them in 6-10 min long videos instead of a single long video will work well, asa you then think, well maybe one more, its only 6 mins long (repeat until all watched)

Good work. My thoughts on the vid - cut the part about 'hovering the mouse over the minimap for more information' (1:40 to 1:57). If you do that, do it during the middle of a game when the team actually has information on those sectors. Ideally you would then look at those sectors in command view and point how the minimap correlates.
In the server lobby, when you mention 'Newbie servers', draw a blue box around the newbie server.

Niiice vid lawson.

Question : Is the vid interlaced? Or any sources interlaced? I see what looks like deinterlacing artifacts while watching.

juckto wrote:QUOTE (juckto @ Feb 21 2007, 10:07 PM) Good work. My thoughts on the vid - cut the part about 'hovering the mouse over the minimap for more information' (1:40 to 1:57). If you do that, do it during the middle of a game when the team actually has information on those sectors. Ideally you would then look at those sectors in command view and point how the minimap correlates.
In the server lobby, when you mention 'Newbie servers', draw a blue box around the newbie server.

Good points! I like 'em.

*edit edit edit*

And I totally missed the Newbie Server thing--even though I narrated it. Doh!

ImmortalZ wrote:QUOTE (ImmortalZ @ Feb 22 2007, 04:46 AM) Niiice vid lawson.

Question : Is the vid interlaced? Or any sources interlaced? I see what looks like deinterlacing artifacts while watching.

It's "sort of" interlaced. For any portion of the video that's "zoomed in" or has other effects applied, Pinnacle Studio (editing software I own) is generating interlacing itself.

The project is in HD format (1920x1080), with 800x600 noninterlaced sources stretched to 1920x1080. Because Pinnacle Studio is designed for "real video" it doesn't provide for arbitrary resolutions; I have to edit at a resolution higher than the source to avoid losing quality.

At final render I'm exporting interlaced MPEG2 at 800x600 which forces the project aspect ratio back to what it should be and keeps the quality near-perfect. If I export a non-interlaced MPEG2, the quality drops because Pinnacle blends the "interlaced" source (which is actually not interlaced).

I am working on a VirtualDubMod filterchain that will use "smart deinterlace" to only deinterlace when combing is visible. This means a slight loss of quality, but considering I'm compressing a 200MB MPEG2 by 8:1 or 10:1 MPEG4 or WMV there's going to be loss somewhere.

You also see this effect on the still shots; the stills are 800x600 non-interlaced, but when added to Pinnacle they get deinterlaced, which actually ruins them. I should probably take the stills through GIMP and apply a line-doubling filter, so when Pinnacle deinterlaces it's throwing away redundant data anyway.

I might export an interlaced and non-interlaced MPEG2, then use VirtualDubMod or AVISynth to splice the two together. For any frames with effects/zooming, I'll use the non-interlaced frames. The result will be 800x600 progressive source that I can feed into Windows Media Encoder or VirtualDub for final compression.

What would really be nice is a hack for Pinnacle that would add "800x600 noninterlaced" as a project format!