playmovie?

[loki72]

i don't think it does... but... does arma recognize any video formats like it does the .ogg sound files?

thx

[Mandoble]

Dont think so.

[loki72]

what a bummer... how does one show the same one time intro to JiP players on the dynamic battlefield?

edit:

with the mission i'm working on.. (in the beta testing area).. when the intro guys get killed.. all JiP only see the intro camera area and the custom sounds aren't right... there's no one there...
i have seen that the camera is for the live dynamic battlefield. is there a way to 'save' an intro that 'was' seen and not show the live battlefield to JiP's?

[Mandoble]

You need to execute your "intro" from init.sqf.

Code: [Select]

// init.sqf
[]spawn
{
   waitUntil {local player};
   []execVM"your_intro_code.sqf";
};

EDIT:
Not sure what initro are you thinking about, but what you have there is, in fact, the current state of the battlefield. You may always setup an intro far away of the action, so it would be the same played at any time during the game.

[loki72]

i have a map:



these guys are the intro guys that shoot each other at the start...



so.. after the initial battle all JiP's don't see the intro guys... they are dead..

[Mandoble]

You may try to recreate that scene somewhere else away of your battle field. Your intro script should create the units, camera, etc, and once finished remove the dead bodies. But it might be a mess, lets say player A joins now and player B joins 5 seconds later. Both scripts running from init.sqf would create different units, so these players would see twice the number of units. I think you should think on a different solution for JIPs, for example, no intro for them.

[loki72]

lol... thought about each of those... and i'm at the same conclusion...
makes intros very limited in their potential.

[Mandoble]

You can always do something general for any player, for example a fly-by camera from its position to the other side of the battle field. That would be short, easy and "good-looking".

[loki72]

agreed... it seems that i went too far in my expectations.

[Mandoble]

Check the intro here, it is quite well suited for MP games.

[loki72]

i received this answer in the BI forums..

"No.
The only way is to either script your own compression codec, or to display frame by frame in .paa."

i've seen the frame by frame.. very bulky...
do you know what this means and if so.. how it would be done?

"script your own compression codec"

[Mandoble]

I would say thas is a joke, in fact, I would say both replies are plain jokes or plain absurd replies of someone that has no idea at all about Arma scripting/resources.

[loki72]

i figure the first is breaking the game engines limits.. but in the Stargate mod.. when one enters the gate.. it shows an animation of the wormhole from the movie.. problem is.. its 70 jpg's that total 3.34 MB..

http://forum.armedassault.info/index.php?showtopic=1295&pid=30018&st=0&

[Mandoble]

For your case you would need to capture a lot of frames for your initial intro where some units shoots to others, I mean A LOT and with a good resolution. The end result would be something like a 10 secs intro with no less than 200 images for an average frame rate of 20 per sec (which is already low).

EDIT:
I would add also that with current control commands you will not even reach 20 fps chaging the image of a control in a loop.

[loki72]

 which brings us back to...

"short, easy and "good-looking".  

this is pure speculation... however.. i would think that if one had a grasp of the core formation of the games code.. one could..ummm.. like a hacker... add a set of understandable variables to the system in order to execute them... i.e. recognize this file and format.

edit:
this was an idea on the BIS forums.. is this workable?

"Recreate the battle everytime a player connects, on a different position on the map.
You spawn the units, make them do the same things.
Once it's done, you setPos the bodies to [0,0,0] and start all over at each connection."

[Planck]

Hmmmm, I always thought Intros were not possible in MP, I thought it was only cutscenes that could be used in MP.



Planck

[Mandoble]

Correct, a cutscene acting like an intro.

[icewind.123]

Movies in ArmA/OFP is possible since some time, but it is done  as  loki72 pointed out, in single frames.

Normally you would have to define every single frame in the description.ext of your mission but there is
light at the end of the tunnel...
Mapfact has released a dialog tutorial 4 years ago, "EinblendungenTutorial4b" includes a demo mission which plays a BHD
sequence (the quality is pretty low because the jpeg itself has been stretched) .

You just have to change the font in the description.ext to ArmA fonts, extract the movie you want to play as bmp,
mass convert to jpeg (set name to FrameXXX,add canvas to avoid stretching, experiment with different quality and size, I got 1:30 minutes of Spongebob in acceptable quality down to 3mb, which is ok imo).


http://www.mapfact.net/include.php?path=content/download.php&contentid=252&PHPKITSID=f033cf38fe4dd08051c040ddb2f41f88


The script is working just great  , I wonder why nobody used it so far.

And here some explanation of the camera.sqs, where the info about the movie is stored
(might be hard to tell from the readme if you don't speak german  ) :





titleRsc ["Text_1","BLACK OUT",0]

0 fadeMusic 1   
playMusic "tribal"    //"Sound" of the movie, even if you put it before the movie starts, it loads some second later than the movie though, so you have to add an empy area with e.g. audacity, I think it was around 1.2 seconds, it's not hard to get it right, just try//

~4

titleRsc ["Text_2","BLACK OUT",0]    //just a text saying blabla demonstration, can be left out if the movie should start instant//

~4

titletext [" ","BLACK IN"]

_ok = createdialog "DlgVideo"

ctrlshow [106, false]

_i = 1
_delay = 1/24        //IMPORTANT, here you set how many frames should be shown per second, if set to a very slow value you can create slideshows...//

ctrlshow [106, true]

ctrlsettext [107, "Black Hawk Down"]

;Video abspielen===================================
#Loop

ctrlsettext [106, format ["video\Frame%1.jpg", _i]]
~_delay
_i = _i + 1
?_i < 182:goto "loop"     //IMPORTANT: Here you define at which frame the movie stops, if you have 400 frames you have to change it to 400//

TitleCut ["","BLACK",2]

~0.5

closedialog 0

TitleCut ["","BLACK IN",2]

~1

hint "Ende der Demonstration."

~3

Ende = true

EXIT

[loki72]

holy cow! ... but i bet it looks great... i will make a small intro and get back to this topic.