Interactive Movie Question

[ShadowMan]

Hi,

Although, this is my first post here, I know quite a bit about programming and the adventure games, so I am hoping that this is not a silly question. Here's the question:

I want to create an adventure game using videos, and photographs. Actually it will more like an interactive movie than an adventure game. My question is, is the Adventure Studio, best program to do this? What are the limitations, pros and cons? Are there any limitations with the filesize of the mp4 files?

I will be more like the dialog trees of the Walking Dead, meaning there will be a limited amount of time before the user can select the right option. And in some scenes the video will loop until the right choice has been selected.

And furthermore, has anyone ever tried something like this?

[Cassiebsg]

Well, we know that there's the game/sprite file has a file size limit of 2G. Don't think it applies to video, that is stored outside of the game file though. So you might want to test playing a bigger video size by just creating a new game. With the photographs will most likely be imported as sprites which will increase your sprite file, if you think you have so much at such good quality you might have a problem there if you need more than 2G for them, This can be "bypassed" by using dynamic sprites thought.

So, my advice is, try and create a new game with a single room, and test this limits. If it can't handle what you need it to do, try another engine.

Don't know if anyone has tried this before though.
Am sure someone more knowledgeable than me will give you a more exact answer than I can though.

[m0ds]

Hi there. Storing videos outside of the game files mentioned by Cassie is a bit of a faux pas, though might be a way to balance sprites/backgrounds and video. But if you use OGV format then the game will store them internally and people won't be able to turn your "spaceship.mp4" in-game video into "pornhub.mp4". Also, videos stored outside generally rely on the players computer's codecs, whereas ogv will use an internal codec. Meaning, some of my games from yesteryear which have video files outside of the project, rely on the codecs on my PC and many don't work nowadays.

This game I have unfinished on the side uses photos and OGV video. At the dialog sections (and the trampoline part where there is player control), it's actually an animated object. There was once some theora plugin or something for looping videos as backgrounds, resizing them etc but I never understood it to be able to use it and I think the chap that created it may have left a long time ago. As far as I know, when you play an OGV or external video file in AGS, all control will be lost, and of course, it's a video not a room so you can't add AGS code to it.

So I found animating an object (within a room) the next best thing to create a looping video effect during dialogues. You could even use this technique with room backgrounds (where you're doing puzzles) and run small looping videos as backgrounds (though they would need to be animated object sprites, unless that theora video plugin thingy still exists/works). Yes, you could add a timer to that so that it ends automatically after a while and no doubt countless other tricks. Of course animated objects, full screen ones, will eat up the memory. That's why in the video above those loops are about 2 seconds long each, of say 50 frames. Because 50 sprites at 640x480 in AGS repeated can make the game preeettyy large. Whilst the internal storage is definitely great, it would seem AGS doesn't compress the OGV files so great. Part of the looping trick was in the edit suite though, I'd need to look over things ago to remember how I did that exactly - if you look closely it's just fading in and out of the same piece of footage.

The game in the video above has 30 OGV videos at 640x480, most of them 10 seconds and a few maybe 30 seconds long and about 30 rooms of photos same size in it so far, two or three of those looping objects during conversations and stands at about 350mb. So it's getting pretty big already. But it's entirely possible and I think FMV/interactive movie creators could have some fun with it. I don't have a video of it but another game of mine you can download from this site called 11-11-11 has a bit at the end where 3 rooms are linked by videos to create a sort of seamless movie transition across them with playable bits inbetween. It doesn't work perfectly but I think it shows the potential, perhaps of using animated objects as movie clips rather than OGV video. Oh and that reminds me, in that video above, I play a silent OGV and sound file seperately, to avoid abrupt stops in the music and for another reason I can't remember right now.

Good luck! I for one would like to see perhaps a bit more cinematic approach in AGS games that internal ogv's and animated object movie files can offer. And there is potential there for it to be stylish, not just game *plonk* video but interwoven and cool! I have noticed this showing up in games a bit more often, even if a video file plays and the end frame corresponds to the background you then play on - it's cool!

[Mandle]

unless that theora video plugin thingy still exists/works

It still exists and it does still work...Although it is very hard to get working as you wish...

If anyone has played to the end of my game: Feng Shui And The Art Of TV Reception then they would have seen the theora video plugin in all its glory...

(And it took me about 5 hours of head-slamming into keyboard effort to get that bit working properly)

[ShadowMan]

Thanks everyone for their kind replies. The screen resolution of my game is quite big, so I am assuming that I will be using a different program.  The programming part should be simple enough. I am actually more worried about the program that I should use. the other websites seems to be quite unhelpful. I am not even quite sure what I should be searching. Is the video programming, the right term for this?

I will start quite simple. there will be dialog three and different videos for each answer. It will be similar to a DVD menu.

[m0ds]

Probably want to hit the key term "FMV" when searching. An engine that can deal with or is designed for an FMV game means it's capable of interactive movies. FMV is perhaps the more technical term for interactive movie, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMV

[ShadowMan]

I searched with every term thinkable, yet I can't seem to find any program capable of creating a FMV game. Someone advised me to use Visual Studio or Adobe Encore. But I am not too hopeful about them either. Maybe I am underestimating the task at hand here. Even Unity seems to be not designed for these types of games.

So I am back adventure game studio it seems. Since there is no cutscene option in AGS, I am assuming that, the video will be a background room, am I right? The rest of the project should simple enough.

[morganw]

I think you can probably do this easier with Ren'Py. You don't have to do much programming for a basic interface and it has video support.

You can play a video fullscreen or inside an object:
http://www.renpy.org/doc/html/movie.html

WebM is the recommended format:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8=35438&hilit=webm#p391574