"First-person walk" feature using VIDEOS

  • #1, by alex cherkasoffFriday, 22. December 2017, 14:40 6 years ago
    Is there an option to implement pre-rendered videos in this engine to do a first person walking like in "the Neverhood" or "7th guest" or some other FMV games?


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  • #2, by afrlmeFriday, 22. December 2017, 16:20 6 years ago
    VS supports both playing videos & inserting videos into scenes. I believe someone was working on an first person FMV game a couple of years or so back with the engine. No idea what became of them or the game. There's some other devs working on a sci-fi game with FMV cutscenes right now though. https://www.visionaire-studio.net/forum/thread/sol-invictus-...

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  • #3, by alex cherkasoffFriday, 22. December 2017, 16:22 6 years ago
    is this possible through Lua Scripting, or by using program functions in clever combinations?

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  • #4, by afrlmeFriday, 22. December 2017, 16:36 6 years ago
    Is what possible? The walking in The Neverhood is of a third person character that was comprised of stop motion animation (someone moved things a bit, took a photo, moved things a bit more, took a photo until they had an animation). I assume they cut the animations out later & then added them together in the engine to create the character animations, scene animations, etc.

    I've no idea about the 7th Guest game. Hmm ok just watched a little bit of it on youtube. The movement videos you can just play as regular videos before changing to the next scene. The on-scene characters, you could either create as videos & use the blend option I suppose or export them from your video editing software as image frames & then edit them in photoshop or something similar then import them as regular animations into the engine. There's various ways you could go about that I suppose.

    The thing you have to understand about the old FMV games is that they weren't video all of the time. Mostly it was just the cutscenes that were video. The rest of the game (interactive bits) were usually still frames/animations created by chopping up the still frames of the recorded videos.

    I think it would be quite intensive system resource  wise to try to make a game 100% out of videos only.

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  • #5, by alex cherkasoffFriday, 22. December 2017, 16:54 6 years ago
    First-person walking parts are should likely to be video, at least for the sake of compression.
    It'll take hundreds of megs to store image sequence of a pre-rendered scene of moving through some corridor or something.

    For example, First-person parts in "The Neverhood" were made using BINK video.


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  • #6, by afrlmeFriday, 22. December 2017, 17:30 6 years ago
    I guess this video might help you...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xj21_HSWrU

    It's a general guide to how to make a first person fmv.

    As for what you said about first person walking. Yeah I know it would require a lot of frames to have that as an animation. I'm not saying you should use images for animation sequences like that. Gabriel Knight 2 for example used to have the character stand in a certain position in the room. They'd have the background as a static image & then when you clicked on something the game would play a video that always started from that position & would contain a video of the character walking from that spot, interacting with something & then walking back to the center of the room. With first person you have a lot more options, think Myst. Actually here, you can check out SimonASA's games. He makes first person myst-like scifi point & click adventure games with video cutscenes that show the character walking in first person from the current view to the next view.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXnkpHFmsmw

    Gameplay starts at around the 10 minute mark.

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  • #7, by alex cherkasoffFriday, 22. December 2017, 17:36 6 years ago
    AGS is capable of doing this, I've already asked the developer early today.
    But this plugin (it's not a standalone software by the way) is way too hard to learn.
    It has very ridiculous "node logic", and it's better to know the Unity to fully understand it.
    And it has no shareware.

    I'm actually liking the VS logic and interface much better.
    That's why I'm asking, is it possible in VS....




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  • #8, by alex cherkasoffFriday, 22. December 2017, 17:40 6 years ago
    no, wait.... I've mistaken AGS with Adventure Creator

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_13750...

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  • #9, by alex cherkasoffFriday, 22. December 2017, 17:47 6 years ago
    His method is way too wasteful, it seems, he's creating a new room for every single video, even for a different camera turn.
    It's dozens of rooms.
    Quite illogical, if you ask me smile

    And if I'm correct, this software DO needs a little coding skills.

    Sorry for double-posting, I can't edit a post.
    Everytime getting an error for no good reason.

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  • #10, by afrlmeFriday, 22. December 2017, 18:01 6 years ago
    Yeah, a new room per different makes sense; it's 2D after all not 3D. If it were a 3D engine, then you could simply reposition the camera.

    It would quickly get very confusing for you to overlay multiple backgrounds & scene objects inside of a single scene. Each scene object would need conditions/values associated with them to determine when they should be visible/can be interacted with. It would just become one massive mess.

    No Visionaire doesn't require any scripting at all, though it depends on what you are wanting to do. A lot of things can be done with scripting. Playing videos, setting up scenes & basic interactions can all be done in the editor along with the premade action parts & query based action parts.

    I'm not really sure how you think video games are made, but a room with different perspective points in a 2D game requires one scene per perspective point. Optimization wise it's better too as the less content/data you have in a scene, the faster it will load.

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  • #11, by alex cherkasoffFriday, 22. December 2017, 18:09 6 years ago
    I've made a lot of these things using Action Script 2, but scripting is the wa-a-ay out off my head.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0UefI7AUmY&list=PLUP340U20j...

    Can't do anything harder than if-else-goto.

    Flash software cannot handle a big game, you have to split a game into many-many SWF files which are loading separately, it seems kinda difficult to me.


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