Preparing a Vis. project... (Catyph)

uh oh Very problematic for a 1st person adventure... There are a lot of situations where adding videos in the backgrounds helps a lot.

You're formal that there's no way to add a video in (or instead of) a background ?
It is already possible to play a video before and after a scene, so why not during the scene ?

not unless Alex or one of the other devs code in support for it...

can't you do it via animation frames? if the animation/graphic quality doesn't require the background to be too sharp then you could create slightly blurred animations at half the size (width/height) that they need to be & then scale them up to 200% with Lua Script which would save on space, ram, vram etc...

Thanks, good idea : it might work for the main menu. Interesting solution !

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I'd like to explain my point of view about adding video in a background (for a 1st person game), in case someone could add this feature someday in a new release.
It's not only useful in a Menu :

Imagine that in a game, one of the frames is a PC monitor, like in this picture (arbitrary choice) :

(You can see that what is displayed by this monitor covers a lot of the whole picture)

So with this monitor you want to play a short film of 1 or 2 minutes in the game. The only solutions I see are :
1/ use animation frames
2/ insert a video.
The animation frames solution sounds impossible in this case (unless I'm mistaken), because of the duration and size of the animation to play.

I had done that kind of configuration with a video in my previous game ASA with Adventure Maker. It worked perfectly, the film was playing inside my 3D monitor.
The purpose was to bring movement in a game relying mainly on static views. And this video was used in one of the puzzles, more precisely a quiz. There was a question about the content of the video.

I can imagine many other situations where using video in a background (or instead of a background) would be useful. In Riven, I remember this little gold scarab that was walking on a tree trunk : when you clicked on it, it was going away by flying. It was made with incrusted videos if I remember well.

Not sure if I'm being clear lol I can explain differently.
Anyway, if one of the devs sees this message, please keep this in mind for the future !

hmm I understand what you are saying...

I wonder if you could attach the video to a 3d object inside of a 3d program like 3dsmax or something & then export the object with the video as a collada file which you would then be able to import into the upcoming version of vs - which should hopefully include 2.5d support - as an object to the characters section...

I don't really know much about 3d stuff or how it works but they must attach videos to objects somehow, as there are plenty of games with tv/computer screens etc which contain video that moves around with the screen or player. just a thought mind.

I believe we have to wait and see this new version including 2.5d then !
Do you think my game developed with the current version will be compatible ?

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you could create slightly blurred animations at half the size (width/height) that they need to be & then scale them up to 200% with Lua Script

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I have been looking for informations on the forums to do that, but I think I'm not going in the good direction :

- where should I enter my scripts in Visionaire ? There is a "Scripts" button in the left bar, and a "Execute a script" in the Actions. Did you refer to one of those ? I read that some of the scripts must be put directly in the .ved file ?

- I'm not familiar yet with the syntax of Lua : which document do you recommend for VS ? I found this one :
http://wiki.visionaire2d.net/index.php?title=Data_Structure_...
I'm not sure it will help me scale my background to 200% - how would you do that ?

Thanks !

the url you have linked is the old wiki. the new one is here: http://wiki.visionaire-tracker.net

you can't scale your backgrounds. you would need to add the background as an animation to a scene object & then use lua to scale it up.

action, script > execute a script:

I'm not sure if you can go below -100 or over 200 for the animation size, as I haven't tried. also you can only scale animations that are currently active/playing; hence the reason why I wrote "ActiveAnimations".

yes, whatever you make in 3.7.1 will be compatible with the upcoming version.

Aaah thanks !!! You're being very helpful.
With all these new infos + the official wiki, I hope I will make it.
Have a nice week-end !

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I'm not sure if you can go below -100 or over 200 for the animation size

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Just to let you know : I used 400 and it works really great ! Thanks again.

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By the way, do you know someone around who does german translations ? I will probably have English, French, Spanish and Italian languages in my game. It would be a shame not to add German !

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Aaah thanks !!! You're being very helpful.
With all these new infos + the official wiki, I hope I will make it.
Have a nice week-end !

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no problem. the new wiki is far from done... been a wee bit busy lately but will resume adding new pages to it soon

in regards to the language translations... just ask around on here as there are plenty of multilingual users on this community & the vast majority are German yet most have a decent grasp of the English language too.

Thanks AFRLme, I just posted an annoucement on the forums.

Another technical question now :p

I am often using the following configuration in my game :
Scene > Video > Scene
It can be, for example :
Main Menu > intro movie > First scene

I have noticed 2 problems that annoy me a little. If there's no way to change them, I will continue anyway, but I prefer to ask :

1 - Between a video and the following scene, there is most of the time a black screen. It's very short, but still visible. I believe it's the time needed to load the scene, so I try to optimize as much as possible, but I don't know all the features for that. Do you have something special to recommend ?

2 - When one of these videos is playing, the background music is stopped. It's a problem when this video is in the continuity of the previous and next Scenes. I was wondering if there is a way to keep the music playing with the video ?

1. you could load the scene & inside of an at begin of scene action; play the video. the black bit is the fade to scene part... there is no true game load for vs so you can change to a scene instantly or fade to a new scene. on scene open the active animations will load as they are playing or if you preload animations at the beginning or end of a scene then you may experience a bit of slow down in animations & the mouse movement until the animations have done loading.

2. the upcoming release has some new options for allowing the scene music & sounds to continue while a video is playing.

sorry for the random explanation in the first part. I just typed it out real quick off the top of my head which is why it's not very coherent.