Judith on 21/6/2015 at 09:30
I know Le Corbeau and friends probably don't take any requests, but is it possible to do something about the movies now? We have missions with HD textures and we still have to make cinematics in 640x480. It would be great to have higher internal resolution for movies as well. Just doubling the resolution (1280x960) will be a substantial change, and it will affect making briefings in a good way. For example, we won't have to use gigantic fonts ;)
baeuchlein on 21/6/2015 at 14:37
Quote Posted by Judith
I know Le Corbeau and friends probably don't take any requests, but is it possible to do something about the movies now? We have missions with HD textures and we still have to make cinematics in 640x480.
No, you don't.
The Codex of Drymia has a briefing movie with 1024x576 resolution, which plays even with NewDark v1.22.
Quote Posted by Judith
It would be great to have higher internal resolution for movies as well. Just doubling the resolution (1280x960) will be a substantial change, and it will affect making briefings in a good way. For example, we won't have to use gigantic fonts ;)
Be careful with these high resolutions. The movie playing facility in NewDark is far less powerful than what was used with pre-NewDark Thief. For example, the old DEATH.AVI movie (the Skull-and-Crossbones thing coming up when Garrett bites the dust once gain), which has only a 320x200 resolution, often won't play smoothly on my ancient Athlon-900 machine with NewDark. With Thief 2 v1.18, even a prehistoric Pentium-II machine could do that!
Now for something else. There's a small bug in NewDark v1.23. When a mission uses custom loading screens, these are not always displayed correctly in v1.23. Sensut's "Bathory campaign" and "Dracula reloaded campaign" suffer from this, as well as the Necro Age version of T2X. In the "CCR Campaign", however, things still look OK. Not a serious issue, but it would be nice if that could be fixed for v1.24.
Meanwhile, if anyone hasn't got the news yet: New (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134733) TFix and (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=131106) Tafferpatcher versions are out already, allowing anyone to easily update to v1.23. (Yes, Tafferpatcher 2.0.15 indeed installs NewDark v1.23, not 1.22 as the first post there currently states.)
I have been very skeptical concerning NewDark when it came out some years ago, but this has changed. Whoever is behind our mysterious Le Corbeau apparently does not vanish in the pitfalls which have eaten up several Open Source projects. So far, NewDark has become far better than I anticipated first, and I'm just writing from a player's perspective.
Judith on 21/6/2015 at 17:18
Quote:
The Codex of Drymia has a briefing movie with 1024x576 resolution, which plays even with NewDark v1.22.
I have movies for an FM in 1280x960 resolution, but it doesn't matter, since the internal rendering engine scales it back to 640x480.
Quote:
The movie playing facility in NewDark is far less powerful than what was used with pre-NewDark Thief.
That's absolutely not true. New codecs in NewDark movies allow use of H.264 compression, you can even use formats like .bik, as long as you rename it to .avi for the final movie. You have tons of better options in terms of quality vs compression over old and buggy Indeo codec. Backwards compatibility with Pentium II machines is really not an issue these days.
baeuchlein on 22/6/2015 at 17:25
Quote Posted by Judith
I have movies for an FM in 1280x960 resolution, but it doesn't matter, since the internal rendering engine scales it back to 640x480.
Sorry, I did not see that before, for I had commented-out the "crop_movies" line in the cam_ext.cfg on my notebook, and didn't notice the black bars on the left and right. But indeed, once I activate "crop_movies" again, the upper part of the movie in "The Drymian Codex" is cut off. Only 720x480 movies (like in the "Cataclysmic Revelations campaign") still work.
Concerning whether or not the old movie playing facility of Thief is more powerful than the one in NewDark...
Quote:
New codecs in NewDark movies allow use of H.264 compression, you can even use formats like .bik, as long as you rename it to .avi for the final movie. You have tons of better options in terms of quality vs compression over old and buggy Indeo codec.
I'd rather call that
flexibility (and indeed, NewDark's "movie facility" is more flexible by being able to handle several movie formats which Thief 2 v1.18 could not), but let's not fight over words. What I really wanted to say is that you need a more powerful machine to play
one and the same movie with NewDark when compared with Thief 2 v1.18; the prehistoric Pentium-II machine was just an example to show how much less CPU horsepower was needed back then to play a standard Thief movie. What if higher resolutions choke ffmpeg (or whatever plays the movies in NewDark), and we're seeing only slideshows?
I don't want to stop people from making movies with better resolution, but to be careful. Every time you double the resolution along both axis, the computer has to handle four times more data per second. If the price for a better resolution would be that movies regularly stutter on machines which just are not the newest and best ones on the market, maybe a lot of players would not want to pay that price anymore.
During the last months, several people weren't happy with the performance of some newer missions on their machines, and I thought it could be a good idea to try not to let history repeat itself with movies. Prepare your movie, check whether it still plays with a decent machine (and I neither consider that Pentium-II nor the ancient Athlon I mentioned as "decent" anymore), and if it does - fine. If it does not play smoothly, maybe a change of the codec would help.
Of course, I do now realize that in order to check this out, NewDark would have to be able to use movies with larger resolution first. As I said, I did not notice these limits before.
Judith on 22/6/2015 at 22:55
I agree that you can never be too careful, but let's get some perspective here :) People are already watching HD clips on YT or Vimeo using laptops and desktops that are several years old. And those movies use bitrate from 5,000 to even 20,000 kbit/s (those are actual Vimeo recommendations). On my HDD I have a 12 FPS 1280x960 mp4 intro movie with panning screenshots, and it's as low as 1000 kbit/s. Seriously, the only device where this movie played a bit sluggish was my 2-year-old LG smartphone, and it was only because I forgot to turn on the hardware decoding :]
Dev_Anj on 23/6/2015 at 01:03
Quote Posted by baeuchlein
Be careful with these high resolutions. The movie playing facility in NewDark is far less powerful than what was used with pre-NewDark Thief.
I doubt this is true. I would want someone with knowledge of software to check this. I'm convinced that movies playing choppily must be because of extra things added to the game with New Dark. There's no reason for New Dark to put in a less powerful movie player.
ZylonBane on 23/6/2015 at 02:38
The patch notes clearly state that it uses ffmpeg for video playback. As a cross-platform, highly portable codec library, of course it's going to take more CPU power to run smoothly.
Nameless Voice on 27/6/2015 at 02:10
Quote Posted by baeuchlein
Prepare your movie, check whether it still plays with a decent machine (and I neither consider that Pentium-II nor the ancient Athlon I mentioned as "decent" anymore), and if it does - fine. If it does not play smoothly, maybe a change of the codec would help.
I think most people would include "able to play x264 video at 1080p resolution smoothly" as one of the requirements for something to be considered "a decent machine".
Caradavin on 27/6/2015 at 04:22
Ok, dumb question here (but somebody has to do it, right?) - the zips in contrib-src, do I just unzip them to the directory in their own folders or are they to also be unzipped right into the directory? (fmsel, etc...)
Caradavin on 27/6/2015 at 06:02
NVM - I think by using Tafferpatcher I don't have to worry about that anyway
