3D Star Racer Questions (FMV)

[summer_goth]

Hi, don't know whether Regis is still around. If you are Regis then I would love if you could answer these questions. Anyone else are welcome to answer as well.

I tried out the demo of 3D Star Racer on the Pocket PC and I was quite impressed. Basically it features a FMV that is being played in the background the whole time while you are playing. I think that the only reason why it may not have sold well is because its playability isn't that good. (I suffered to play it). The idea and execution is quite good though.

I would like to know how the FMV was achieved.

In the options screen there is a choice whether to load everything and then play and then there's the choice to load everything during actual play.

How was this achieved?

Is every frame an actor that is activated during the gameplay and then the previous frame destroyed?

As in:
Create actor
Destroy previous actor.
until game is over.

Sorry I would love some insights. Since on the Pocket PC such things tend to be slow and yet here I played a game which did this fluently.

How was the video achieved in 3D Star Racer? Thanks guys.

[summer_goth]

Sorry to answer my own topic.

I see that regis was asking the same things quite a while back:
http://game-editor.com/forum/tp-513-Ani ... t-pc-.html

Makslane I see there that you have made it so that the actor controls the animations better.

What will be the best way to do this now since Game Editor has been improved quite a lot since then.

I basically want to add FMV into the game. Only 5 second videos which I don't really want to load in beforehand. I'd prefer if the frames are loaded on the fly.

Unfortunately I can't test on the Pocket PC yet because I am still using the trial version. 3D Star Racer shows though that it is possible to make the game that I want. So I will hopefully buy Game Editor next week sometime.

What will be the best way to play those 4 second videos? Have every frame as a separate actor and then use activation regions?

[makslane]

Just put your animation in an actor like any other animation.
Game Editor will manager the frame loading for you.

[summer_goth]

Thank you very much for the quick reply Makslane. I will try it out.

[summer_goth]

It works perfectly. Very well done Makslane.

I first tried a video like this without sound and it worked perfectly. Even playing one directly after that. I added some music as well (Ogg Vorbis) and it still runs perfectly on my PocketPC. Doesn't slow down at all.

So then I thought, I wonder if it will work on an old Toshiba e310. And I can't believe it, it's actually playable. The second video slowed down a bit after I played it the first time but on such an old Pocket PC with music running in the background is very impressive.

Well done Makslane. I was worried that Game Editor will be too slow for everything I want to do and I was completely wrong. It runs like a dream.

Keep up the good work.