Animation memory limit ? (pocket pc)

[BeyondtheTech]

No, no movie files. If you want to play a movie, you need add like any other animations.

The previous dialog sounded like you were on your way to developing a video playback capability. Did that feature get scrapped, or put on hold? Without any automated process, I can't fathom trying to create 900 actors, let alone a hundred, manually scripting it or adding events to it, just to have it play a video.

If you're not going to implement a video feature, would it be possible for you to add to your program the ability to call out to another non-Game Editor executable that could possibly run it or do something, something like a VB Shell command?

Perhaps mixing Game Editor with a little PPL, I could make this multimedia project work.

Thoughts?

[dybot]

I would love what BeyondtheTech mentioned -If Game Editor can't handle videos it should be possible to link to other programs to support it.

[makslane]

You can just import the big animation and use the Change Animaiton Direction action to stop or play.

I have hold the movie feature, due the some issues with royalties.

[BeyondtheTech]

If it's a codec problem you have, we can use something like XviD or some free version, or even worst case scenario, an animated GIF or individual images that wouldn't take up any memory in the long run.

The idea of a 900-frame animation as an actor or nine 100-frame animations, or worse, 900 one-frame animations is wasteful and time-consuming to develop or implement, and resource-intensive.

If you could implement it like a PlayMusic/PlaySound command and just load the individual frames without trying to pull in all the animation into memory, that would suffice.

[makslane]

The xvid or divx format uses the MPEG4 encode.
You need have the MPEG licence to use.

If you could implement it like a PlayMusic/PlaySound command and just load the individual frames without trying to pull in all the animation into memory, that would suffice.

Regardless animation size, in the exported game only few frames will be load in the memory at time.

[dybot]

But if you allow us to run external programs you would not have to deal with the licences... Only the ones who were going to implement self contained video executables.

Do you know something like RAD Video Tools for PocketPC?

[BeyondtheTech]

Regardless animation size, in the exported game only few frames will be load in the memory at time.

How is this controlled or can it be controllable? My last game required 12MB of free memory on the PocketPC and 16MB when I had the parallax scrolling background. That had no large number of frames, so I'm concerned that the next game that it going to be bigger will require much more memory.

In the PocketPC world, 12-16MB of free space is asking quite a lot, which is why a lot of people couldn't ultimately play/pay for my game.

[makslane]

The problem with open an external application to play movies is:

- The movie will be opened in a other window, not inside game
- The file can't be stored on Game Editor dat files

Is a big issue?

[makslane]

Regardless animation size, in the exported game only few frames will be load in the memory at time.

How is this controlled or can it be controllable?