Cool Feature I Forgot About

DeeZire · 04-30-2003, 04:59 AM

Once upon a time, back in the golden age of build98 (13 months ago LOL), there was a nice feature in the game that I *think* could still be made to work - this would be nice for you Blitzkrieg guys.

When you select any object, you get the 'big' icon for it on the right of the Control Bar. Back then, it played a movie of the object instead

The movie was in .avi format and was normally made in W3D Viewer. Theyd just export any anim of the object as an avi and resize it to fit the window.

The code to do it is still there - the game supports avi as well as bik by calling AVIFil32.dll from the Windows system directory - you have to edit ControlBar.wnd so that 'ControlBar.wnd:CameoWindow' uses 'W3DCameoMovieDraw' instead of 'W3DGadgetPushButtonImageDraw'.

What I cant remember is how to get the game to display it instead of the texture image :S There was a tag, CameoMovie = , but they never used that. Maybe it references an entry in Video.ini.

Its well worth trying I guess.

Flyby · 04-30-2003, 05:15 AM

That would certainly spice up the interface, but also have a negative (small) impact on gameplay smoothness.
*.bik files would be more efficient then *.avi, i think.

Zoop · 04-30-2003, 05:40 AM

id like to see something like that

thats indeed very worthwhile ...

would you happen to know that you could do more with it? like showing a little bik when firing a super weapon, or at a given time scripted in the map? so you can get one of those small briefings you had in Ra2

i was hoping for such thing

Chronosfera · 04-30-2003, 10:31 AM

Sounds like the sweetest thing I have heard

Could be made like starcraft, or make it more worthwhile to create a whole new interface layout, let me see if I can get anything working by trials and errors

Phoib · 04-30-2003, 10:37 AM

This sounds good for all mod users, now only get it to work,,,

Too bad it's "only" for selecting units, that rules out supers that are selected at the right :/

DeeZire · 04-30-2003, 11:33 AM

I checked the INI files form the same build, theres no apparent tag that triggered it.

My best idea is this but havent tried it yet;-

SelectPortrait= checks the Mapped Images files for the cameo. If the specified cameo isnt defined there, AND the window uses W3DCameoMovieDraw, then the game will then look either in the Video.INI file for it (more likely) or directly in the Movies folder.

Like I said, havent tried it out yet, but given what WAS removed from the game over the months it would be weird if this didnt work somehow given that all seems to be there.

It may even work with (or even require) a bik movie instead. Either way it looks like the movie needs to be 90x68 pixels to fit.

smurfbizkit · 04-30-2003, 11:49 AM

why was it removed? did it lag the game up much?

it sounds great if we can get it working

DeeZire · 04-30-2003, 12:17 PM

I think speed was the factor in the end.

Bit more info: the cameo movies that actually worked were eventually in .bik format and defined like other .bik movies but ONLY in the Data\INI\Default\Video.INI file.

Curator · 04-30-2003, 03:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zoop

would you happen to know that you could do more with it? like showing a little bik when firing a super weapon, or at a given time scripted in the map?

Indeed you can. RVMech is doing that in his campaign maps.

Chronosfera · 05-06-2003, 03:46 AM

Hmm, none of the things I tried has worked yet. W3DCameoMovieDraw is safely put in, but nothing could call the 90x68 bik (tried avi too) I made and put in data\movies and data\english\movies.

I added it in the video.ini and used the entry name in the portrait line in FactionUnit, but it shows nothing. CameoMovie = even caused the game to not launch.

It will be a real shame if we can't get it to work.