Using video in games?

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0 comments, last by WhiskyJoe 9 years, 8 months ago

So I'm trying to make my own game in the style of a classic point-and-click adventure game from the late '90s/early '00s.

The series I'm trying to emulate uses bink video for its character animations. So like there will be a scene that the player can fully interact with, and meanwhile somewhere on the screen there is a video playing out.

How do they do that; get a video to play in part of the screen while still allowing the player to interact with the game, so the video isn't just a cutscene?

Any ideas as to how they implement this? 'Cause I wanna mimick it. Also the game I'm trying to emulate has no loading screens and no noticable lag whatsoever (the game is about an hour or two long if you play it straight through). I would ideally like to have no loading screens as well.

Thanks

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I never used bink, so I can't tell you any specifics on that part, but if you want multiple objects to be played as a video you will need to render the video to a texture and make the video play the relevant parts according to the interaction.

However, I think you mean to have a video you can interact with. If that is the case, you probably need to create a video for every interaction (not necessarily multiple files, but different scenes) and play the relevant parts of the video accordingly. I don't know if this is the way older games have implemented this, but I am sure someone here knows.

As for the no loading part, I guess it depends a bit. The more content you need to show, the more memory you need and you only have so much of it to be in memory at a time. You can of course be smart and anticipate what parts you need and pre-load it and unload unneeded parts etc or stream in the needed parts.

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