proanim

I am not exactly sure where to post this, but this is probably more of programming question more than anything else.

How exactly is this programmed into the game? This kind of thing has no/very little vertices movement but it shows smooth animations?

I saw same thing in Final Fantasy Dissidia but it had lower quality and to me this looks like it switches textures on given frame of animation, which might be quite bad apporach. Since I would be making games for PC, something tells me that switching textures in real time to get this result will not give desired effect and in turn lower the performance (well kind of).

I am thinking about making something that would come close to Final Fantasy 9, how much time would it take to create game like that with today's technology, but keeping everything at more or less basic level? As in - nicer looking game, no fixed camera, simple collision, same dialog system, probably same combat system, no hardware intense shaders, simple 3d sound.

Since I will probably be making my game(s) alone, I am not planning on making this game with 50 hours of content like original FF9.

I did some research on the networking and server- client stuff, and I found that clients need to be connected to server by specifying ip address and port. Now this creeps me out - I also found that to use port number it is supposed to be registered in some global database that contains all of them, so I can't just pick random one and go with it. What I want to do is make a multi player component for my game, that might even use dedicated server (in my case not a real server - just separate pc). Seeing that there are many many programs and games using one of the ports and those have its range since they use maximum of five numbers, do I really need to register the port to use it in my game?

I came across small app that lets you play video files, but due to copyright some of the codecs are disabled by default. And the user should recompile the program to use them. Now from what I saw on Wikipedia about those codecs is that some of them are GPL, LGPL, (and GNU variations), MIT (and variations). All codecs use some sort of patent and the user (in this case developer) is required to pay for the patent to use the codec. Is this true? Does x264 also requires this? It's not like someone will binge through multi-gigabyte sized game to see if someone used certain codec. Are there any video codecs that provide something close to x264 quality/compression without need to pay for patent?

How can I check how much video ram is being used/free (in this case when using opengl)? First thing I can think of is to find a way to check memory amount used by the image or whatever related to graphics and with it calculate used/free memory. But this is probably incorrect and/or ineffective. Do graphic apis have this functionality built in?