Guild of Writers

I must be missing something because all I see is a white featureless ground plane.

Like me, you probably deleted or renamed Intro0.bik and Intro1.bik to save startup time.

It displays Intro0.bik on the plane - if you have the file that is.

Spot on that was indeed the problem. (those pesky splash videos..)
Haha that thing is great! Nice work Lon! I concur with GPLMilano's comment about the sensation of falling.. Feels a bit like walking on a movie screen.
Animated linking panels ahead whoohoo! (and it only tooks us 3 years to get them )
That 's really great news. I've been dying to see that in Uru since the very first beta..

*sigh* ... and I had just finished by own style of animated panels for Pahts that didn't use a GUI popup, but rather zoomed in closer to the book with an animated layer as a scrolling panel

I just made a quick .bik movie of Tsogal, I used fly mode, went up in the air and just rotated 360 degrees once. Saved the file, an then used Bink and Smacker to convert the movie from a wmv to a bik, and even have the size right: about 400 x 160.

NOW all I need to figure out is how to embed a 512 x 256 background behind the movie.....

errr... any chance of sharing HOW you did that (after all, I thought SHARING was what this forum was about ... (though it seems recently that it seems to be more about showing off than sharing ... )

Alright, so you want to know how it was done. Simple, using a plLayerBink.

look through Andy's tutorial here to see how one converts prc to an po/uof and then how to add it to a file.

http://www.guildofmaintainers.org/Forum ... =77&t=1063

Then, (using pageEditor) you can add the object prc from the plLayerBink in this file: http://www.guildofmaintainers.org/ftp/Upload/lontahv/bink_texture_test.zip to your age, changing the <Movie Name="avi/Intro0.bik" /> tag to point to any bik file you want..

Then change a layer reference in a material to point to the BinkLayer instead of a normal layer. ie:

Code: Select all

<Layers>
      <plKey Name="Roots_bink" Type="plLayerBink" Location="1788;0" LocFlag="0x0000" />
</Layers>


andylegate wrote:I just made a quick .bik movie of Tsogal, I used fly mode, went up in the air and just rotated 360 degrees once. Saved the file, an then used Bink and Smacker to convert the movie from a wmv to a bik, and even have the size right: about 400 x 160.

NOW all I need to figure out is how to embed a 512 x 256 background behind the movie.....

Using Bink, extract the bitmaps. Do some crazy batch image scripting (I suggest ImageMagick?) to resize and add an alpha border around each frame.

Using Bink, recompress the frames into a .bik file.

I'm confused. I think we need to split this thread up.

Here, I'll try to get it back on track, since I'm the one that derailed it (oops, sorry.).

I've spent part of the afternoon thinking about this (LayeredAnimations) for a day/night cycle, etc.

Looking at both Gira and Laki (Myst V), obviously lights need to come on and off, they show that if you look at them with the PageEditor.

But there was one thing that started bugging me. I'm a firm believer in KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, and all those materials being phased out and others phased had me wondering:

Why not just have the sky dome fade out and another skydome fade in?

Laki has 2 sky domes, a SphereDay and a SphereNight, you can find them both under SceneObjects.

I know we can make object appear and disappear using SDL states. But is there away to have the objects fade out and fade in? I mean the objects themselves, not the textures.

I'm thinking no, that this isn't possible with plasma, as I can't think of an example of this in either Uru or Myst V...but it did seem to me to be an easier way of going about this, instead of having to mess with a bunch of textures. The object itself is already textured, you'd just being making a visability animation with the object, having one fade into existance, while the the other fades out.

How the SDL animation works is like this. Its pretty simple actually. There's only a single variable in it that references the SDL file. This is what tells it to work over a time specified in the Age File.

Then you have three textures. A sky texture with alpha, whose offsets are changed so that the clouds roll around the sky. a Gradient Texture of white to blue. This gets the same treatment as the Sky texture, except its ambient color is changed as well, so that it fades in and out. This is the key to making the sky change colors, and must be done with an animation to the ambient color of the material. The way layer animations are currently set up is through the preshade and runtime colors. Which is what causes you to get that immediate blinking in and out of a texture. Your final texture is the night texture that gets a similar ambient treatment and offset like the gradient texture.

Its actually really a simple animation. There's no reason why it shouldn't be in PyPRP already, as its just a layer animation. But PYPRP isn't set up to change the ambient or specular color of a material with an animation.