Bink Layer or plLayerBink

[andylegate]

Kind of gnashing at the teeth here if what I think is true.

I think Cyan took this out of their Plugin (like the bubble thing for Myst V).

Apparently, you can give an object a Material that has a Bink movie as it's layer. If you link into Direbo, or walk around the Myst V Descent (after conversion with Drizzle and the OfflineKI), you'll notice that the linking panels are animated.

How did they do this? Apparently, you can just pick a bik movie when you make your layer for your texture for the object. You need to set up the material animation of course.

But, guess what? I can't find a Bink Layer when I go to select my plasma layer. You can pick a bik file if you want and stick it in there as a plLayer, but you get a plConvert error on export.

This sucks if they took it out as the Uru version of Plasma fully supports this (unlike the bubble morph).

That or it's hidden somewhere on me.

[Lontahv]

I think I can shed some light on why BinkLayer is not in the MOUL 3dsMax plugin.

Myst 5 was a branch of the Plasma engine/toolsets. They basically added some fancy stuff to the Uru: Complete Chronicles engine; grass shaders/bubble mods, and, I assume, the use of Bink Layers in the plugin. MO:UL took the old Uru code, rewrote the network code, and added a few of the Myst 5 features (bubble shader, grass shader, etc.). However, most likely, they had no need to add the BinkLayer functionality to the plugin.

The reason, I'm assuming, the BinkLayer stuff is in Uru:CC is because it's used internally for the intro videos. To play those, they use Python, and I'm assuming, internal engine scripting: no PRP interface needed.

[D'Lanor]

Makes sense since MOUL doesn't use this at all. They probably never added it to the MOUL plugin in the first place. Binks in Uru are always played against a GUI background (they can be played without the GUI but then the movie easily distorts).

Edit: Oops, crosspost. What Lon said.

[N. Sigismund]

That sucks...

I was hoping on having an animated linking panel to Llantern, but if it's impossible then I'm a sad man tonight.

[Lontahv]

Not impossible. I've made a test age with the plLayerBink. A with a little bit of hacking around with PRC, you can get the animation into your age.

Edit: here's that age if you want to look around:
https://sites.google.com/site/lontahv/bink_age.zip

[D'Lanor]

Adding an animated linking panel inside a book does not require any prp hacking. You simply add a line like this to the Python code of your linking book.

Code: Select all

'<movie src="avi\\myage.bik" align=center link=%d resize=yes>'

For Relto books that will work fine since they don't lie around opened.

[Egon]

Adding an animated linking panel inside a book does not require any prp hacking. You simply add a line like this to the Python code of your linking book.

Code: Select all

'<movie src="avi\\myage.bik" align=center link=%d resize=yes>'

For Relto books that will work fine since they don't lie around opened.

Well I wanted to make animated panel for AhraPahts, so I downloaded Bink software and made my own bik animation.
I tried to use "<movie src="avi\\Pahts.bik">' but it just made my URU crash.

During convertion from still images to bik file, I think I have set same properties as derebo bik files. After checking with the Bink site, I come to conclusion, that it is not enough to have Bink converter. For the panel animations (or any bik animations) to work we would need exactly the same converter (or adlest version) which Cyan used.

Unless using attributes "link=%d resize=yes" will help (I will try it letter).

[Paradox]

I got linking panels to work in a popup book once, but I was using Myst V biks as placeholders and never got around to replacing them...

[diafero]

If you are using the Offline KI, you can get an animated linking panel in Relto without any Python. Quoting from http://alcugs.almlys.org/Offline-KI/Tec ... umentation:

The Offline KI looks for linking panels in the following order: For Relto links, it first looks for videos in the "avi" directory: If "InternalName_SpawnPointName.bik" exists, that file is used. The same goes for "InternalName.bik". Only if both of them do not exists, it looks for static linking images - it tries to read "LinkingImage_InternalName_SpawnPointName.jpg" in the "img" directory. If that file does not exist, it tries "LinkingImage_InternalName.jpg" in the same directory. If that file doesn't exist either, it uses the default panel, the black void. In Nexus, it uses the same procedure without taking videos into account and with "LinkInPointDefault" as SpawnPointName.

[andylegate]

For making an animated linking panel when the book pops up, you could use this method that I figured out almost 2 years ago. Here's the thread, right here on this forum:

viewtopic.php?f=59&t=2501

As for having the linking panel animated with a plLayerBink while it's laying there on the table/stand, etc, I think Lontahv and D'Lanor are right. While Uru supports the plKey, it was removed from the plugin (I'm a bit disgruntled about that......many of the things Cyan removed from the plugin would have only enhanced MOUL. Removing these things, even if some of them were not supported by MOUL's plasma engine, is like cutting your foot in half because the shoe you want to buy is too small ).

However, there are ways to "cheat" and get it in there: edit the prp file with libPlasma is one. Create a panoramic texture for the linking panel and animated the texture itself is the 2nd (I did this with Camp Bravo and in Andy's Nexus and it looked great!).

If you decide to go the first route and use libPlasma, you'll need to make a bink move of the place. The ones used for the Rest Areas in Descent from Myst V are 256 x 256 in size and 30 seconds long.
One way you can do it, I talked about in the thread I linked above, and succeeded in making a "Flyby" movie of Teledahn by adding a prp file to Teledahn that contained an animated camera, and then used video capture when the camera was triggered. Worked great!

But, and this is key, if you want to have the Bink movie for a linking panel when it's popped up (BookGUI popup), the movie will need to be in a different format I believe, just as we have to have a special size texture for linking panels in the GUI pop up anyways (if I remember right, you have to have a over all texture size of 512 x 256 that's transparent, with a 410 x 160 picture of the place you wanted to link to).