Niefel AAR: "...Some Say In Ice"

[Gandalf Parker]

I love the way you do your AAR with touched-up screen captures. Some of the more interesting battles might be fun to watch as mpegs (movies).

If you run into space troubles with your hompage site let me know and I can set you up with a hosted account

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
I love the way you do your AAR with touched-up screen captures.

My pleasure. It is a style that I have long enjoyed in writing my Europa Universalis 2 AARs, and Dominions 2 accomodates that style very well.

Some of the more interesting battles might be fun to watch as mpegs (movies).

I tried applying an Indeo Video compression codec to an avi of a 1 minute battle for test purposes this afternoon, but even with hefty blurring, low quality, and only 7 FPS, it ran to rather more megabytes than my puny account can reasonably support. (A typical jpg runs to 80K-100K with the compression factor I use, a blurred stuttering movie runs to many megabytes, and a clear one to dozens)

For test purposes, I used the following free software: MandSofts Screen Movie Studio for the capture and VirtualDub, a SourceForge project, which is exceedingly easy to use for video manipulation.

If you run into space troubles with your hompage site let me know and I can set you up with a hosted account [/QB]

That might be an option with respect to battle-movies.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Peter Ebbesen:
For test purposes, I used the following free software: MandSofts Screen Movie Studio for the capture and VirtualDub, a SourceForge project, which is exceedingly easy to use for video manipulation.

I will have to try those. In another thread here someone recommended FRAPS which is free and works but not real well.

That might be an option with respect to battle-movies.

A whole battle might be abit much I guess. I really had fun playing with zooming camera (PageUp/PageDown/arrow-keys) to do a zooming fly-by of a battle in progress. If I ever let one of my test games get to where there are thousands on the battlefield the way other peoples do then Id love to capture a fly-over of the battle to offer Online.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Peter Ebbesen:
I tried applying an Indeo Video compression codec to an avi of a 1 minute battle for test purposes this afternoon, but even with hefty blurring, low quality, and only 7 FPS, it ran to rather more megabytes than my puny account can reasonably support. (A typical jpg runs to 80K-100K with the compression factor I use, a blurred stuttering movie runs to many megabytes, and a clear one to dozens)

Dominions II battles already ARE stuttering. In fact, there's basically no animation in a Dominions II battle. Units don't walk, they just kinda teleport-hop. A Dominions II battle is actually a slideshow: There's no real animation, just a "stand" and an "attack" pose for units. As such, most video codecs are probably poorly optimized for this kind of behavior.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Dominions II battles already ARE stuttering. In fact, there's basically no animation in a Dominions II battle. Units don't walk, they just kinda teleport-hop. A Dominions II battle is actually a slideshow: There's no real animation, just a "stand" and an "attack" pose for units. As such, most video codecs are probably poorly optimized for this kind of behavior.

The problem is that while this could be easily dealt with by setting an exceedingly low FPS, it is not the whole story. Units hop - but magic effects and arrows use smooth movement. Optimize for units, and you get awful looking magic effects, optimize for the latter, and you end up using a lot of bandwidth.

[Tuna-Fish]

One friend of mine had very good results when compressing a similar animation (cardboard-cut-looking ppl walking on a handpainted background coupled with cheesy effets) with the xvid codec. In the end he managed to compress it to less than a tenth of the orginal while retaining almost full quality. His background didn't move at all in the duration of the entire clip though, and that means a lot for a mpeg-4 codec.

[november]

Hi Peter,

Seeing you here made me realize I hadn’t seen you on the Victoria forum for some time. Is this what you’re playing now? How does it compare to Paradox offerings?

And what is your favorite game?

I ordered DOM II over the weekend and just started visiting here. I played the demo of the original and thought it was just OK, which is why I’ve waited this long to order the new Version.