Will ARMA 3 support video files / image sequences?

[RoyaltyinExile]

Since A2:PMC, it's possible to run videos in game via the OGV format. There were some early teething problems with playback on certain hardware, which were addressed in a subsequent patch or two.

They're a nice addition/ option to have, but - particularly in full-screen - their quality can suffer when trying to balance resolution and filesize. Dark scenes particularly can suffer. I find that they're best deployed as smaller resources, such as the small "video feeds", etc; although, fairly long full-screen footage can work nicely, if your players are willing to download the extra data. For example, the 'title screens' for each showcase were OGV videos running in fullscreen. I think they're only ~5-10MB each, and are 10s long.

I believe that the OGV playback doesn't handle alpha (at least in our current implementation), so you will always end up with the black scene, even if you export with an alpha channel, capturing the footage as you describe above.

You can, actually, play image sequences already though. It's a bit of a hack, but if you were to export your composition as a png-sequence with alpha, a simple script can play this back, calling the numbered images at whatever framerate you've exported it in. We actually used this 'hack' in the E3 presentation in our prototype of the context-hint system, found in the 'Deterrence' mission (such as fire support), which is actually a sequence of 90 images, called by script.

The problem here again is the data size. In my example, it was only a very small image for 3 seconds, but we're still talking about loading and scrapping a lot of data, and I'd be concerned about performance when trying to do anything more complex/ longer/ fullscreen. It's not engine supported, nor is support for it planned at the moment. As long as Ondra (or anyone else that may explode over a 'hacked' 'designer's' 'implementation'™) doesn't see it, you'll be fine.

If you carry out any experiment in full-screen, for example, perhaps overlaying some png-sequence of particle effects on a real-time rendered scene, that'd be fascinating to see in action!

Hope that helps!


Best,
RiE

[JwHs]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gAwe6JC348

Funnest example ever.

[SpecOp9]

From what I understand the script/image sequence idea could potentially already work in ARMA 2 as well, I'm feeling inclined to try it

[Zipper5]

More or less. At its core, it's a for do loop with 90 steps that rapidly calls different silent hints:

for "_i" from 0 to 89 do {
	private ["_pic", "_string"];
	
	// Filenames need to be handled differently if single or double digit
	if (_i < 10) then {_pic = format ["pic_0000%1.paa", _i]} else {_pic = format ["pic_000%1.paa", _i]};
	
	// Don't display the instructions for the first 30 frames
	if (_i < 30) then {
		_string = format ["<t size = '2'>EGLM</t><br/><img image = '%1' size = '10' shadow = '0'/><br/><t size = '1.25'> </t>", _pic];
	} else {
		_string = format ["<t size = '2'>EGLM</t><br/><img image = '%1' size = '10' shadow = '0'/><br/><t size = '1.25'>PRESS [H] FOR MORE INFO</t>", _pic];
	};
	
	// Use a silent hint to display it
	hintSilent parseText _string;
	
	// Display at 30 FPS
	sleep 0.03;
};

[Sniperwolf572]

...'hacked' 'designer's' 'implementation'™...

More or less. At its core, it's a for do loop with 90 steps that rapidly calls different silent hints...

PNG sequence with alpha you say?

[Tonci87]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gAwe6JC348

Brilliant!

[Kremator]

Now if we were able to pull in a data feed from an external source .... ahhh to dream, to dream!

[PuFu]

With 3d camera tracking you could do some very interesting things. Say you wanted a realistic plane crash with thousands of individual particles and physics and explosions. You could render the animation in 3ds max / Cinema 4d. Instead of using film-video as your main plate to composite it together, you use a recording of the cutscene. Once it all looks good, import the video file in-game so when the cutscene plays, you have a plane crash simulation. But you would need that Alpha, or else it would just play the animation with a big black background.

I am well aware of what alpha is used for, i had my fair share of compositing, both static and animation files.

But after reading your OP, what i find weird is, that you would like to compose, in the game, a scene between an pre-rendered sequence, and a cutscene (that might end up differently each time). Of course, you could (most likely very hard), capture the camera movement (match moving it via Boujou, Nuke, AE, ADSK Matchmoving or whatever have you) and then redo the whole scene. But then again would be much easier to pre-render the entire thing (especially since, even with alpha, you wouln't be able to do the rotoscoping/masking in A3 editor)...

I think being able to play a sequence of image files, as well as animation files should be enough for 99% of the community needs, even for the lads doing machinima (who would, in my humble opinion, be happier with some more advanced camera controls)...

[SpecOp9]

Pre-rendering the entire movie to me shows some problems, the file size, and full screen video can start showing artifacts. If, however, it was a small 5 second CG clip composited in and along with the actual in-game cutscene, you'd be able to not only render the video at a higher resolution, but the file size would also be much smaller. I'm a bigger fan of in-game cutscenes, pre-rendered takes away from the magic to me

The in-game scenes would need to be very simple and specific. The AI does move in all different directions nearly every mission preview - but one thing is definite and the same every time, the camera movement. This is a benefit, because now you can conduct multiple passes of different objects, solo the individual elements out of each pass, and then composite it together - now it's the same every time. I think this is what you meant.

[SpecOp9]

Well I was able to come up with a short example of what exactly I mean.



What I did was created a simple camera animation in ARMA 2 and recorded it.
I then did a 3d motion track
imported the camera data into Cinema 4d
created the small animation
overlayed the animation with the alpha

I hope people are starting to see the potential with this, it worked fairly well, that's not to say I did not notice any potential problems. The frame-rate is extremely important. I set the animation to 23.967 FPS, but ARMA's frame rate can fluctuate depending on the scene and things can become rather wonky.

As for file size, the animation image sequences are 31.0 MB with 1680 x 1050 dimensions (pretty good considering my render straight from AE is 1 GB)

It's a quick and silly example video really... but with some more advanced compositing in Cinema 4d, like Ambient occlusion, shadows, reflections, HDR lighting, motion blur and more, you could create some pretty surreal things - and achieve animations in cut scenes that normally would never be possible inside the engine.

Also notice how the balls interact with the shot, by bouncing off the sidewalk area of the dam.