Duffnershuffle


modred11

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I'm thinking of making a simple game for pandora, it's just a point and click adventure game thing (I'm thinking of Myst when I say that) with like pre-rendered images of a 3D environment. I made a youtube video
That actually took I think three days to make, (IDK why I decided on a video, the game'd have to use still images). I'm imagining this'd be easy code-wise, just blitting a single image over the screen. I guess it'd have to support using the pointer to click on stuff to interact with puzzles and stuff, but that doesn't sound so tough. I'm imagining C++ with SDL'd be the choice here, unless something else'd fit better.

Sorry for the "lag" in the video, it has almost one-third the proper frames per second (it's 7 FPS should be ~25). And actually that one doesn't seem to use that much memory, hmm... Would it be better then to go with lossy videos or lossless images? I suppose going with videos wouldn't be possible (or usually necessary) when your standing still for example. I need to go render an ogg version and see if that one's good with memory... this one's only 20 megabytes in memory (according to XP's task manager) which is a fifth what I expected (3 bytes times 800 * 480 pixels times 105 frames is 100+ megabytes I thought). & it's only 600 kilobytes on the hard drive... I guess my understanding of lossy video formats is incomplete.

And hey this png is only 61 kilobytes! What's going on here?! At that rate I could have 4,266.6 images (or frames) loaded into memory at a time... hmm... that's 170 seconds if 25 are shown per second... Well but that's the hard drive size, in memory it'd probably be uncompressed (I guess). I'll go render that 25 FPS ogg one now.

edit: replaced with higher quality video. Fixed the low frames per second, and revealed a problem with the floor texture flickering.
 
SDL is fine, but it doesn't have a builtin way to play video, and managing video will be a pain in the ass if you don't know anything about game design.

You could also use Python and Pygame, which is the SDL binding to Python.

Yes, the images will end up uncompressed in memory, but the Pandora has 256MB of memory. You are not going to run out of memory with a game that displays still images.

Definitely don't use video.
 
You're not going to run out of memory with video either. I posted this before. It might give you a better idea about video compression. Also, what's wrong with animated backgrounds (I'm thinking Monkey Island II when I say that)?
 
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Mr.Confuzed said:
You're not going to run out of memory with video either. I posted this before. It might give you a better idea about video compression. Also, what's wrong with animated backgrounds (I'm thinking Monkey Island II when I say that)?

Really? Videos!? Cool...

Yeah, right now I'm planning on using lossless images for most stuff, possibly animated lossless images... For instance, I'm planning (currently) on using that map (in the video) for the first part of the game, and the fog in it moves around perceptively, so it'd be cool if that could be animated. And it'd probably be good to do most of the stuff using still/animated images, rather then videos. But it might be better to use videos for occasional lengthy sequences of animation.
 
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