The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I would like to know why? im not bitching or anything, ive seen them before in the early 90's seeing how star control was my first computer game, and pretty much all i had for a few years... lol the good old days before you could get everything free off the net  :D. anyhoo, i would like to know why, does it have something to do with coding? or something

There has been some discussion about this here before, but I'll summarise for your benefit. First of all, nobody's quite figured out how the 3DO version stores its video files (what format, how to play it, et.c.) and second, it's somewhat unclear whether we're actually allowed to use them anyway due to some odd copyright problems (similar to the trademark problem with the name "Star Control").

Due to these problems, work is being done on using the PC intro instead. This is easier for a number of reasons: the PC version only uses static images, and we know (or at least think) we're allowed to use it. However, since most of the development team is working on getting the game itself working properly first, there has been little progress on showing the introduction and ending. Also, since UQM is based on the 3DO version of Star Control 2, we have none of the source code for the PC introduction and ending sequences. In effect, the PC introduction/ending code has to be rewritten from scratch.

Are you speaking of the videos?  If so, here's why.

It's kind of low on the totem pole as far as getting the game all together.  There are still a great many bugs to iron out before we get to worry about the "frills" such as FMV.

Also, the video is in an odd format (.duk) for which the source code and materials have been lost.  Our stout-hearted programmers, therefore, have to manually decode the bitstream and header info in order to be able to play them at all.  To re-record them into another format (eg: via recording and reprocessing) risks further decay of the already shabby video quality.  The .duk format is apparently horribly lossey and therefore degrades the visual quality of the film.

(for those who don't know, high quality video winds up being incredibly huge if not compressed.  When compressing video, you will almost always lose quality.   To record every frame and then compress it with a lossless compression would still be FAR too large to be of any real use other than for movie or television work.  Therefore, a "lossey" format is used with acceptable tolerances to make it small but still visiually appealing.)

Anyway, I hope this answers your question as to where the intro and conclusion went.  It WILL be in the final version I'm sure.  We'll all just have to sit back and wait.

Arcain

An interesting thing to note here is that all of the PC SC2 ending is not static images.  The important parts are, but still, not all of it is.

Wonder how the DEV team is going to reproduce that?  Or has someone figured out how to extract all of those frames?  FSCP might have that ability or something...

I thought that it was a mixture of Static shots, static shots being panned-across, fade-in/out, and conversation-style animations. All that is fairly straightforward, but not so easy that it takes priority over more serious issues.

If you really really want to watch the intro and ending, go here
http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/files/sc2.shtml

or here
http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/3do/movies.shtml

You and I apparently both forgot the actual "destruction of the Sa-Matra" sequence, which is a rather short animation (one part where your flagship moves in alongside the Sa-Matra and launches the escape pod, and the explosion seen from the escape pod). This makes supporting the PC version's ending a bit more complicated (we'd have to extract the entire animation from the PC version).

Thats exactly the part I was talking about.  Just wondering if there is already someway to do it and if not, if its next to impossible...???

We have already extracted all needed datafiles for PC intro/ending, but there's no code to play them yet; it depends on new resource system which has to be implemented first.

You have all the important ones yes, (at least in the content/slides directory in CVS) but not ALL of the ending.  

Here are some selected images from the animation that I'm talking about.  I took these with just a screen shot grabber, so I don't have all the frames...

(http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/sc2/ending/Image11.png)

(http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/sc2/ending/Image12.png)

(http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/sc2/ending/Image24.png)

Errr... Surely there are players available for TrueMotion-S video that we can use? A quick Google search pops up several references, including mentions of Microsoft Video for Windows and QuickTime codecs. Using one of these, we should be able to unpack the video. Once we have access to the raw video data, we can start thinking of what sort of codec we can design to recompress the data without losing image quality.

Alternatively, we could try to use an existing player for Windows (and annoy all non-Windows users).

We have those too, they just aren't in CVS currently :) Or actually they once were, before we re-extracted stuff from 3DO cd and removed all images which weren't used by any 'ani file'.

About TrueMotion etc, to my knowledge format which 3DO version uses isn't playable by any standard video player / codec out there. Meep-Eep knows more about that than me though. Our hope ultimately is to make a player for them ourselves so that no recompression is needed.

I'm no expert, but given the 3DO version was out during a period in the gaming industry where proprietary formats were the *norm*, for various reasons (for instance, modding was a pretty foriegn concept to most companies, and then there's some performance issues that were more important then than now, etc), I wouldn't be surprised if the format's some nearly lost information at this point. There might be something in the source code, possibly, but if it's a 3DO proprietary format, and not a SC2 format, I wouldn't count on much useful.

But whatever the case is, either the developers will need to write their own player code, use existing code as yet undiscovered, or modify the files to a standard format. In the foremost and latter cases, they'd have to decode the file format *anyway*, and at that point, most of the work in getting new player code written is done, so you might as well use the original format to avoid further quality problems. In the second case, it's all a moot point, anyway.

Another, more insane option, is to get someone real good with 3DS Max or something like that(whatever's appropriate-- i haven't seen the 3DO's opening myself) to re-build the sequences from scratch. I'd have to say, that I sure wouldn't volunteer for a job like that, though. Ug-ly.

How about this: use the original 3DO video playback code through an emulator (e.g. FreeDO (http://www.freedo.org/)). That could be somewhat inefficient, but it ought to work, at least. If we, for one reason or another can't or don't want to add 3DO emulation to UQM, we can take the emulator output and recompress it in a suitable (possibly custom-made) format.

Sweet.  ;D

can't you just plug in a 3do and hookup the videoout to a tv tuner? then just record the thing as an mpg.  If you use high quality cable, the video quality loss shouldn't be that great.  

hmm, is that what the "pages of now and forever" people did?  

To improve the quality, you could use a deinterlacer program and capture at a loss-less format (mpeg2?)

This has all been discussed here:
http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Gendiscuss;action=display;num=1045206393;start=6

My message there should give you all the info you want on this subject.

>>but there's another, more serious problem: TFB doesn't own the videos.

yes. yes that is a serious problem.

Well, barring any "unofficial" release of the videos that can  "unofficially" be plugged into UQM, I'll have to go with arcain's idea of reproducing the videos with some animation and modelling magic.

Ahh, you'll be wanting Tsing then.

This brings up an interesting question. With 3do music,  voices, data, ship animation files, opening and ending animation cinimatics, the final thing is going to be one helluva download. Would it be possible for TFB to offer the whole thing on CD for the cost of the media and S/H? I think it'd just be icing on the cake to have an "official" copy of UQM. Heck, sign the CD and I'd pay extra for the thing.

Yes, this is what I did... Captured through a TV Tuner card to uncompressed stereo AVI files.  I think the opening movie was like 4 gigs!

For PNF, I compressed all the movies with MPEG stuff before providing them as downloads.

I provided all of my original, uncompressed files to Chris Nelson.  What and if they use them is up to them.

I'm sure if they can figure out how to extract the files, that would be much better.

well, the fact that TFB doesn't own the videos (which I take to mean they don't have the rights to use the video either) pretty much ends the discussion.

I think reproducing the intro and end is the way to go.  My own 3d modeling and animating exprience is pretty wimpy, otherwise I'd be all over this.

Just looking thru the game folders there seems to be all the files needed for the pc version of the intro/ending (well most of it anyways).   Why not just slap together a semi-working intro-conclusion using the pc files?

This has recently been discussed here (and I think in older threads also)
http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Gendiscuss;action=display;num=1046665685

Its also a "todo" item on the developers list...
http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=46

So yeah, they are going to do it  ;)