Videos are on a playlist which contains these three movies:

• "Space Race, The Musical!"
• Chapter 2, "The Stars Have Ears"
• Chapter 3, "While the Iron is Hot"

This is pretty awsome, I had no idea things were this far along.

So are they story screens not put in yet, and the music as well?

Looks geat.

To clarify, these are not taken from Xsera. I think it's pretty unlikely that Xsera will ever support the old demo format–the demos are just sequences of serialized keystrokes, and that makes them sensitive to every quirk of the original engine (e.g. random number generation, angle-to-slope conversion...).

This post has been edited by Pallas Athene : 12 June 2009 - 07:06 AM

Nice to see Ares refusing to die, even if it is just in vid form for the moment.

Very much agreed. Ares has survived where most games have fallen. I really wish my old G3 still works. SheepShaver and Classic just don't cut it. Oh well.

'pologies for the gravedig, you'll understand my reasoning in a minute. Pallas, is there any way I could get those demos in a (very) high quality format, along with a few other sequences from Ares (I'm talking about the scrolling text parts)? Implementing those videos would give a very authentic feel to those scenes that I can't do without days and days of work.

What are you doing adam_0?

-Peter Story

QUOTE (p3ter_st0ry @ Aug 30 2009, 06:05 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What are you doing adam_0?

Well, I'm hoping that I can take the scenes that I just requested and play them as movies from within Xsera. That would save me many hours of hard, frustrating work.

I've never looked into Xsera... until now!
Looks pretty AWESOME; best of luck with it

To bad the supposed homepage is down though.
¿Homepage?

-Peter Story

The homepage has been switched temporarily, I'm still trying to figure out what's going on with nfreader. The new (although temporary) site is here.

I think Nick just let the nfreader.com domain expire, and didn't bother telling anyone.
nfreader.com and studio-16.net go to exactly the same place though, if I remember correctly, so you should just be able to replace any links and they'd work fine.

I could record these for you, but the quality would be limited by the fact that I'm recording from an analog interlaced source. MPEG Streamclip does a decent job of deinterlacing it, but there's still a little motion blur and the whole video is scaled down slightly. If you've seen my videos on YouTube, they would look a little better, but not much. If you want me to do it anyway, let me know what resolution you want them at. They will come out roughly 640x480 regardless, higher resolutions will show more but be scaled down more too.

Great, thanks NMS, I could definitely use the videos. I think the videos will be run at 640x480 anyways - enlarging them will make it look lousy either way. So please record them at 640x480, the interlacing should be reduced by the fact that the text moves slowly, right?

I uploaded the intro text and the demo of chapter 2 to my FileFront page: http://www.filefront.com/user/NMS127

I understand why it would be very difficult to run the demo files in a different engine, but it seems like you should be able to extract all the data you need to replicate the scrolling text (and it would look a lot better). I'll record the rest for you if you want them though.

It would be great if you could record them for me. I may end up recreating the scrolling text in the end, but that would require a substantial amount of time that I don't want to spend on that right now. It's something that's very low on my priority list right now - I'd rather have all the game mechanics and scenarios working, if you know what I mean.

Ok, I have them all recorded. I have some questions before I encode them, though. Since the scrolling texts don't fill the whole screen even at 640x480, should I crop them down to the smallest possible size? My recording method slightly distorts the aspect ratio, so I can try to just correct that, or I can scale them up to a larger size if you want. Do you want me to include the movies that play before chapters 1, 7, and 13? (Oddly enough, I only discovered these today. Apparently, they've been missing from my data folder all along.)

No thanks on the movies, they've already been supplied. If you could fix the aspect ratio, that would be great, but don't crop them all the way down. Thanks!

So I should use the same settings that I use to expand the full screen parts to 640x480?

Whatever you did to Intro.mp4 will be great.