Inserting short videos in mods?

Inserting short videos in mods

I am experimenting with inserting a video in my mod: Colour. Since it has tanks like Hack9 (they don`t move yet but look cool and shoot too) I took a video from Youtube about tanks then made screenshots about every 0.5 seconds and saved them as .pbm background. Now I am trying to quickly change these backgrounds (or the levels with the backgrounds) in the mod to reconstruct the original animation. It would be great to have video cutscenes!

What do you think? Is it a good idea? Some tips, proposed solutions maybe?

Best wishes,
trickybilly

 

If only we could program cave story to open an avi file

Cant we just make it use windows media player and full screen it?
Thats what most games do but lock all mouse control or media player actions.
I mean if we could do that then we could have mp3's in cave story

A dream
Ive just wet myself thinking about it

 

The insane way to do it: Have each frame of your animation in a linear fashion on a tileset, and use <SMP a bazillion times. It would look alright, if you didn't make any mistakes.

The slightly less insane way to do it: That thing you said. I don't think there's a command to change the bg, so you'd have to <TRA a ton, which would eat up an awful lot of maps. Unless, you wrote a new TSC command for that. Also it would probably be a little choppy.

The also insane but in a good way to do it: What Jethawk said. I'm almost certain you could use Assembly to open a video. I don't know how it would work, since it would probably be unlike any kind of assembly hacking that is typically done on Cave Story. But if your computer can do it, Assembly can do it.

 

Is there a way to increase the number of available tiles past 256? I tried doing it once, but the tileset editor in sue's workshop just ran into errors.

 

Is there a way to increase the number of available tiles past 256? I tried doing it once, but the tileset editor in sue's workshop just ran into errors.

Hm, I never tried this before, but it's interesting. In CE, if you make more than 256 tiles, and you select one past 255, it substracts 255 from the tile # and displays the corresponding tile, at least in the editor window. I didn't test it ingame.

I guess it only lays out one byte for tile ID.

(i.e. Tile 255 is FF in Hex, or 00 00 00 FF. tile 256 is 100, or 00 00 01 00, of which only the last two nums get read.)

I guess this renders my idea #1 above invalid. Whoops...

 

Unless, you wrote a new TSC command for that.

How would you go about doing something like that though?

 

How would you go about doing something like that though?

Hmph. Well, I thought that would be fairly straightforward, but I can't find any way to modify the background other than to change what mode it's in. Changing the name in the map data doesn't appear to do anything, even if you reload the map. Might be because CE does something funny with it. I can't find anywhere else the name of the BG is, and I don't know really where/how to look for it.

As far as writing new TSC commands, it's been done before. You'd just need to make a list of the different BG names, and change the map BG to one of those. Something like, <CBG0002 and the tsc thing would go to the location of where the start of your list is and SHR 0002*(8? 10?) to find the name, then MOV the appropriate data.

But, I could be wrong. Again.

 

As far as writing new TSC commands, it's been done before.

very true. me, gir, and rune have done it. (mine are the snazziest)

You'd just need to make a list of the different BG names, and change the map BG to one of those. Something like, <CBG0002 and the tsc thing would go to the location of where the start of your list is and SHR 0002*(8? 10?) to find the name, then MOV the appropriate data.

sorta, you wouldn't need to make a list of the names tho, as I presume that backgrounds are run through a function that sets them as a number, like all other forms of data are. I think you would just need to call ascii_to_num, and then call a function which I assume is hidden inside tra. I can look into it if you want.