Hey folks

Since the release of the Free SDK in last August some time has passed, but one big problem remains: You can't create any movies for the Free SDK, as no Scaleform support is available as of now. Even if it comes, you probably can't make any videos, because "Scaleform Video" seems to be commercial only.

So there was the cry for an alternative among the hard working community.

After 2 months of work I proudly present you Cry Video:




Cry Video features things like:

-Full HD support
-Easy, fast creation
-Fullscreen intro movies on startup
-Ingame fullscreen videos
-Play movies on dynamic surfaces
-Support for multiple videos at once
-Start/Stop/Skip control
-Performance friendly
-Algorithm can compensate some lags and slowdowns
-1:1 sync between video and audio stream to allow playback of videos containing facial animations and lip-sync

On top of that a new system allows you to use any prepared map as a background for your hardcoded menu. An example of the forest map will be included in the first release.

Cry Video and a tutorial on how to create movies for it will be available for free shortly!
Stay tuned.

Please check out my other projects too. See signature.

Fantastic

Is there a pause function too for ingame videos, or did i miss it?

Thank you

It's not implemented yet, but since sounds can be perfectly paused, I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work.

I will include a Pause and Continue button for the FG Node in the release version

Super!!! Thank you!

Amazing stuff, Hamers! Very exciting to see such creative and inspirational work!

Holy sh*t

Can mods use this?

Finally! I know animated textures or DDS files placed in a row in the DIFUSE tab works. But this also opens up for splash screens and more features. This is great work man. Will definately try this out when it's available. Thumbs up for creativity.

@Cry-Adam
Thank you

@Johnny Guitar
For the Free SDK? Of course. For Crysis 2 it isn't possible, because there is no source code available.

@Lavizh
Thanks. Your posts about this 'issue' with the Free SDK inspired me to made Cry Video
Yeah it definitely opens up a lot of possibilities.

And the oscar for "coding and not crying" goes to Hamers
Cool stuff.

Wow.. big release with lots of feature, you're one of the few intelligent people who open a thread after having completed their project and that's a good thing in my opinion !

Great job, I can see lots of potential for this one.

Hey guys!

The beta version is almost finished. I converted the whole thing now to the newest 3.7 build of the free SDK.

On top of that I added a pause function to the FG node, so you can pause and resume your videos at any time now.

Here is a picture of the current FG node


Anyone who is interested in testing the beta can send me a PM and when the time has come I will get back to you.

Very cool! You have a message
Thanks for doing this and helping out the community. I have nominated you for an Oscar. Hope you win

As i understand this plays MP4 H.264 (AAC for sound) encoded at fullscreen? Is there any limitations on Bitrate?

There is no video codec involved with CryVideo. This is because the CryEngine doesn't understand any kind of video codec right out of the box besides Scaleform Video (usm) and implementing a new one is not an easy task, because of some missing functions and many codecs are protected by copyright.

So Cry Video just uses a sequence of strong compressed dds images. You can either use the batch mode of the resource compiler or my new script for GIMP to do this in very short time.

The work flow looks like this:

1. Create your video file (avi, wmv etc.) with video and sound data.
2. Use a program like RAD Video Tools, which separates the audio and video stream. Then you have all the images as TIFF files (RAD automatically numbers them from 1 to xxx) and the audio as a wave file.
3. If you want to use your video on startup, convert the audio file with a tool like Audacity to OGG. For ingame videos to MP2 or MP3 and just change the extension to MP2.
4. Use the batch mode of the rc.exe or my script for GIMP, which converts and compresses all the images to the CE3 dds format in very short time.
5. The images will be compressed again when you create the pak file for it. Then it is a reasonably size.
6. Create a xml file for your video containing all the necessary information like the first and last number of the sequence, FPS, Width, Height, etc. Sample files are included.
7. Use your video!

CryVideo will play the images with the FPS number you specified and automatically syncs the playback to the audio file, so there is no inconsistency between the video and audio stream.

And of course you can choose any resolution, FPS and quality of your input video, there is no real limitation. However, any increase of the quality also increases the file size of the images in the end.

I recommend 720p @ 30 fps for fullscreen videos. Ingame movies on surfaces should also work fine with 360p, unless your screen is very big

The CryEngine automatically upscales the images, when the player uses a bigger resolution then the video.

This is fantastic!
Looking forward to this release, really waiting for it.
I was dreading having to use animated textures in our game.