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    Has Anyone Recreated FMVs In-Game?

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    Ostratego

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    Have there been any efforts to recreate and replace FMVs with assets inside game engines? This would be for the purposes of ditching said FMV and replacing it with an in-game cutscene.

    I am wondering about this because I still see many PC games (Saints Row and Darksiders) using FMVs at 720p resolution despite the fact that many people run games at higher resolutions. I know that FMVs are most likely hiding load times or are portraying scenes too intensive for graphics on consoles, but I don't see load times or graphics to be a problem on a PC. I just want my games to look sharp at all times, including during cutscenes.

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    Pie

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    You mean like this?

    Loading Video...

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    Darji

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    #3  Edited By Darji

    @ostratego said:

    Have there been any efforts to recreate and replace FMVs with assets inside game engines? This would be for the purposes of ditching said FMV and replacing it with an in-game cutscene.

    I am wondering about this because I still see many PC games (Saints Row and Darksiders) using FMVs at 720p resolution despite the fact that many people run games at higher resolutions. I know that FMVs are most likely hiding load times or are portraying scenes too intensive for graphics on consoles, but I don't see load times or graphics to be a problem on a PC. I just want my games to look sharp at all times, including during cutscenes.

    Square Enix did this with some Tech demos. The most famous one is the dance scene from FFVIII which showed the power of the PS2 back then.

    Loading Video...

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    Ostratego

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    #4  Edited By Ostratego

    What I mean is a little bit different... it's probably because of my language difficulties.
    Here, I'll try to explain it in an example.

    Loading Video...

    This is an FMV of Darksiders (This is actually a Windows Media Video file that came with the game; it plays during a certain time in the story when I play the game; it looks like it uses the same assets as what is in the game, with the same game engine). This cutscene is a video but it was rendered in-engine with in-game assets. I want that cutscene to render live, on my computer, using the Darksiders engine instead of this video. Hence, I want to do away with FMV in place of rendering the scene myself if the assets can easily be placed inside that game engine on a PC.

    So, I guess the thing I want is for the cutscenes to be rendered during gameplay if the assets allow it instead of FMV.

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    Darji

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    #5  Edited By Darji

    @ostratego said:

    What I mean is a little bit different... it's probably because of my language difficulties.

    Here, I'll try to explain it in an example.

    Loading Video...

    This is an FMV of Darksiders (This is actually a Windows Media Video file that came with the game; it plays during a certain time in the story when I play the game; it looks like it uses the same assets as what is in the game, with the same game engine). This cutscene is a video but it was rendered in-engine with in-game assets. I want that cutscene to render live, on my computer, using the Darksiders engine instead of this video. Hence, I want to do away with FMV in place of rendering the scene myself if the assets can easily be placed inside that game engine on a PC.

    So, I guess the thing I want is for the cutscenes to be rendered during gameplay if the assets allow it instead of FMV.

    Oh I see You mean like Uncharted does it with running real time scenes prerendered? These cut scenes exist mostly to hide load times which is in my opinion a pretty clever way to do this. I do not think these will go away.

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    Ostratego

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    But has there been any efforts by the modding community to transform prerendered cutscenes into in-engine stuff on the PC? I don't think load times are that big on PC.

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    Cybexx

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    #7  Edited By Cybexx

    The assets specific to the cutscenes like animation, the scene and effects are very unlikely to exist with the shipping game. Often the cutscene character models are different than the gameplay character models, even if they look the same the cutscene models will often have more bones rigged into the face and those cutscene models might not exist in the final game if they are unnecessary.

    So you would be looking at recreating cutscene specific animation, effects, character models and environment models / textures. And this is assuming that the engine is not a pain to patch in content and you can hack the script to play your new real-time scene instead of playing the movie file. You would also need to rip the FMV's soundtrack and sync it with the realtime scene. If you want/need subtitles you would need to script your own subtitle display.

    As the other guys have mentioned there is often technical reasons for why these scenes were pre-rendered, often to mask load times but also for games like Jade Empire they found that matching the audio timing to the action was a pain so they pre-rendered the scene to perfectly sync the audio. A lot of these decisions were made for consoles, so you could theoretically get around them with a PC but you would be trying to do a better job than the developer. It is really unlikely that if the PC version shipped with pre-rendered scenes that there is a switch to flip over to real time.

    As a side note, there have been remakes of games that switched pre-rendered assets to real-time such as Tomb Raider: Anniversary and some of the environments in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. Then you have weird cases of cutscenes being real-time on one platform and pre-recorded on another like Final Fantasy XIII and Resident Evil 4.

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    VACkillers

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    Battlefield 3/Battlefield 4 / Call Of Duty Ghosts / Far Cry 3 / Assassins Creed / Cant remember if the Crysis games do their own cinematic through the game engine or not, I think they used BINK video / The Mass Effect series use in game engine for their cinematics I think also....... FMVs are pretty much old school now, but live-action renders are really now known as quick-time events now or are more common seen in quick time events because games are starting to emerse you more into the story side of things rather then just sitting there watching an "Intro" of sorts, with the rare exceptions would be any single game from blizzard as they seem to like over-hyping their games with insanely stupid cinematics that looks amazing, but bare absolutely zero to anything of the game what so ever. These are the ones I can think of the top of my head anyway............

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