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[Kaz]

Hi,

I have a scene 2048 x 768 which looks out across a pond. The water movement on the pond's surface is created by a looping ogg.

I skip the cursor to the right hand side so the rightmost 1024 x 768 is showing. Then I scene.scrollto the left hand side, so panning across the pond and coming to rest at the left hand end of this 2048-wide scene.

But the autoscroll is jerky, stops and starts. If I disable the video, the scroll is perfectly smooth. I suspect it's a hardware problem of course, but it's a dedicated video card, albeit the PC has a Celeron processor.

Any suggestions for smoothing the scroll when the video's playing?

Cheers
 

[Mnemonic]

It's possible. Decoding theora videos can be quite CPU intensive, especially if the video is large. That means lower framerate, that means not-so-smooth scrolling...

[Kaz]

But the video is small, 16 x 1024 x 768, lopping constantly at 16FPS. OGG is 181kb, original frames only would have been < 5Mb. Puts out 16 frames and loops them. I would have expected the computer to cope with that easily. A similar scene elsewhere in the game, admittedly with less motion and a shorter scroll distance, scrolls supremely smoothly. Any ideas?

Thanks 

[odnorf]

1024x768 is HD (720) not small resolution. Especially for theora which is not the most optimized codec (but the only true free option).

[metamorphium]

Hmm, also there's the problem with different computers behaving differently. My coleagues computer is more powerful than mine yet he has much lower fps in theora entities playing.
We're still investigating what's the cause (sometimes the fps on his machine drops to 17 frames) when all games and everything run much faster on his machine.

btw. congratulations for securing a publisher.

[Kaz]

Hello all,

We did a workaround. We noticed a pattern in the jerkiness - it was jerking every time the water surface .ogg looped. So we made up a single video where the water wouldn't have to loop and then panned across that. The result was to cut the jerks down by three quarters but there was still a jerk there.

Eventually what we've come up with is a cosmetic solution. We animate the water in the righthand frame, alphablend to a still png with a transparent cutout ("Pink - it was love at first sight" - Aerosmith), behind which is the first frame of the water surface ogg so we still get the impression of water (reflections etc.), then do the pan, reanimating the water when the pan stops. It gives us a smooth scroll and fools the eye. But only you Muties know that's how we've done it, right? It'll be our little secret :-)

Thanks for the congratulations. We're hoping for a commericla success, of course. A bunch of amateurs, we installed Wintermute on 6th August 2007, having migrated from another engine. We launch in October 2008. Wintermute and this forum are noted in the credits, as you'll see in the playable demo, coming soon. A portion of our first royalty cheque will be going to Wintermute.

Cheers