you can encode chapters into mkvs. you could develop differents plots within the same file easily, maybe multi-angle (this is what your ideas look the most like). an additional step would be to add menus (just like in dvds), but I don't know how (if ?) it can be done in a mkv.
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
I don't think the "let the viewer play around here" part is very important, since they can already do that if they want to
I kinda agree, but that was kind of an afterthought from the suggestion of having the movie stop automatically to let you watch skipped parts like cutscenes. Trying to follow the story yourself while trying to enjoy the movie at the same time is really annoying. An auto pause/resume feature would be very useful.
Example: I watched the FF1 movie, and I found it really boring for the most part. The only reason I found it interesting was the luck manipulation and the fact that it showed how to get directly from one critical point to the next. However, having never played the game myself, and having no desire to play it, I would have loved to have the movie tell the game's story along the way. I probably would have read every dialogue had they been visible. Trying to stop the movie at just the right times, taking savestates, and reloading the movie constantly is difficult work and is certainly not entertaining to do.
Oh, but that's one of those games where you really have to seek out the story for it to mean anything. Do we need to add in sections where the player wanders around talking to just the right characters so you know what the point of each level is?
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What'd be really nice for making some entertaining movies on this site is a way to simply combine many movies into one, as the site doesn't currently have any ability to do that.
This way, you could show off several glitches in one game (e.g.: SMB3) without having to go through the entire game and watch every animation to show off most of the glitches.
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Joined: 11/17/2005
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This is crazy impractical and I know it, but here it goes. Maybe an emulator would allow you to record a rewind as part of your input? So the movie plays one way, rewinds, and then plays back a different way? And when you watch the movie you actually watch that happen?
The implementation would be format specific but it could be done with multiple movies. I'll use SMV as an example since I'm familiar with it. What the emulator would have to do is put extra SMV files after the end of input. Each of these tangent movies embedded in the main SMV would have the frame to 'take over' on in the header. So an emulator that doesn't support branching movies would start at the beginning of the file, read the movie, play it, and end. But an emulator that did support branching movies would notice that the movie file is larger than it should be and it would keep reading more movies (that must always start from a save state) to be loaded later.
Playing the movie would require the emulator to stop the current movie and play a new one. No problem. But then resuming the old movie would require the emulator reload the original movie (no problem) and fast foward back to the frame that it left off on. Not every emulator supports that.
I have no experience with coding the emulators or w/e, but it seems like the "make a savestate, play this segment, load said savestate, continue playing" thing wouldn't be all THAT hard to code. It also wouldn't add that much to the movie file. What I'd do is have each frame have an additional bit at the beginning - if it's a 0, then the frame is played normally. If it's a one, then it does a special action - like make or load a savestate. It could even use temporary savestates, to avoid having to worry about the viewer's pre-existant savestates. Either way, the size of a 1-hour movie would only be increased by lke 27 kb (not sure, estimate) from the extra bit at the beginning of the frames, so it wouldn't mean a huge size increase in the movies. You could do a lot of stuff with this, and an author could always just ignore the extra "watch THIS!" options, and make a standard tas.
Is it possible to rewind a movie because you saw an interesting part and want to go back to it? Most emulators have a turbo button that allows you to fast forward, but no rewind button.
I know someone's gonna tell me "play the movie again and make a savestate before the interesting part", but that would be impractical for really long movies like Chrono Trigger.
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I've asked about backwards emulation before and it aparently it has many complication, but it would be possible if a savestate was automatically created for every frame, but savestates aren't small enough and computers aren't powerful enough for that yet.
you don't need to have a savestate for every frame, only on regular intervals. the emulator would just have to skip (fast forward without drawing) to the goal frame from the closest, previous savestate. it would look almost transparently as rewind.
this idea has already been discussed in several emulators topics.
you can even try it.
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
