Video problem

[RoliX]

Hi everyone,

My "team" has a finished game, but can not release it because of video(cutscene) problems.

We do not miss any video drivers. We do not miss any codecs. Videos can be played outside the game. We tried ogv, flv, avi, mpg and several other formats. Also tried Direct3D and DirectDraw rendering modes.
We tested the game with several computers. Some cases, when the cutscene should start, we get a black screen and must force close the game. Some cases we hear the sound of the video, but see a black screen. Some cases(like 1 of 10) the video plays without problem.

I must say that this is not the first time to have problems with ingame videos. Back in 2008, we released a game what was played by hundreads of people in Hungary. The game was made with ags 2.71 and had 2 cutscene videos(both in .avi) and about 50% of our player stucked in black screen when the cutscene started(not able to move forward, only to force close the game). We suggested our players to rename the video files. This way they got an error message ingame, but was able to continune the game.

Now, we use the latest version of AGS. But still we have video problems in several computers, with all possible settings.

Please tell me if it is a recognised known issue in AGS, or not. If our testers have so much trouble to play videos, we can not release the game to players.

We would happy to see a simple and ultimate fix about this video problems. We don't want 10000 questions per day about "game stucked in a black screen after the menu".

Cutscenes are important parts of our games, so if this problem can not be solved(e.g in a future ags release), we must switch to an other engine. What would be really sad, because we use ags since ages and we love it.

[amateurhour]

are you loading the videos on a blank room or does it have a background?

I had an issue where I inserted a video and it stretched to full screen even though I didn't ask it to (I wanted to keep it at the default resolution) and I added a solid black image to the room background and had it play over that and it worked perfectly. I was using .ogv.

[Khris]

Your best chance is ogv since the codec is built-in.
Color depth could be an issue, but I'm just guessing here. Did you try setting the game to 32bit colors if it isn't already?

[RoliX]

Thank you your replies, we try out these things!

[RoliX]

We tried the cutscenes with .ogv videos. I tried the game in a brand-new computer with a fresh win7. No codecs, all drivers okay. Sorry to say, but the ogv videos weren't played. I tried all settings(DirectDraw, DirectX, windowed, fullscreen), but it seems there is not any ogv codec in AGS. At least it does not work as we may expected. After I installed a basic K-Lite codec pack, the cutscenes worked, but only in DirectDraw mode(DirectX had sound only).

The problem is not solved, because the cutscenes are still very dependable on PC configurations. Our players are constantly complaining about black screens, and "sound only cutscenes". Somebody has no problem, but the most players have.

I must add that I recently played Assassin's Creed 3 and Far Cry 3 WITHOUT any codec pack on the same computer and all the video cutscenes were played well. I wonder if it would be ever possible to achieve this video stability in AGS one day. I respect AGS and the developers very much, but when we talk about videos, it should not be a deal that they are played sometimes and sometimes not.

p.s: The game uses 32 bit color depth.

[Khris]

I have never worked with videos and can't contribute much to the problem, but with regard to game cutscenes, nowadays they are almost always in-game graphics, not videos. And if they are, they're usually Bink videos and thus don't have to rely on installed codecs.

I'm surprised that using ogg theora videos didn't fix the problem, but like I said I don't have any experience in that regard.