Custom Race Animations.

Would appreciate some help.

from GalCiv2 Forums
I'm currently working on implementing the Goa'uld as a race, at the moment it's solely for personal use as I'm pretty new to this game and when the clips loop, well, you can tell it's a loop but there really isn't much I can do to work around that. I've replaced the Drengin Empire with the Goa'uld System Lords but my question is to do with movies. I've done a Neutral, Happy (Not so much with the Goa'uld, more like currently satisfied but still thinking about killing you) and Angry movie, each seem to work fine though my Neutral one stops looping after ten or so seconds, which isn't that big of a problem.

I also have made a senate one. I made sure it was the same resolution as the other race's senate movies (as I have done with the Neutral, Happy and Angry movies) but for some reason I just get a red screen where the movie should be playing, basically the box but filled with red, it doesn't even look like it's trying to play the movie. I've checked the Raceconfig and it's definitely set to play the correct file, the file is named correctly but still no dice, is there something else I need to edit?

Thanks in advance, really enjoying modding the race into the game so far, if I can work this in well enough, I might start on other Stargate races.
modding
5,693 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I had issues with this too, except for me it crashed when the Vote screen appeared. I was using the Rad tools on some jpg's, only 1 frame bik files but I don't need animations. The angry, happy, neutral movies worked fine, but the vote one never did. However, if you put a non-existant file name for the vote bik in the raceconfig.xml the game will instead use the square portrait as default. For the vote screen I found this to be enough. It won't animate, but it still looks fine.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hmm, well if there's no way around this, I may think about just using static images instead of videos for everything (Apart from win cutscenes and the like). It's a lot less work (Scouring through 9 box sets of SG-1 for a 3 second clip is far from fun, the show's great, going through that many DVDs is tedious though...) but the big thing is, when you loop a clip, you know it loops as the person awkwardly moves to where s/he was when the clip started, while not extremely bad, it does have a feeling of poor quality to it, where as still images would defintely look more professional and have the same general effect, it'd just lose the "wow" factor of an actual video.
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
What you could do is that you take a small clip, then at the end of it you switch to a reversed version of that same clip. That way you could mask the looping, and if you have it done in slow motion it shouldnt look like too awkward.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
That's a good suggestion and it had crossed my mind at one point but I just don't have the software to do it, unfortunately.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I am sure there are several open source or freeware video editing programs for all major operating systems. It shouldnt be too difficult to google for one?
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Already have and downloaded three or four of them but am unable to find one with the ability to reverse a clip.
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I know Quicktime lets you play in reverse, maybe that would help?

If you can pull off good animations for the happy, neutral, angry parts I tip my hat to you, it would be sweet for any mod. For the vote screen I don't think you need to bother with video, the vote lasts only a few moments and the pictures are the size of stamp. A static image for that is fine I would say.
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Does Quicktime allow you to reverse it and then save it though? If so then it would be possible as I can convert .mov files into .bik files. I've searched basically every freeware program I can find and none of them seem to be able to just reverse a clip, very annoying.