Specialisation Progress

After a few responses from my forum posts. A few responses from the www.incrysis.com forums told me

“There's software that will convert video to animated gif but I'd think that you'd first want see if it's even possible to embed a photo or an animated gif inside Crysis. You would think that that would be possible since there are lots of displays and consoles in Crysis that have animation. In fact, the only thing that I know of that's not animated in Crysis is the sun. Nothing stands still, not even the leaves and shadows.”

I then tried to find out about animated Gifs and there application to Crysis. If these animated gifs have the capacity for creating a simple moving texture and it was possible to further develop the concept to possibly a video.

Converting a video into an animated gif

• Firstly you can have to find a short video to convert (4 seconds is preferable as this is its limitations)
• You need Adobe Image Ready & TMPGEnc which can be downloaded for free on their website TMPGEnc.net
• Start by opening up your video file in TMPGEnc
• Go to File>Output to File>Sequence BMP/PPMTGA/JPG File
• Create an individual folder for this sequence – Name it whatever you like. It will now render each individual frame into a bitmap image
• Now open up Adobe Image Ready
• Go to File>Import>Folder as Frames and open up the folder you just created. It will then begin to import these images frames as an animated gif sequence
• Now resize the image pixels to whichever you desire through Image>Adjustments>New Size
• Go to File>Save Optimized As
• Then save your animated gif file
• Reopen your gif and it should then animate

Applying an animated gif as a custom texture in Crysis however did not work. In crysis you have to convert all custom textures to Direct Draw Surfaces (.dds) files for its application in the Crysis material editor. When an animated gif is converted to dds it loses its ability to animate.

Some of my reponses in the Crysis forums got me some great modder contacts. Im now currently communicating with Ruben Steinbacher from Crytek who told me.

“we are working on a similar thingie for our mod...it needs some c++ coding and I believe we finally found the places where to look for...contact me on my MSN/ICQ/AIM...whatever messenger you have”

Currently exhanging emails with him for more information