I'm thinking of starting a small game project that will make extensive use of film, and I wanted to get some opinions from all of the creative folk around here. Real video footage doesn't seem to get used much anymore in games; and if it does, it's primarily used for non-interactive cutscenes between sections of actual gameplay. What are some ways to use video and integrate it into the game itself? I'm thinking about doing an adventure-style game, where most of the graphics are film that is spliced up cleverly so as to allow different parts of the screen to loop at different rates. For example, imagine the main character walking across an overpass over a busy street full of people, viewed from the side: the video could be split such that the upper half of the screen can play various versions of the character walking to and fro according to player input, while the lower half can play a looped section of video of the busy street. Then layer a bunch of grainy old film effects over the whole thing so that players know it's supposed to look a little choppy and weird. ;) Another idea I had was to try and make the gameplay based around a noncorporeal character (like a ghost), so that the overlayed character has an excuse to not have an effect on the filmed scene on the layer beneath him. Or, to make the game not character-based at all, more of a puzzle game... at the simplest, you can envision tetris overlayed on film, but it would need to somehow integrate the film into the gameplay. Anyone have any other ideas of how film could be integrated into gameplay?

Video sequences were used a lot in games during those years between when the CD-ROM was introduced as a home media format and before 3D graphics became fast enough to become standard. Unfortunately, it also created a huge glut of "interactive story" game that were barely interactive or stories, so there's a stigma you'll have to fight against.

The common (bad) approach was to have a totally filmed scene A showing some event, then giving the player a choice, then showing either scene B or scene C depending on the decision made. I'd recommend against this, as it wasn't really that much fun (especially because the actors were rarely any good).

Some of those adventure games used a more standard version of the pre-CD-ROM adventure games, except with a filmed version of the main character instead of sprites, and with other film snippets for other effects. Due to the processing speed at the time usually most of the background was static, but I don't think that will be as much of a problem now. This could work, although you'd need a lot of blue/green screens and good actors to make it work well.

There's also the old arcade trick of having a film background with the action in front. The game would have a non-changable film version of the game world, such as a race track or a space ship's path through a canyon on another planet, and the game elements; enemies, power ups, player's ship etc.; would be pasted in front of this, resulting in a game that looked much better than other games of the era. This too can work, although your game has to be on a rail for that approach.

As for new ideas, I'll have to think a bit about that [smile]. The tricky part is still making the game interactive and not turning it into a film with minor game elements. Replacing sprites with film snippets is a good idea, since that won't hurt the gameplay. I also like the idea of using a "filmic" art style.

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Original post by makeshiftwings I'm thinking about doing an adventure-style game, where most of the graphics are film that is spliced up cleverly so as to allow different parts of the screen to loop at different rates. For example, imagine the main character walking across an overpass over a busy street full of people, viewed from the side: the video could be split such that the upper half of the screen can play various versions of the character walking to and fro according to player input, while the lower half can play a looped section of video of the busy street. Then layer a bunch of grainy old film effects over the whole thing so that players know it's supposed to look a little choppy and weird. ;)

This could be an interesting idea but technology-wise it maybe useful to consider the format of the video in itself.. The problem with most video formats is they are too large in size and too bad in quality to be used interactively in a game engine as where normally the engine would push a *small* amount of vertex and texture info into memory, process it and draw a full-screen frame, it would now have to push a massive amount of full-screen frame information (number of videos per scene * size of one frame per vid * number of frames per vid) into the memory and granted the processing is less since the engine only has to throw each vid onto the frame buffer per frame of animation, in the background the engine will have to handle the massive amount of video information being streamed from HDD to VRAM (or HDD to RAM to VRAM).

I know computers today are pretty powerful and there are good methods for video compression but a very hardcore game engine would be required to push interactive fullscreen video at crystal-clear (typically 1024x768 res, near HD quality..) quality AND dynamically swap between multiple video streams per scene AND render the character and 3D scene objects AND do a load of extra filtering on top..

And then you have the problem with restrictions on resolutions the game could run at without either providing too large a penalty for up/downscaling the native video resolutions that it would slow down the game considerably, or end up reducing the video quality to the point where visually the game would just look horrible..

Maybe there are ways to get around these issues but having a full-blown adventure game where most of the rendering is overlaying multiple videostreams interactively would probably give most programmers a headache and I'm sure the limitations of engine overall would make the task not worth the effort..

It would however be very very nice to see it successfully done though..

This may sound funny but its true: You could have a real camera filming real space and have a 3d character. You can make a minature world out of materials, add a motion camera that follows on track. Player controls camera

Thanks for the input everyone!

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Original post by Trapper ZoidThe common (bad) approach was to have a totally filmed scene A showing some event, then giving the player a choice, then showing either scene B or scene C depending on the decision made.

Yeah, I've played some of those games and I definitely want to avoid going that route.

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Some of those adventure games used a more standard version of the pre-CD-ROM adventure games, except with a filmed version of the main character instead of sprites, and with other film snippets for other effects.

I don't know if I've played any games that did this. Could you give me an example to check out?

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As for new ideas, I'll have to think a bit about that [smile]. The tricky part is still making the game interactive and not turning it into a film with minor game elements.

True... :)

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Original post by ArchangelMorph This could be an interesting idea but technology-wise it maybe useful to consider the format of the video in itself..

I haven't done many tests of this approach yet, but I think I can get it to run at a decent framerate. In my particular case, we may go the route of classic grainy black and white film noir style, which will hopefully allow me to get away with using lower resolution and quality video streams without hurting the overall feel. I agree that trying to make it look 100% realistic and high quality might be too much to handle. For this project, at least, I think a certain amount of choppiness and "collage" feel might be better than trying to keep everything looking clean anyway.