rapierdragon
Rear Admiral
I was wondering if there is a similar project for WC4? Or perhaps someone can figure out how to extract the animations from WC1 and WC2 and do movies for them? WC3 was certainly well done (see my thorough review below), but I hope a "fixed" version is released in the future, or at least some common problems are avoided from compilations of other WC games if they get done.
REVIEW
I just downloaded and watched the compiled WC3 movie. It seemed very close to the book to me, and the editing was well done. Scene cuts were quite flawless and on the whole the movie was almost, but not quite, professional hollywood work. Flaws in the compiled movie seemd to be limited mainly to flaws that pre-existed in the game (see "FLAWS" below). I do have a few complaints about the final product, but they have more to do with the video format and turning the file into a DVD-playable disk (see "COMPLAINTS").
BONUS BITS:
1) Used the high-quality parts where possible from the 3DO (or whatever) port of WC3.
2) The Hobbes Explanation hologram bit. Very well worked in.
3) Clear, easy to read on-screen text at crucial parts. "THRAKHATH DETECTED" for example.
FLAWS:
1) The flight/combat scenes were in a few places buggy (fly through a transport, manually trying to land upside-down on the carrier, etc) but those are common to the game so missing those when compiling the movie up could be easy to make mistakes (if not mistakes that cannot be avoided. I've sometimes had collision problems with WC3 and have found parts of some ships simply don't register hits from guns or can be flown right through even though they should be solid). Trying to make the game fly to the book script would be hard enough (can't really control the A.I. other than setting the difficulty level) but it shouldn't have been that hard to simply use the rotate key on the keyboard so that when landing the carrier was right-side-up.
2) Also flight/combat. The player seemed to have a lot of difficulty. Now I know it may be that the difficulty level was set too high when producing those scenes, and that the player was trying to roughly follow the book's script. Also the player may have been using an interface they weren't used to (I.E. good at joystick but poor at keyboard but having to use keyboard cause the joystick messes up the record process or keyboard keys were in use by the video recording program and player was forced to play via mouse or joystick when they would have prefered keyboard), or a combination thereof.
3) Use of chase camera and missile-cam in flight/combat. In one place it looked like the player flew into the flight deck of a Kilrathi carrier and then blew up, only moments later it the carrier was shown blowing up (fired a torpedo while inside the flight deck? Certainly didn't look or sound like a torpedo was used! I think I even heard about 1/2 second of the "you died" and saw his fighter blow up right before it cut to the enemy carrier blowing).
4) Result of (1), (2), and (3): Flight/combat scenes seemed to a degree rushed for production.
COMMENTS and COMPLAINTS
1) I personally would have cheated by using the in-game cheats to make the few flight/combat scenes a bit better and would have dropped at least one of the flight/combat scenes in preference of the mission briefing for when they needed to capture the kilrathi tankers to fuel the Behemoth along with Blair meeting Vaquero and possibly one or two other bits (perhaps the extra "news report" bits that are available for download).
2) the movie was in a split NTSC/PAL format and even on a 1.2 ghz computer I had to wait a good 8 hours to convert it to a pure NTSC format (converted it to a long-format as well at the same time, see #2 below) so that I could burn it to a DVD disk as a DVD-playable movie. That is to say that while some newer DVD players might play hybrid disks most older ones like mine won't (or at least the newer ones can play both NTSC and PAL but don't allow switching between the two on the same disk). Mine (at several years old), will play mp3 disks and VCD's but not region-2 DVD's or PAL format DVD's.) This conversion can take 2 to 12 hours depending on your computer speed. More if you lack a program like NeroVision and have to manually extract the foreign parts to convert them and then re-edit the movie to re-insert them.
3) At 2 hours 20 minutes the movie doesn't fit the standard 4 gb DVD (which is limited to 2 hours). You have to either buy a more-expensive DVD-9 or convert the movie (via a conversion/burning program like NeroVision) to fit a regular DVD by converting the file data to a "long-format". Thankfully the video from WC3 wasn't super-high-quality (like a regular DVD movie) so the slight quality loss that occurs in reformating it to long-format isn't noticeable when comparing it to the original game video. Conversion can take from 2 to 12+ hours depending on your machine's speed.
REVIEW
I just downloaded and watched the compiled WC3 movie. It seemed very close to the book to me, and the editing was well done. Scene cuts were quite flawless and on the whole the movie was almost, but not quite, professional hollywood work. Flaws in the compiled movie seemd to be limited mainly to flaws that pre-existed in the game (see "FLAWS" below). I do have a few complaints about the final product, but they have more to do with the video format and turning the file into a DVD-playable disk (see "COMPLAINTS").
BONUS BITS:
1) Used the high-quality parts where possible from the 3DO (or whatever) port of WC3.
2) The Hobbes Explanation hologram bit. Very well worked in.
3) Clear, easy to read on-screen text at crucial parts. "THRAKHATH DETECTED" for example.
FLAWS:
1) The flight/combat scenes were in a few places buggy (fly through a transport, manually trying to land upside-down on the carrier, etc) but those are common to the game so missing those when compiling the movie up could be easy to make mistakes (if not mistakes that cannot be avoided. I've sometimes had collision problems with WC3 and have found parts of some ships simply don't register hits from guns or can be flown right through even though they should be solid). Trying to make the game fly to the book script would be hard enough (can't really control the A.I. other than setting the difficulty level) but it shouldn't have been that hard to simply use the rotate key on the keyboard so that when landing the carrier was right-side-up.
2) Also flight/combat. The player seemed to have a lot of difficulty. Now I know it may be that the difficulty level was set too high when producing those scenes, and that the player was trying to roughly follow the book's script. Also the player may have been using an interface they weren't used to (I.E. good at joystick but poor at keyboard but having to use keyboard cause the joystick messes up the record process or keyboard keys were in use by the video recording program and player was forced to play via mouse or joystick when they would have prefered keyboard), or a combination thereof.
3) Use of chase camera and missile-cam in flight/combat. In one place it looked like the player flew into the flight deck of a Kilrathi carrier and then blew up, only moments later it the carrier was shown blowing up (fired a torpedo while inside the flight deck? Certainly didn't look or sound like a torpedo was used! I think I even heard about 1/2 second of the "you died" and saw his fighter blow up right before it cut to the enemy carrier blowing).
4) Result of (1), (2), and (3): Flight/combat scenes seemed to a degree rushed for production.
COMMENTS and COMPLAINTS
1) I personally would have cheated by using the in-game cheats to make the few flight/combat scenes a bit better and would have dropped at least one of the flight/combat scenes in preference of the mission briefing for when they needed to capture the kilrathi tankers to fuel the Behemoth along with Blair meeting Vaquero and possibly one or two other bits (perhaps the extra "news report" bits that are available for download).
2) the movie was in a split NTSC/PAL format and even on a 1.2 ghz computer I had to wait a good 8 hours to convert it to a pure NTSC format (converted it to a long-format as well at the same time, see #2 below) so that I could burn it to a DVD disk as a DVD-playable movie. That is to say that while some newer DVD players might play hybrid disks most older ones like mine won't (or at least the newer ones can play both NTSC and PAL but don't allow switching between the two on the same disk). Mine (at several years old), will play mp3 disks and VCD's but not region-2 DVD's or PAL format DVD's.) This conversion can take 2 to 12 hours depending on your computer speed. More if you lack a program like NeroVision and have to manually extract the foreign parts to convert them and then re-edit the movie to re-insert them.
3) At 2 hours 20 minutes the movie doesn't fit the standard 4 gb DVD (which is limited to 2 hours). You have to either buy a more-expensive DVD-9 or convert the movie (via a conversion/burning program like NeroVision) to fit a regular DVD by converting the file data to a "long-format". Thankfully the video from WC3 wasn't super-high-quality (like a regular DVD movie) so the slight quality loss that occurs in reformating it to long-format isn't noticeable when comparing it to the original game video. Conversion can take from 2 to 12+ hours depending on your machine's speed.
