DownloadLoads Dwarf Fortress CMV and CCMV movies in
Avisynth (which is Windows-only, though people have had success running it on Linux by way of Wine). Requires a tileset and colors file, either from a DF installation or custom files you specify.
Supported formats:
Unsupported:
- CCMVs produced by the CMV Editor (see documentation for details)
----
I knew I'd forgotten something! I finished this project almost a week ago, put it online, and have had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind ever since. I made note of the plugin in a couple of places, but I'm embarrassed to admit I forgot to bring it up here. Whether anyone finds this thing worth using or not, you have my apologies for not mentioning it sooner.
For those not familiar, Avisynth is a scripting engine for video editing and processing. It acts as a frameserver, only generating output frames when they're requested by the calling application, thereby saving disk space compared to rendering intermediate files. Users can write scripts to directly process a particular piece of video footage, but can also write generic script functions (using the Avisynth language to encapsulate a series of instructions without writing a full on C/C++ plugin) and, of course, actual C/C++ plugins. CMVSource is one such plugin.
I know there's the DFMA movie viewer, and Fraps/Camtasia/countless other screen capture programs, but I thought something more direct might prove useful in some cases (that, and I wanted to flex my plugin-writing muscles). Open a CMV/CCMV file in an Avisynth script and you can edit the clip, adjust the color, crop, resize, and so on, then feed it into whichever video encoder you prefer, as long as it works with Avisynth; since Avisynth is invoked either by direct support in a given application or just the standard Windows AVIFile interface, this includes a great many programs, among them
VirtualDub,
MeGUI, and
x264. Instead of having to record a gigantic video file while playing the game, or while using the in-game movie playback function, you can use the CMV directly, with the added benefit of being able to swap out the tileset at your leisure, without having to change your init file every time you want to try something new.
There are two main drawbacks to using CMVSource: one, that there's no audio support at the moment. The only CMVs with audio, as far as I know, are the ones included with the game, so hopefully that won't be too obnoxious. The other is admittedly more significant, that like the game's CMV playback, creature graphics are not displayed correctly; you'll see only a standard tile, tinted according to the tile attributes, as if you were using only the tileset and not the creature graphics themselves. This is the biggest reason to stick with something like Fraps, and if possible I'll address this in a future release.
Curious development-minded parties will find full source code included, since CMVSource, like Avisynth itself and most other plugins, is released under the GNU GPLv2. Everything necessary to compile the plugin itself is in the zip, but you'll need the Boost libraries to compile and run my unit tests; find a copy of 1.47.0 mirrored at my site:
http://www.gyroshot.com/cmvsource.htm You may also be interested in a more technically-oriented discussion, from a more Avisynth-specific point of view, in which case you can head to Doom9:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=162850If you find yourself interested in this sort of thing, you may also get a kick out of the similarly DF-inspired
TurnsTile, which uses a tileset system (I call them tile
sheets there, though) to apply a mosaic effect to your input video, as seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFJreg-LW50I'm always open to ideas and/or corrections, and if anyone has any questions I'll do my best to answer them. Here's hoping someone gets some use out of this thing!
Author
Topic: CMVSource 1.0.0 - Load Dwarf Fortress movies in Avisynth (Read 2190 times)