Re: [VANILLA-LIST:3160] Developers Must Play

[Karthik Arumugham <karthik@arumugham.com>]

On Wed, 10 May 2000, Trent Piepho wrote:

> Make a big animated GIF and crash netscape with it?  
> 
> Really, if you want to make a movie from the client, just modify it to do a
> screen capture and produce MNG or animated GIF output.  I haven't used the MNG
> library, but I imagine it wouldn't be that hard.  Clips from the resulting
> animation could be put on web pages, for the great netrek tutorial that no one
> is going to make.

I've found the movie I made a while ago. It's about 1.9MB for 2:19 of
action; a QuickTime mov version is 1MB. The animated gif version plays
perfectly in my browser. It's clipped down to just the tactical + dash +
about 1/3 of the galactic.

It's at http://www.psychosis.net/agridrop/

I included the .mov and .gif, as well as .gz and .bz2 versions of both.

Look how much the .mov compressed down... I wonder if there's some sort of
MPEG codec that can be used to directly encode Netrek-type animation with
this level of compression:

-rw-r--r--    1 psychos  psychos   1954201 May 10 21:31 agridrop.gif
-rw-r--r--    1 psychos  psychos   1463910 May 10 21:33 agridrop.gif.bz2
-rw-r--r--    1 psychos  psychos   1437276 May 10 21:33 agridrop.gif.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 psychos  psychos   1056280 May 10 21:32 agridrop.mov
-rw-r--r--    1 psychos  psychos    162580 May 10 21:33 agridrop.mov.bz2
-rw-r--r--    1 psychos  psychos    245372 May 10 21:33 agridrop.mov.gz

Anyways, this just shows that it IS possible to encode the entire game in
a standard video format. Assuming 2x the window area as in my recording, a
full 90 minute game would take about 12MB as a .mov.bz2 as above.

- Karthik