Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Gridiron Solitaire (Addendum)

Holy crap, what a day.

Fredrik finished the cut scene. I was very, very pleased.

It was rendered in 1080P.

Playing the file by itself on my system, it looked tremendous. So I put the file into the game (I had a dummy file in there so that I could put in all the code in advance, so all I had to do was swap files out and I was good to go).

I start the game, see the cut scene for the first time...and the audio is 5 seconds behind the video.

#*$*#*#*! Shoot me.

After about three hours of testing, I discovered several things:
1. 1080P just can't render quickly enough in a WPF application to keep up with the audio stream.
2. Performance in WPF is significantly faster with an .mp4 file than a .wav file.
3. 720P works fine, as far as I can tell, although I'm guessing that crappy netbooks will choke.

So instead of a simple drop-in and drive away, I'm going to need multiple versions of the cut scene, rendered at different resolutions, and select the one to load.

That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's a thirty-second operation that basically took five hours to fix, and it's not completely solved yet.

Oh, well, at least the Exhibition game code works.

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