State of Horizon

[Zaimat]

State of Horizon

Hello all,

I am still here alive and kicking. Work on Horizon continues albeit as evidenced by the lack of updates *since 2007* it’s been a constant struggle due to having to shift priorities to a ‘day’ job.

No one said Indie development would be easy and things certainly didn’t go as we had planned. But that’s a long story for another time.

So what have I been up to most recently...? A mini blog follows to give you a glimpse...

Thank you for your support and your continued interest in Horizon…


Games require a lot of sub-components and one of those things is the ability to play videos (e.g.: avi files) for your cut-scenes/animations. So you need an integrated video player and the right codec on the system to compress the files and decompress when playing the video.

Back in 2003-2004, you didn’t have much choice you either bought the player/codec from a 3rd party (such as Bink Video which is still used today) OR you coded your own player (likely based on DirectX/DirectShow by Microsoft) and you also had to license a codec (e.g.: mpeg4, divx).

So I coded/integrated a DirectShow player in the game engine (which saved us some money but cost us some time). The codec, I wasn’t sure which one we would use/license. A myriad of choices, the quality varied as did the cost with licensing terms often difficult to understand… No wonder most development houses went with Bink Video, it seemed much simpler… But having just put the time to code the engine I was not going to give up and throw it away just yet. So I left the decision for later.

It was either in 2005 or 2006 when I first found out about a completely free mpeg4 quality codec called Theora (or libtheora) thanks to the Xiph.org foundation. It sounded too good to be true… It was an alpha version, after trying it for a couple of days I gave up on it; it wasn’t ready as far as I was concerned…

Fast forward to 2009 version 1.0 of Theora was released; I gave it one more shot and after some brief struggle got it working properly (to decode video in the game engine). Persistence had paid off and it felt good as another thing had been scratched off the to-do list.

So all of this brings us to the past week, where I have been encoding the game video/animations with Theora. All the work until now was just preparation. I had tested it but nothing was really final. I had the animations, the music and s/fx but it wasn’t all encoded, not yet…

Encoding should be a one step process right? Not always! The process should be like this in theory: Prepare the raw video => Encode => done

But in production what can happen is you find a ‘bug’ in the animation, you re-render the animation after correcting the glitch (can take hours to render thousands of frames), put it in the video editing application, render the raw avi file (uncompressed), encode it and find more glitches?!? Now this time mind you there is nothing wrong with the animation, the codec just doesn’t like the aspect ratio your animator decided to use long time ago... It is too much work to change the animation, so you work around the problem; you manage to fool the codec with some creative attempts and some trial and error.

So you feel good and you think you are done right? Come on now, you should know by now it’s not that easy!

After watching the almost 6 minute Horizon intro scene several times you notice a glitch with the sound which you hadn’t before. You listen to the raw uncompressed animation and it sounds perfectly fine. Clearly the artifact is due to the encoding process… How to fix this? More trial and error… You try several audio filters and re-encode a dozen times using different settings but it’s not working. You try exporting the raw video to different formats before encoding but it does not help. Just when you start thinking you are going to need to take more drastic measures, you try a desperate attempt at encoding the edited raw video in another application and then final encoding with theora… It works... You carefully watch/listen to the video a few more times just to be certain all is as it should be. Yes!

While this was pretty much an example of a worst case scenario it did and does happen and rarely do things go smoothly on the first or even the third try even though you expect it to. Creativity and persistence go a long way in game development.

There is a considerable amount of video in Horizon and it will likely take another week or so to do the rest. I want to be finished with it so I can move on to other items on the do list...

I hope you have enjoyed my trials and tribulations in this…
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Horizon - Lead Designer

[Anguille]

Thanks for the news...that blog idea is a great.

Keep it up!

I'll keep coming and checking.

Cheers
_________________
I may not post so much...but i am here watching!

[Jambi]

This has made my month! I like the blog idea. Thanks for posting the update and keep up the good work.

[Sim-Mania]

Thanks for the update. Much appreciated.

It's good to know that progress is continuing to be made.

[NacNud]

Good to see your still working on it despite the set backs! I'll, along with others I'm sure , will keep checking in while looking forward to what looks like a great game!

[KillerAnt]

[Schmengy]

Glad to hear you're still working on it after all this time. Though I think (if you haven't thought of this already) that the music will need to be updated after all this because it may sound a little dated

[Traker]

Great to see you are still going on this and have not given up even though it is a massive undertaking.
I congratulate you on your persistance.
Can't wait to see the resulting game.

[tomatoes]

We'll still be here when you get it done. Looks like you've got a solid enough game not to get left behind when all media converts to some amalgam of 3D and virtual reality How old is Horizon?

[JosEPh]

Nice to see you've kept your "vision". Here's hoping you get to see it bear fruit in getting a working model out for testing.

JosEPh