Dungeon Master Forum

Posted: **Wed May 12, 2004 10:11 am**

Just finished DM that came with CSB for Windows... I had it on my old PC but had download it again when i got my new one. What happened to the little animation with the Grey Lord destroying the Firestaff? I was rather fond of that...

Posted: **Wed May 12, 2004 11:55 am**

That animation is only in the original PC version. CSB4Win is based on the Atari ST code, which didn't have any animation at the end.

There's lots of differences like this between versions. You can see them at Christophe's site: http://dmweb.free.fr

Posted: **Wed May 12, 2004 2:51 pm**

Yes, unfortunately that is one of the few but important features, that CSBWin as well as RTC are still missing. Despite their old, low resolution I would like to have these animations included in the current clones. I hope Paul as well as George will add them one day (I can't imagine that this would be difficult to implement).

Posted: **Wed May 12, 2004 8:42 pm**

The format of these animations is fully documented on my site, so it would be fairly easy to create a "player" for them. Then it would be easy for Paul to call that player with the correct parameters at the beginning / end of game. Another way would be to reencode them in another video format.

If someone wants to give it a try... personnaly I don't have enough time for this.

Posted: **Wed May 12, 2004 9:18 pm**

If someone knows how to convert them to another format I would like to have the converted files.

Posted: **Wed May 12, 2004 9:55 pm**

I've been fiddling with these recently -- I'll see what I can do.

Posted: **Wed May 12, 2004 10:58 pm**

Here's a link to a folder on my free webspace. I've done the ending anim for PC DM as a test:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/matt_hill/avi/

I've encoded this first one with DivX, so you'll need to download the codec if you don't already have it.

http://www.divx.com/

Posted: **Wed May 12, 2004 11:04 pm**

Hey cool! Can you do this for the CSB end too?

Posted: **Thu May 13, 2004 12:01 am**

I've deleted the AVI and replaced it with a Smacker EXE -- this is a self contained movie and player at 640x400 resolution; it plays in a window only on Windows machines.

I've done this because it uses a better lossless compression for this type of solid colour animation than DivX which is lossy.

I've also added the CSB ending animation.

I'll look at doing the other ones that I've extracted -- various versions of the CSB anims (different languages), and various DM2 anims. However, these contain sound which makes the whole thing a bit more time consuming. Watch this space.

PS: I'm still not sure about the playing speed of the PC anim -- I think it's a bit slow. I used the standard 6 frames per second which seems to be used in most of the other anims.

Posted: **Thu May 13, 2004 12:08 am**

wow - i have never seen the csb/amiga-ending before

can you do the same for the intro?

very nice work indeed!

Posted: **Thu May 13, 2004 12:18 am**

You can see the intro for Amiga and Atari CSB on Christophe's site. At some point I'll do a bigger version with full stereo sound and synched sound effects.

Was saving all this stuff for my site, but it helps to test it now anyway!

Posted: **Thu May 13, 2004 12:52 am**

Can you provide the CSB end as an avi too for me? Can you provide both ends as mpeg too?

Can you provide the CSB intro in these formats too?

So how can I make RTC play them endings when chaos is fused or the corbums are destroyed?

Posted: **Thu May 13, 2004 2:28 am**

I've just uploaded the English CSB intro for the Amiga. Again, it's in smacker self-playing format. I created it from scratch using the files extracted from the utility disk and Chrstophe's magic scripts. I made a 'fake' stereo version of the music, and took cleaner samples of the sfx to plop into place. Not having any sophisticated software, and just using sound forge to mix the SFX, the timings are a bit out, and I messed up the demon roar at the beginning. But generally it's pretty much as it appears in the game.

I've run out of space now on my free host. Can't provide AVIs or MPGs just now -- maybe in the future when I get some better software (and time!). Just tried this out this evening to see if I could do it with current tools...

Posted: **Thu May 13, 2004 9:27 am**

Just as a reminder, you can find on my site:

http://dmweb.free.fr/CSBDownloads.htm#Videos
Chaos Strikes Back for Atari ST Introduction
Chaos Strikes Back for Amiga Introduction
Chaos Strikes Back for Amiga Ending Sequence

http://dmweb.free.fr/DMIIDownloads.htm#Videos
Dungeon Master II for Amiga Ending Sequence

All these files are smacker executables, with sound.

Also, on this page you can find links to the PC ending animation as an animated GIF file (without sound):
http://dmweb.free.fr/DMScreenshots.htm