Opening Movies

[calroger]

There are two movies that play as TOC starts up. The first is a splashy animation of the title. It is impressive to see the first few times logging in but it gets old quickly. In other games I play, the opening movie can be turned off or disabled by either deleting or renaming the movie file. I suspect that is the case here but I need to know the name of the file. I found a folder with four video files in it but none of those seem to be the opening video.

The second movie shows as background for the player selection screen. This movie starts with a run through Minkata and then switches to an overhead view of the courtyard. The next scene is a little crazy! There is this big cartoony yellow bug being chased by a treasure chest and both of those being chased by a dinosaur. Is there any significance in the game to these three characters? Just curious.

Cal

[Annabelle]

Usually we are able to rename opening movies files to skip them.

For example, in MOULa, Minkata, URU:CC, Deep Island, etc. I renamed the file(s): Intro0.bik and Intro1.bik to _Intro0.bik and _Intro1.bik.

The result is that the game doesn't recognize the videos and just skip them...until the next update where I have to manually modify the files again. The game loads faster going directly to the updating & avatars page.

In Gehn, they removed the avi folder so we don't have intro videos no more which is a great thing.

For TOC MOUL, there's an issue. I don't know how the TOC team coded their thing but each time you modify the movies name, the patcher detects a change in config and send you a brand new file!!!

So you have to live with the intro movies whether or not you like it. I would like they code their game differently because like you said it's getting old after a while and I want to log in faster.

[calroger]

I found that if you click anywhere once the movie starts it skips to the player screen.

Cal

[Annabelle]

Yes I know that but I'm not always looking at the screen since on other shard I don't have to.

It's a possibility.

[Ehren]

Usually we are able to rename opening movies files to skip them.

Or you could just delete them.

[gabriml]

The escape key will stop the first two animations.

It would be nice if the third animation was optional. I know they want to showcase the technical capabilities of the shard and client.

Here is why I am not pro-3rd animation--I am inclined to believe that the third animation is downloaded each time before it is played--That is why there is a longer wait till the 'explorer selection' than other MOUL instances.

I would opt for the normal static explorer selection screen or something like Tweek has suggested in the GOW dev journals.

Anything to make it faster to get back in especially when you run into bugs that crash your client.

[Mystler]

After the game starts, you only have to click twice to skip the intro movies...

[Annabelle]

@ Mystler

yes I know we can just click twice and that's it...

Just tonight, I started TOC on my older PC. I was working on my New PC meanwhile. 1 min later, I checked on the older PC (very slow PC) to select an avatar...I couldn't, it was the intro movie running!!!!

I just find it odd how you coded your game so we can't rename the intro movies to skip them UNMANUALLY. I have no time to think: "oh on TOC I have to click twice". When I run a program, I'm usually multi-tasking and looking at something else, not waiting in front of the screen.

We should be able to rename them with an underscore at least until the next update without having the patcher re-download the whole movie because it thinks you haven't got it.

[Ehren]

Clicking when Uru starts has become pretty automatic to me.

Uru won't detect the movie at all if you rename it, it's the same effect as deleting. Do you rename them to keep them for record purpose? Because otherwise you could just delete the movie entirely or even delete the whole avi folder and MOUL still won't replace them.

[calroger]

I deleted the movies, and next login, an entire new copy of the client was installed complete with movies!

Cal