Dios mio! It works …

After several days, there are subtitled movies in Heroine Anthem.

No, nobody figured out the WV1F codec–not even close. To have really perfect movies, someone will need to, but in the mean time, another option presented itself.

A guy named Varlis got me in contact with his friend, [CD]Overkill, in Germany who I uploaded all 800MB of Heroine Anthem movies to, and a test player. Using ACI Capture Pro on his incredibly powerful computer–compared to byuu and I, who can’t manage much more than 1.1GHz–he played and recorded all the movies in real time to new AVI files.

These AVI files were sent back to me, where I had to first, free 9GB of hard disk space to deal with uncompressed AVI, then trimmed all of them to get the exact start and end point of the file, and exactly match the frame count of the original. The audio was de-muxed from the original AVIs, applied to the new ones, then the image was cropped, expanded back out with a black region, and subtitled.

To play them in the game, byuu made a loader hook that catches all the commands to play AVIs and loads our alternates instead. The problem right now is when we kick out to the new program, the two split process priority 50/50 meaning the movies only play at 4fps.

After doing more research on XviD, I found out how it works (motion processing on key frames) and started playing. The recommended setting for XviD key-frames is 300. I changed it to -5-. This means there are six key frames for every SECOND of animation in the movie.

The result is even with such s–t for processing power, the movie plays nearly flawlessly. This will work as a last resort if byuu can’t find a way to reassign process priority, but it will mean the new files will be the same size as the original (despite using compressed audio when the original was PCM, the video data is just that huge).

The subtitles are rendered in the Junicode Small Caps font distributed by the University of Virginia’s Department of English. It’s free for students and scholars of Old English, so I guess that’s a double-blam for me. The documentation says it can be used in publications without permission, so I assume it applies to subtitles.

For the really curious, it’s a TrueType adaptation of the Saxon typeface made for Franciscus Junius in the 1600s. Why am I using a Saxon typeface in a Norse game? Because you people would bitch like an old whore if the movies were all subbed in Runic. It’s certainly closer than a Celtic font, which had been my second choice.

Oh yeah, I sent out an email earlier to Mike Melanson, who apparently loves figuring out video codecs in his spare time. Strange hobby, but s–t, look at this page, I’m not one to talk I told him about WV1F so we’ll see if he is interested. If not, we can make do.

So … progress …

Oh yes, it would be nice if someone could get me scans of the strategy guide. I never got it before it went out of print, and it’s the only chance to find out a lot of the official names for people and places. These will become necessary ASAP, because I’m not redoing the videos 90x.

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