Re: New Entries

On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Jim Leonard wrote:

> Any one person who has come up with their own video or audio codec thinks
> their version is awesome and wants to tell the world.  Graeme Devine
> definitely felt proud of his creations in the Wired interview he granted in
> 1995; David Kopf provides code and tests via http://dakx.com/ .  Hell, my
> home-rolled audio codec sucks with anything sampled less than 32KHz but I'm
> especially proud of the decompression speed (less than 40 cycles per sample).
>   Along these lines, I can only assume that Karl Morton would jumpe at the
> chance to describe it.  Give him an email and show him your codec research pages.

	Sometimes, but sometimes they still have legal obligations
prohibiting them from talking about the details. However, whenever someone
has RE'd a codec and made a closed source tool, I usually find that
they're more than willing to share the details if asked.

> I just wanted to defend the poor genre before it was eternally damned :-)  As
> I mentioned earlier, Star Trek: Borg was a complete surprise (extremely high
> production values, they used some Paramount sets and actors).  There are some
> others, although I haven't played them so I won't list them here.

	I have actually found many games that have good, or at least
passable FMV that advances the storyline quite nicely. But such games do
not typically revolve around the FMV. I wager that Star Trek: Borg had
more to it than watching videos; probably had to fly around in a spaceship
or something. I reserve particular venom for games dubbed "interactive
movies" where they just plugged a camera into a hard drive, assembled a
bunch of bad actors (probably people who worked on the game) and filmed
hundreds of talking head sequences. Then the game consists of nothing but
watching those sequences. These are games that can actually be implemented
in Visual Basic (which was the case with Critical Path, at least).

--
	-Mike Melanson


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