questshock/modding/ss-specs/media/VideoClips.md

Video Clips

Video clips are made out of a sequence of standard bitmaps. The meta-information about a video clip is stored in resources of type 0x04. This information block refers to the resource that contains the frames, which is stored in the same resource file.

Contrary to MOVI Resources, video clips contain only the frame information - nothing else.

Format

Video Clip Sequence Description (16+5*N bytes)

0000  int16      Width of video.
0002  int16      Height of video.
0004  int16      Resource ID of frames, referring to a compound resource
0006  [6]byte    Unknown. Always 0x00
000C  int16      Unknown. TriOp intro: 0x0001, 0x0000 otherwise
000E  N*[5]byte  Sub-table of N sequence entries
MMMM  int16      Unknown. Always 0x010C

Video Clip Sequence Entry (5 bytes)

0000  byte       Unknown. Always 0x04.
0001  byte       First frame
0002  byte       Last frame
0003  int16      Frame time (in milliseconds)

Video Mails

Video mails are small animated movies sent as mail during the game, all stored in vidmail.res.

A single video mail is split up in several sequences. Most notably, the TriOp intro is a reused sequence for all mails. The resource file contains 12 such sequences: Per sequence there is one resource of type 0x04 and a corresponding bitmap resource (containing the frames in blocks).

Video mails have a size of 200x100 pixel and are the same for the HD and CD releases. They share the palette of the game (gamepal.res).

Hardcoded constants

The classic engine has the following hardcoded constants:

• There are 6 video mails, ordered as: "shield", "grove", "bridge", "laser", "explode", and "status"
• "laser" has two sequences, "explode" has five sequences. The twelth sequence is the intro, having index 10, right before the status.
• The first ID for the sequence descriptions is 0x0A4C
• The first ID for the sequence bitmaps is 0x0A40

The engine always plays the intro first, then the requested video mail. The bundling of sequences (like for "explode") is hardcoded, so if another video mail could either split itself up, or simply have only one frame (or none at all) at the end.

Cutscenes

The files start1.res, death.res and win1.res contain low-res variants of the corresponding cutscenes.

The palettes for these cutscenes are stored in cutspal.res.