“There’s a full-length feature film rendered in our game, with seamless transitions in and out of gameplay.”
With those words NetherRealm’s Adisak Pochanayon opened his talk at GDC 2013 on how, exactly, NetherRealm designed and produced the character-filled cinematics that play between (and seamlessly segue into) the bouts that make up the “Story” modes in NetherRealm games like Mortal Kombat and Injustice: Gods Among Us.
It was a good talk, one that covers (among other things) minimization of resource contention with simultaneous movie playback and level data loading, pre-caching and off-line metadata extraction for hitch-free playback, and implementing a movie decoding pipeline.
It was a great overview of the technical challenges and the implementation process of using movies in games, and if you missed it in person you can now watch it for free over on the official GDC YouTube channel.
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