Movies¶

The game plays its movies with RAD's Bink (BINKW32.DLL), their sound through Miles (BinkSetSoundSystem with BinkOpenMiles). The movies are Bink files (.bik), in the game's folder and in the discs' archives.

Playing a movie¶

Four functions play a movie in a loop of their own, in xtrabits.cpp:

The two that read the disc's archive find the movie in it (hog_locate, 0x004C83F0), by its whole name whatever its case, and have Bink open it where it lies in the archive's file (BINKFILEHANDLE, 0x800000).

A pass of the loop (0x004AB7B2) runs the message pump, reads the keyboard and moves the pointer. Escape, the pointer's right button down, the movie's end (0x005D6C90) or the game quitting (0x005D60BC) ends it; otherwise, once BinkWait says the next frame is due, bink_frame (0x004AC510) decodes it (BinkDoFrame), copies it into the middle of the screen (BinkCopyToBuffer), and moves on to the next (BinkNextFrame), or marks the movie ended at its last. The message pump pauses the movie while the window is away (BinkPause). A movie that cannot be opened stops the game with a message (play_bink_movie: error loading %s.).

The video settings' Transitions ([Device], 1 unless set, read at 0x004A9081; Video) turns off the movies over the screen; those on a cleared screen play whatever it says on a hardware renderer (sr + 0x1AC). With it off, a chapter's end plays its zoom alone.

The Reliant's rooms, the news report and a new pilot's induction play their movies in loops of their own, from the disc's archive at 15 frames a second whatever the settings, each frame copied to the screen as it is due (The Reliant's rooms). The briefing plays the mission's movie on the briefing room's screen so, at the movie's rate and full volume (Briefing).

The discs' archives¶

cd_hog_open (0x0042FE00) opens a disc's archive, cd1.hog or cd2.hog, in place of the one open (cd_hog, 0x005202D4): from the disc in the drive (cd_in_drive, 0x004AC6C0), asking for the other disc where the drive holds the wrong one, or, in a full install, from the installation's folder, where both lie (Platform). Where the archive cannot be opened, the game stops with Can't open HOG resource file %s.

Disc 2 holds the Reliant's movies and chapters 1 and 2 with their news; disc 1 the Yamato's, chapters 3 to 5 and the story's end. Both hold the Yamato's hangar and landing, the zooms and the news' transition.

Around a mission¶

WinMain plays the hangar's movie before each mission it flies, and play_landing_movie after it. The main menu's INSTANT ACTION flies its mission itself, without either, and neither plays where a lobby launched the game (lobby_launch, 0x00595C64).

The hangar¶

After the briefing, WinMain starts the music fading out by 15 (music_fade_out), stops the voices (sound_pause_all), and waits a second, in which the timer fades the music out (0x004AA3B2 on). Unverified: that the call it waits with is Sleep: the executable's protection hides its imports. Then, before the mission's loading, hangar_movie_play (0x004ABD40) opens the mission's disc, the second up to mission 18 and the first after it, and plays the next of three movies of the pilots readying (play_bink_movie_resourced): the Reliant's, r_h_ta.bik to r_h_tc.bik, or past mission 18 the Yamato's, y_h_ta.bik to y_h_tc.bik. It steps the count on before each (0x005D6C8C), which WinMain sets to the first as it opens the front end (0x004A9587), so the second plays first.

The landing¶

WinMain plays play_landing_movie (0x004ABDE0) as a mission ends, but not where the player's ship was destroyed or the ejected pilot killed or captured, nor where the mission was left from the pause menu (mission_ending 1, 3 and 4), nor after mission 25's first part, which leads into its second.

It plays nothing after mission 25's second part or mission 27 where the game's variable 36 is clear, nor where the player's ship was sent home (mission_ending 6 and 7). A mission that ends a chapter of the story ends in the chapter's end, unless the script rated it a total failure (mission_success -1); any other mission ends in the landing.

The landing (0x004AC195 on) plays its movie from the disc's archive at 15 frames a second (BinkOpen with BINKFILEHANDLE and BINKFRAMERATE, 0x801000) at full volume, on a screen cleared to black; then, unless Escape ended it, the thread's movie, a file of the game's folder read whole (hog_file_read) and opened in memory (BINKFROMMEMORY, 0x4000000), at its own rate. Neither movie has sound: the land bank's first sound, from resource.hog, plays over both at 127, once, from the middle (sound_play), and stops as they end (sound_pause_all). Escape ends each movie; the pointer's right button does not, as the loop moves no pointer.

The movies and the bank follow the carrier and the mission's rating (0x004ABDEC on):

Mission 7 always ends on the Yamato, and mission 8 where the game's variable 32 is clear, each with a failure's thread and bank whatever the rating.

A chapter's end¶

The chapters' table (chapter_of_mission, 0x00509C00, a byte for each of missions 1 to 32) names the chapter a mission ends: missions 7, 11, 19, 21 and 25 end chapters 1 to 5. A chapter's end (0x004ABFEE on) opens the chapter's disc, the second before mission 18 and the first from it on, and plays:

1. The zoom, thread_zoom.bik before mission 18 and rthread_zoom.bik from it on (play_bink_movie_resourced).
2. The chapter's movie, new_chapter1.bik to new_chapter5.bik (chapter_movies, 0x00509BE8), with the news' loop, the first sound of newsloop.fat, playing over and over at 80 from here to the last report (play_bink_movie_no_clear_resourced from here on).
3. The news reports the game's variables call for, each after the news' transition, acntran.bik.

All but variable 34 are the campaign's flags, which a new campaign sets to 1 and a mission's script may clear; each attempt at a mission clears 34. What each stands for is not known (#381). The function has reports for mission 16 too, new_chapter3_thread1.bik, new_chapter3_thread2.bik and new_chapter2_thread3.bik, which are never reached, as mission 16 ends no chapter.

How a mission ended¶

After the landing, or where there is none, WinMain plays how a mission of the campaign ended from the archive of the disc open, the mission's carrier's, on a cleared screen (play_bink_movie_resourced), then turns to the restart screen or the main menu (After a mission). The Reliant's movies play up to mission 18 and the Yamato's after it:

After missions 25 and 27, where variable 36 is clear, a total failure plays the shuttle at Fort Bear, fortbearshuttle_.bik, in the transfer's place (0x004AA5E0). Each movie lies on its carrier's disc, and int.bik and new_a y trans.bik on both.

A mission that awards a medal (medal_of_mission, 0x005009BB) plays its ceremony from the disc as the mission's end is recorded, where the script rated it a success with its bonus and no nanny ship picked the pilot up (mission_end_record, 0x00475B57 on), before the ITAC:

The movies played¶

• As the renderer first starts, before its loading screens, renderer_load plays the intro: new_nms.bik, new_dalogo_fs_uncmpr.bik and warty_.bik, from the game's folder.
• As WinMain opens the front end, 0x004AB6A0 plays splash to mm.bik, the splash turning into the main menu.
• The front end's screens play their transitions from its interface folder as they lead from one to another: SINGLE PLAYER main2sin.bik, MULTI PLAYER main2mul.bik and GAME OPTIONS main2opt.bik from the main menu; the pilot roster's MAIN MENU and Escape sin2main.bik, and LOAD GAME sinfade.bik.
• As START GAME starts a campaign, WinMain plays a new pilot's intro, new_intro.bik, before mission 1's induction, and the ways from where the induction ended; the in-game options' MAIN MENU plays interface\igo2mm.bik before the main menu (The Reliant's rooms).
• Around each mission WinMain flies, the hangar's movie, the landing or a chapter's end, and how the mission ended or a medal's ceremony (Around a mission).
• The ITAC plays its own in its loop, its sections' movies in and out, and on the Reliant the pilot's eye read (The ITAC).

In OpenReliant¶

engine/bink.zig stands in for Bink, each function for the call it names; engine/bink/picture.zig turns a decoded picture into colours, by BT.601 in its limited range. It reads the container itself and hands the packets to a Codec: FFmpeg's decoders, in the platform (Platform). It decodes a movie's sound whole as the movie opens and plays it as a Miles stream, where Bink fills a Miles sample as it plays; the sound starts with the first frame, and OpenAL Soft resamples it as it resamples every sound (Sound).

game/xtrabits/movie.zig holds the game's players, one Kind each and one for the landing's loop, bink_frame, and the hangar's movies; game/xtrabits/landing.zig decides what play_landing_movie plays. game/interface/disc.zig opens the discs' archives as a full install does, from the game's folder, where openreliant install copies both. The driver runs the loops (openreliant/movies.zig), each frame drawn over an empty scene and put on the window, the window's messages read as the message pump reads them.

The intro, the splash's movie and the transitions of the screens ported play as the game plays them; a mission --mission names, or a screenshot, starts without the intro. A mission the front end starts, all but INSTANT ACTION's, fades the music out over a second and plays the hangar's movie before its loading screen, and as it ends the landing or a chapter's end, and how it ended or a medal's ceremony; LEAVE MISSION leaves it without the landing. A movie that is missing, or that cannot be decoded, is left out, and the game goes on, as it does without a disc's archive or a bank.

Fixes:

• For a rating past the named ones, the game takes whatever its stack holds for the thread's movie and the bank. OpenReliant lands without them.
• Past the chapters' table, the game reads a mission's chapter from what follows the table. OpenReliant ends no chapter there.
• The pointer's right button ends a movie only once it has come up since the movie began. The game ends one while the button is down, so that the press that skipped what came before, still held, ends it at once.

Improvements, each left out under --original:

• The steps at the edges of the 8 by 8 blocks Bink codes a picture in are smoothed where they are small (up to 12 levels) and the levels either side are even (within 3): the blocks that show in a dark or flat area once a movie is drawn large, as in the front end's transitions. Where three levels either side are even, the step is spread over the four nearest it, as H.264's strong filter spreads one; otherwise the two at the edge are brought nearer. Steps past that are edges in the picture, and stay.
• Each pixel's colour is blended from the four nearest samples of the half-size colour planes, three quarters of the nearer and a quarter of the farther each way, where Bink gives a 2 by 2 block of pixels one colour, which shows as steps along a coloured edge.
• A movie is drawn as large as fits in the window, as the front end is, keeping its shape, so that a 16:9 movie fills a wide window. --original draws it at its size in the middle of the front end's screen, as the game draws it on a screen 640 by 480.
• On the GPU, a movie is magnified with FSR 1's edge-adaptive upscale (EASU, from AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0), which keeps its edges sharp without steps (Renderer).

Not ported: the other movies, each with what plays it: the story's end (#416), and the transitions of the multiplayer screens (#404).