Adding Pre-game and Post-game Cinematics to your Scenario

Article written by Felix
Published on 05-16-2012; updated on 07-06-2016
Tags: ,

You will need —

  • AoK:TC (You can use standard AoK but this guide is written for AoK:TC)
  • SUPER© (Video Converter, available here)
  • Indeo Video Compressor (Available here)

Section 1 – Preparation

In this article, I am going to show you how to prepare and convert a video for use with the ‘Cinematics’ section of AoK:TC in the ‘Map Editor’. As an example here, I am going to be using RladalFatih’s scenario ‘1453 – The Last Siege of Constantinople’ which initially contained a video (and a very excellent video, I may add) that could not be played in game.

The first step of adding ‘Cinematics’ is to create your video. We will not go into that here, this guide assumes that you already have a video you wish to add. The second step is resizing your video and converting it into a raw format which ‘Indeo Video Compressor’ can deal with. If your video is in AVI format, MOV format or MPG format, ‘Indeo Compressor’ may open it but will reject it if it is encoded in a format that is not raw. We will need to convert the file whilst simultaneously changing its codec.

If the video resolution is 320*240 or lower, you will not need to change the size of the video. If you do not know your video format or resolution, I would recommend following both the converting instructions and the resizing instructions below.

Section 2a — Changing Resolution

Changing the resolution in SUPER© is simple. Open SUPER©. Open the file by dropping from ‘Windows Explorer’ into the large box near the bottom of SUPER©’s window.
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Next select the ‘Video Scale Size’ under ‘VIDEO’. By ‘Video Scale Size’, SUPER© means resolution. Set this to ‘320:240’.
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Even if your file is in AVI, MOV or MPG and a raw uncompressed codec, please follow ‘Section 2b’ anyway, if you are not familiar with SUPER©.

Section 2b — Converting Format

Look to the top of the SUPER© window. Change the drop-down menu labelled ‘[ 1. Select the Output Container ]’ to ‘AVI’. This should change the settings in the adjacent boxes automatically. You should see this:
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Change the second drop-down menu to ‘Raw UnCompressed (Lossless)’ and the third to ‘WAV -(pcm 16 little-endian)’.
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Now export your file in its new format. You can do this by selecting ‘Encode (Active Files)’ at the bottom of the SUPER© window.
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The file will then encode and will give you no indication of its completion besides a small bar seen in the screenshot below:
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The exported file will most probably be very large.

Section 3 — Indeo Compresssor

Now you have prepared the video file for use with ‘Indeo Compressor’ , you must feed it into ‘Indeo Compressor’. Open ‘Indeo Compressor’ and select the button that looks like a folder. Navigate to your video. The newer one, created by SUPER© will have two file extensions. It will look like this in the ‘Open’ window:
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Open it.

Next click on the button that looks like to arrows facing in on each other:
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A window filled with options should appear. You will not need to change anything here unless you would like to change the output to a new location or adjust the quality slider. I will be doing neither.

Select ‘Encode’. The file will play on screen and when it has finished doing so, the file will be created in the output location. If this was not changed, this will be the folder the file was in originally. The file will have the same name but with ‘out.avi’ on the end.

The file is now ready to use in-game.

Section 4 — Applying in-game

Copy the video file to folder labelled AVI in your AoK:TC directory. By default that is :

C: / Program Files / Microsoft Games / Age of Empires II / AVI

If your directory is different, you will probably know that it is.
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Launch the game and open your map in the ‘Map Editor’. Select the ‘Cinematics’ tab. Your file should appear in any of the drop-down menus.
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Selecting the video in any of them will make the video play when the menu label suggests (e.g: pregame).

-Felix36


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