Goodbye AVI - Part 2

Continuing on from the 1st part in this three part series, this post covers the basics on how I converted the original Astral World AVI cut-scene into the original, propriety Presage cut-scene format.

Astral World took a little longer than I would have liked to be honest. The Astral scene only has one more element - the phase blocks - over the Reef World scene but these were very involved and therefore very time consuming. Remember, I don't have access to any of the original resources used to create the video - I've got to extract it all out of the video.

*The all new Astral World!*

The background is not the same as Reef World or any other world in Lode Runner. For some reason, the background is slightly stretched vertically in the video. This was changed as I wasn't going to have separate dodgy stuff in the code for one cut-scene. In the end result above, you cannot notice it at all.

The results from removing the background were a little odd. It took me quite a while to find out what the issue was - the colour palette the AVI uses, unfortunately, is slightly different than the Astral palette the game uses. It was a simple fix once I worked out what the issue was.

The process for the monks and Jake went exactly the same as the last video. The problem was the phase blocks at the top. They may look it, but they aren't the same block repeated (a few are) and there are a few different phase effects so not a lot could be repeated. It took multiple attempts to figure out how to go about this. The first attempt produced a cut-scene a little larger than the AVI which was not acceptable. The other issue I had was the sheer amount of work to edit all the frames - something I wanted to avoid - so I pretty much ended up building about 75% of the cut-scene file manually. Time consuming, but quicker than editing hundreds of images again and again.

Below is made is a video showing the various stages of creating the Astral World cut-scene. The quality isn't too good and doesn't go into too much detail since VirtualDub doesn't allow you to add frames that aren't the same size (I'm really selling the video aren't I?)

Nutritional info

The Astral World cut-scene is only 335kb in size compared to 1.14mb for the original AVI.

  • 78kb; 6 sound effects
  • 257kb; foreground, graphics and image/animation data

During conversion;

  • 115mb of storage space
  • 4,434 files across 24 folders
  • approx. 1 week to convert