Wesnoth "Commercial"

Fynmiir · Post by **Fynmiir** » March 23rd, 2006, 1:54 am

TimothyP wrote:1. Use one piece of music throughout the whole thing.

My experience with Wesnoth's music is that it can be race/situation explicit. So I'll definately spend time rooting through it to find a good one track, but my initial feeling is that I may use multiple clips. But the point is very valid and well taken, so I have music sifting ahead!

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Post by **Quensul** » March 23rd, 2006, 3:21 am

Indirectly from Fynmiir to you, Wesmercial 0.7.1!

Post by **Zhukov** » March 23rd, 2006, 5:22 am

New version is a definite improvement.

I actually rather like the portraits at the end, however they really are a bit fast. I can only recognise them because I have played the game and they are familiar. I very much doubt someone who has not played Wesnoth would make any sense of them at that speed. Rather then thinking, "hey, there goes an Ent (Wose)" it would be something like, "what was that green flash?" When a picture I had not seen came up (the Merman king) I had to wind it back to see what it was.
I would suggest that each picture gets a full few seconds, like the HttT story pictures do. Perhaps they could be made to 'drift' ever so slightly within the frame (that's poorly described, do you know what I mean?).

Minor points:
Perhaps the last words could remain on the last frame rather then fade to black...?
The yellow letters cannot be easily seen over the colours of the pictures.

Good work, this whole thing is a neat idea.

UDD · Post by **UDD** » March 23rd, 2006, 12:53 pm

Its nice, but not perfect.
The one thing that bother me the most is that fact that there are like 4 different tracks stuffed into 24 seconds.
You should either give each track more time (much more time), or cut some of them out. Rapidly switching background music is like randomly stringing a bunch of musical notes. Its just a meaningless blurb that hurts the ear.
Also, in the battle scenes you can see the terrain highlight as you are pointing at it with the cursor, which kind of messes up the feeling :/

If I were you I'd add some more battle sequences, but hasten all of them a bit (say, 1.2 times faster than they currently are), and slow all of the logos and pictures by a lot. And make sure you get to actually hear the track, not just the first 0.000000000001 seconds.

Post by **Darth Fool** » March 23rd, 2006, 1:00 pm

I find that the fight scenes seem to make some of the units disappear. Are those units with missing animations? Also, I wouldn't put the units on top of the castle, but put them to the side or above/below. Echo the previous comments about the music. Choose one piece and use it the whole way through.

Post by **zookeeper** » March 23rd, 2006, 1:06 pm

Yes, the music should stay the same for the whole clip. Also, more different short clips of individual fights would be good. If you have the software to do fancy editing, you could show something like selecting a unit, moving it next to an enemy, selecting the attack and zoom in to show the fight up close. Obviously you'd also have to pick units that have great animations for those directions.

You could also flash a portrait of one of the units (like the one that kills the other) before the fight. Some of the HttT story images could be shown right at the beginning, fading in and out one by one (ending with the Eldred vs. Delfador, for example), after which the "Battle for Wesnoth" title would appear, after which the gameplay stuff would follow. I would do something like this myself, if I had some decent software to do video capturing and editing with.

scott · Post by **scott** » March 23rd, 2006, 2:19 pm

I would go with 2 pieces.

Let elf-land play out and keep the title screen up until 10 seconds into elf-land.ogg (that's when the 'ahs' die down). During that time, keep the title up! If you want to have something happen, you can make the background shimmer. People need some time to see the title.

Then, for the rest of the time use gameplay01.ogg starting from around 4:20 until the end of the commercial. For a 30 second spot, 20 seconds of the strong theme at that point of the piece is quite nice. Maybe from 4:22 to 4:42.

There are great alternatives in the other gameplay pieces, but I thought this was the best.

I really like the special effect you applied to the httt story image where delfador's staff glows!

casanabo · Post by **casanabo** » March 23rd, 2006, 3:27 pm

That's a great commercial !

BTW it would be fun if the battle was not only with 2 characters, but with 30 or more

Anyway, it's already really good !

Casanabo,
(who offers a drink to everybody to celebrate his first post).

Website · Post by **Sapient** » March 23rd, 2006, 5:27 pm

Fun, fun! But, the sound effects seemed too loud, I think.

And I can't believe you used the old castle tiles. Dude!... The new one (by pekka) looks so much better.

Fynmiir · Post by **Fynmiir** » March 23rd, 2006, 8:16 pm

Sapient wrote:And I can't believe you used the old castle tiles. Dude!... The new one (by pekka) looks so much better.

Yeah I know, I am going to upgrade that. Sorry

scott wrote:Let elf-land play out and keep the title screen up until 10 seconds into elf-land.ogg (that's when the 'ahs' die down).

I'm going to do this with the music. Then I'll keep one more all the way through. Something else will really have to strike me to change that. I don't know what the second music selection is, but I'm using that and elf-land.

As for questions on fight scenes etc. New story board. I'm gonig to cut out the portraits flashing and add intro portraits followed by fight scenes. There will be 3-4 of these. (Basically like I did with the Delfador picture followed by Delfador fighting.)

Darth Fool wrote:I find that the fight scenes seem to make some of the units disappear. Are those units with missing animations?

No, I don't think so. Its just my computer. When I try to run my capturing program and Wesnoth it get quite laggy, especially when I have to be zoomed in. So the units sometimes flicker or something with all the lag.

That goes into my major predicament. Zooming in = lag which = degradation in the quality of captures. This is problem number 1 to deal with for the next release.

Post by **Darth Fool** » March 23rd, 2006, 8:33 pm

Fynmiir wrote:
Darth Fool wrote:I find that the fight scenes seem to make some of the units disappear. Are those units with missing animations?
No, I don't think so. Its just my computer. When I try to run my capturing program and Wesnoth it get quite laggy, especially when I have to be zoomed in. So the units sometimes flicker or something with all the lag.

That goes into my major predicament. Zooming in = lag which = degradation in the quality of captures. This is problem number 1 to deal with for the next release.

Well, if you can, you should remove the frames where the unit disappears.

Fynmiir · Post by **Fynmiir** » March 23rd, 2006, 8:35 pm

Good thought! I can do that!

Sandman420 · Post by **Sandman420** » March 24th, 2006, 12:01 pm

It should be a lot slower, to the people who this would be persuading to "Come join the battle" it goes by to fast to actually see anything happen, maybe try and take 10-15 seconds of HttT campaign and put it in, but not 10-15 CONSECUTIVE seconds, but like some dialouge, some fighting, some moving. Another thing that really annoyed me was how it starts out with the title all *slow* like, then it hurrys into action right away, then jumps into *slow* like pictures again. It should go- *Slow* Title, then *slow* pictures, then lets say some dialouge from HttT campaign, then some dazzling special effects into the real action of fighting, and then end with an explosion (even a *bang* sound along with visual) with the ending "Join the Battle at http://www.wesnoth.org. and then slowly fade out. The ending now is to long to be appealing.

Another cool thing would be to have all the factions scroll across the screen, mind you this would have to be fast enough to keep within an alloted time limit, yet slow enough to get at least a nice glimpse of the units in Wesnoth. This of course would have to go by lets say transparently across the screen as the fighting takes place, around the fighting not in it so you can still see the good the game has to offer.

As others said only use one music file, but probably not one of Wesnoths. Use/make one that starts out slowly (just like the video) and then gets faster and louder until the end with a big bang, then as the words come and it starts to fade, it gets slower and quiet.

Those ideas are what make videos for games intriguing and very entertaining to watch. And I'm sure will draw more attention to the game than what you have now.

Also, I only chose HttT campaign for this as it's the main campaign in the game.

If you need any help contact me either on MSN or AOL/AIM
kamakaziejetplane@hotmail.com
Damien420Cross

Skizzaltix · Post by **Skizzaltix** » March 24th, 2006, 5:29 pm

Nice! I think maybe if you made the music transitions a little smoother, it would work better.

Fynmiir · Post by **Fynmiir** » March 24th, 2006, 8:10 pm

Right now I am working on major revisions to what I currently have posted. The next release will be very different to what I currently have. Basically, I'm going to use more in game footage and use the elf-land music and probably gameplay-01 or -02, its a hard choice. The flashing prtrait element will either be removed or redone (probably redone so much its not the same thing). I'm working on many other changes. But the suggestions have been great!

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Wesnoth "Commercial"

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