As a roblox developer, it’s hard to create interesting cut scenes and edited scenes. In many AAA / Indie games on the market, developers implement short videos to enhance the gaming experience with backstories, menus, cutscenes, etc. In roblox, it’s currently very hard to do that. It’s time consuming, and excruciating to upload hundreds of image assets, then put them in order and time an audio to play at the same rate/time. Now, if roblox were to implement a movie format, it would be very useful for some developers like me.
Here’s how it’d work:
Video format is a gif
Audio stays the same (invididual asset)
Gifs are referred to as “Videos”
Movie assets contain two inputs
Rate/Speed (Integer)
Video (Asset ID)
Audio (Asset ID)
when the movie’s played, it’ll play the video and the audio at the same time, changing the rate of the video and the audio to match the movie’s rate (so both the movie and the audio end at the same time.)
Gifs are lightweight, so it shouldn’t be a problem to move them through the network
Max. video length of 2 minutes or less
Structure of the “Video” instance:
AssetID
Rate
Basically audio with an image
hopefuly this makes sense. I’ll make an image of what I’m talking about for you visual people
MP4 videos would be better. Gifs are the opposite of lightweight. They store every frame as its entire image, instead of the differences between frames.
There was an in-game video player in this year’s Hack Week demonstration, a feature like this is possible but wouldn’t be implemented like how you’re proposing (it’d probably be as simple as linking an object to a YouTube link). Of course, it’s still for Roblox to determine whether or not this feature would be possible at all.
On an opinionated note, I don’t see any problem with cutscenes rendered in real time. Roblox may not yet be the prettiest engine but a lot of developers already make neat cutscenes without any sort of pre-rendering tricks.
Cutscenes in Roblox are fine if you want your cutscenes to look like Roblox, but my ideal vision for my game’s cutscenes is cartoony representations of the gamemodes. I can’t do that without a lot of spritesheets and tweening.
True. Like I said, I don’t know my formats when it comes to videos. MP4 would probably be the best idea for this. As for youtube links, I highly doubt that roblox will let users attach youtube links to their objects. Then again, I don’t think they want to store information for 200000000 videos on their servers either… As for stuff like cartoony vibes, not all games desire that, with myself included. I make games that don’t have any kind of cartoony feel at all, in fact I’m working on my own anthro packages (slowly but surely )
I doubt Roblox would ever allow users to upload moving images (gifs, videos, etc.), they’re just too large; it makes more sense to upload YouTube links as assets that need to be moderated.
And I understand that a number of people here would want videos to achieve a cartoony look not entirely possible with current rendering options, but I really think that most of these visuals are doable without having to pre-render them. I’m not saying that I don’t want video-playing API, but there need to be more reasons than that. Maybe we should be asking for more shaders instead? There was indeed a cel-shading object that I was really hoping would become a shader.
Hackweek is hackweek. Please do not take it as a promise for the future or as a proof that a feature is possible across the entirety of their supported platforms/devices.
A potential issue with this is hiding something inappropriate within 1 frame of the video - something that could not be seen when the video is playing but can be paused at that exact moment to display it. It would take a long time for the moderators to look at each frame of a video, therefore this idea probably isn’t plausible for this reason, unfortunately
It is something I’d like to see if this problem can be solved, though.
I literally said “a feature like this is possible.” Nowhere did I say that Roblox is definitely going to consider or plan this feature just because it was a Hack Week project. I know that Hack Week projects usually aren’t implementable for various reasons (including multi-platform incompatibility), but they still give us a good idea of what features the engine is hypothetically capable of, that’s why I referenced the project that’s very similar to this requested feature.
You persistently think that I don’t understand the difference between possible features, planned features, and unlikely features; and that your job is to police me every time I so much as mention them. I’m asking you to please stop.
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