Thanks ashore for the interesting information![happy]Hi, thought I'd chip in to address some of what you guys have raised here.
Firstly (and we should probably have telegraphed this better on release) this is an expensive feature! If your machine struggles with large parks as it is, adding the decoding cost of 6 videos to it will tank your framerate. It's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot here, so use videos sparingly if your machine's not too powerful. Fortunately images are much much cheaper, so (with the obvious caveat that all images consume memory, and high-resolution images devour it) go nuts with those!
When you do use videos, we've imposed pretty much no limits on what you can do with them. If you want to decode 8K video, we aren't going to stop you. If you want to add 60 different videos all playing simultaneously, we're still not going to stop you. We won't even stop you if you want all those 60 videos to be 8K (although we won't accept liability if this melts your CPU). These are obviously extreme examples, but they lead into a couple of suggestions to keep your game performing a little better.
- Firstly (and this is the obvious one), lower resolution, lower framerate videos are much cheaper to decode. If you're only running the game in 1080p/30, there's no point whatsoever adding a video encoded at 4K/60 - and given that at any one time the videos probably occupy a pretty small area of the screen, I'd suggest you probably don't realistically need to go above about 360/480.
- Secondly, for duplicate videos that aren't attached to sequencers, we share decoders. So it should be very nearly free to add more billboards showing the same video, as long as they're not triggered as part of a sequence (in which case they get their own decoders, because we thought it best to start the video from the beginning when it gets triggered). It's adding more different videos that starts to get expensive.
All of the video decoding is done CPU-side for now (if async compute were available to us we'd grab it with both hands, but sadly it's not). So to the one complaining about how the 1060 couldn't handle all the videos, unless your CPU is a many-threaded monster (a thydra? sorry, bad pun) you could put two 1080Tis with it and it wouldn't make a difference
For people who need to convert videos, I'd steer clear of VLC for the time being, as I've seen it produce some dodgy output (watch this space, as if I find time I'll try and submit a patch for it). If you can find or build an ffmpeg executable that should do the job, otherwise feel free to take your chances with the online converters - there are more of them than I'm going to go through testing but from looking on here it seems people have found some that work.
The choice to support WebM was driven mostly by licensing concerns, rather than technical ones. WebM is a completely open container, and the spec only allows open codices for playback, so by choosing this we know nobody can suddenly burn us with an unexpected royalty bill. By the same token, I'm afraid you shouldn't expect MP4 support round the corner.
Rest assured we thought of making use of an alpha channel! That's something that's very much sitting in the "might be nice if" category rather than being a feature we're committed to adding though, so no promises. It's something with which you could do some pretty cool stuff, but it isn't something that would slot in terribly nicely with the implementation we have, so there will probably be lower-hanging cool feature fruit elsewhere!
There's better news on the rotation front - a portrait/landscape switch is very much on the cards. No timeline or firm promise, but it's on my to-do list.
For people who had videos that won't play, I don't know exactly what your problems will be, but there a couple of things that might have gone wrong.
- Firstly, just changing the extension to ".webm" is not enough. You actually have to convert the file contents - there are various posts around the forum about tools people have found to do this.
- Secondly, don't use VLC to transcode them! I'm fairly sure VLC doesn't set all of the timecodes properly in the file, so a lot of the files it produces won't play well.
- Thirdly, if you try one encoder and it doesn't work, that might be a problem with the encoder. Of course, it's perfectly possible that we've messed something up and the decoder needs patching, but it's definitely worth trying another tool to encode the video before complaining that our decoder doesn't work
Hope at least some of that helps at least some of you! Now back to work adding audio support...
IMPORTANT: Summer Update: How to use Billboards
- Thread starter Bo Marit
- Start date
Looks like you're spot on. It turns out that Photoshop > 'Save for Web' doesn't play nicely with DirectXtex, as you say the colour space is lost even though I tick 'embed colour profile'. So a workaround (when using Photoshop) is to save using the normal File > Save As then make sure the color profile box is checked in the save as dialog box. Then the colours will look better.
Last edited:
I was going to say the same thing as I tried this already...you beat me Vampiro.[big grin]
I'm really excited about the possibilities with screens! I'm also really scared! Just like any of PC customization people will go crazy with using screens and kill the performance of their game. For me personally, this is the *killer* feature I was hoping/waiting for. I think this will ultimately lead me to make "one ride parks" just to ensure my creations will run smoothly on majorty of PC's. Even with RCT3 I bounced back and forth between building entire parks and just single themed rides.
The only format that has accurate colour for me when importing as billboard is JPEG when saved via File > Save As in Photoshop and ticking colour profile box when saving. "Save for web / devices" will result in poor colours. All other image formats end up washed out and colour shifted (at least for me).
This will only be a problem for some people on some images depending on colours used and how fussy you are! I don't know how to save a colour profile with PNG, the option is not there in my version of Photoshop, so I guess I'll stick with JPEG for colour images.
On the left is the original A billboard JPEG image which is closest in colour to the original palette. The B billboard is a PNG copy of same palette, it should look the same but colours are washed out and shifted.
Last edited:
I wasn't sure if this was answered before, but are billboard pictures and videos saved with blueprints when uploaded to the steam workshop?
No. They are treated like custom audio and won't be saved due to copyright reasons.
Ah, gotcha, thanks [cool]
It's a photo I have taken some years ago.
A kind of solution, i am testing at the moment, is making the picture much darker to counter this.
Housetexture and sign in the back.
Hey guys watch this!It has billboards in it:https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...RE-WATER-FIREWORK-VIDEO-SHOW(disney-inspired)
Some technical know hows needed about the WEBM format...???
After some editing and shaping my own cool video i came across the problems of the WEBM format.
First of all, why WEBM? as all video formats go this is the most annoying because it's standard not even supported by ADOBE Programs...
We either need to convert it online (or in my case) download a plugin for adobe programs of some strange small company...
Just sayin .mp4 or .avi are rather small in size IF we get the right resolutions of the billboards (in pixels)
On Second thought the exact size in pixels woud come in handy to make our own video's anyway.
It's no use to spend hours making a 1080p video when the resolution will be like smaller as 240p...
If for any reason we can only use WEBM then it woud be really really handy to also know what the best Save/Export/Render settings are...
So far we only know VP8 = beter as VP9.
What about the method? (constant quality/bitrate or variable bitrate-> if so 1kb/s or 10000 kb/s ??? )
I know these are all really technical questions, but i just want to enjoy the best quality of my own created video's without to much performance loss or hours and hours wasted on rendering instead of playin Planet Coaster.
After some editing and shaping my own cool video i came across the problems of the WEBM format.
First of all, why WEBM? as all video formats go this is the most annoying because it's standard not even supported by ADOBE Programs...
We either need to convert it online (or in my case) download a plugin for adobe programs of some strange small company...
Just sayin .mp4 or .avi are rather small in size IF we get the right resolutions of the billboards (in pixels)
On Second thought the exact size in pixels woud come in handy to make our own video's anyway.
It's no use to spend hours making a 1080p video when the resolution will be like smaller as 240p...
If for any reason we can only use WEBM then it woud be really really handy to also know what the best Save/Export/Render settings are...
So far we only know VP8 = beter as VP9.
What about the method? (constant quality/bitrate or variable bitrate-> if so 1kb/s or 10000 kb/s ??? )
I know these are all really technical questions, but i just want to enjoy the best quality of my own created video's without to much performance loss or hours and hours wasted on rendering instead of playin Planet Coaster.
So I am having a problem. Whenever I select a video or picture from the dropdown menu, as soon as I close out of the window the video reverts back to the Chief Beef video/picture. I'm not sure why it won't stay on my selection. I haven't worked with custom images or videos so I don't know if I will have the same problem with those. Any thoughts?