Getting movies to work

from GalCiv2 Forums

Am I the only one who has problems with SR2's movies? What happens is that the sound plays fine, but the picture freezes at the first frame of each movie. When the sound has run through or I press escape, the non-movie ends and the game proceeds. Both the demo and the full version bought on TGN has the same behaviour.


I've filed a support request with the developer, but the language barrier is pretty thick. I feel they must be babelfishing to and from Russian, as their response is very confusing and does not seem coherent with my request. The patch they sent contained a small reg file that does seem coherent with my request but doesn't seem to make any difference:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\avifile\Extensions\VDO] @="{00020000-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}"


Here is the full response from support:

It is stipulated by the technical requirements that SR2: RoD can not be played with the resolution higher than 1024*768. He tried to play planetary battles in higher resolution than 1024*768: Let him check the abilities of the video adapter of his machine.

So please keep the resolution at 1024x768 for all battles.

I have checked the other settings and they seem to take quite a long time to load for one setting to another and after the battle is finished, it crashed y machine. So please keep it at that resolution. They seem to be working on a patch for the game that may fix this problem, all patch info. Will be posted on the website at a later date. Sorry for this.

ALSO:

I have spoken to the game developers, they have told me to send this patch file to you and this should fix the problem, if not then we should turn off the intro movies by editing the configuration file. The patch file will be added to this email and the instructions for editing that file will be here as well.

1) According to the information from the log-file, which you delivered to us, it is obvious that the game freezes at the Intro, 4 seconds after the game start. If it is true, in order to eliminate the error from the log-file let the user run the file from the attachment. Unzip the file and double click it. It will then ask if you are sure you want to add this to the registry and you agree. Then reboot the PC and try the game again.

2) If he doesn’t succeed with it. The Intro movies can be switched off. To make it, the user has to edit the file cfg.txt, which is located in the root folder of the game. He has to find the line

SkipVideo=False
And chngae it to the
SkipVideo=True

3,529 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
I have the same issue on 2 of my PCs, but we weren't able to reproduce it on any others. The only solution I received was to try a registry edit (which didn't help) and then disable the movies.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Yes, pretty much what support told me... Oh well, it's more than worth the measly 14$ even without the movies .
Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
what do you do to make a movie? i havent figure out how to make a bik file or do you just change the .mpeg to .bik? can some one tell me what i need to do to make a movie?
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
I'm not sure myself. I'm pretty sure you'd need a raw AVI file and, if you want to make a Bink, the Bink encoder software (which is quite expensive). Interestingly, the movies in Space Rangers 2 don't use Bink, they use some other format.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Sorry, I don't.