Editing cutscenes

This page is about adding new cutscenes to the games. The cutscenes are either videos that play at 2D events or fullscreen videos like intro, outro and such.

Smacker Video is used by the engine to display video files, the video files should be encoded properly before they can be played in-game with Smacker tool which is a part of RAD Video Tools today. The process is slightly easier if you want to make new cutscenes only for patched version (will not be compatible with base GOG version)

Vanilla

Prerequisites

Prior to doing anything you will need:

1. Smacker of version 3.1n (Vanilla) / 3.1s (Mok's patch), something prior to it should probably work as well. Download: Smacker (3.1 g - 11/5/97)
2. Something that can run Win95 applications (virtual machine / Linux Wine)

More about compatibility between RAD Video versions

It may be not very easy to find the old versions of RadVideoTools today. However some people do keep these things on FTP servers.

As you may have noticed 3.1g was released a bit earlier than the ones used to encode videos for M&MVI, but that's okay.

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Preparing the video before encoding

1. Make sure the video is of proper resolution if you are encoding cutscenes for 2D events. For example the video should be 460x344, encoding in higher resolution will not break anything, the video will be just cut off where it starts clipping. The engine is not trying to fill the window.
2. The audio should be in 8 bit .WAV format (that is not clear yet if you have to convert audio separately if not mixing audio with Smacker tool).
3. GrayFace recommendation: save video as lossless H264 and audio track inside it as 16-bit PCM (that's basically .WAV) using .AVI extension. Surprisingly, Smacker doesn't seem to have problems then. Choose minimal compression, because the output would be of the same size as lossless original video anyway. Tested with Smacker 3.0g.

Converting the video to lossless AVI

One of the supported video formats is uncompressed AVI. To convert video to it FFMpeg can be used. The following command will output the proper file:

 ffmpeg -i <input-filename> -f avi -c:v rawvideo -pix_fmt bgr24 output.avi

Encoding

Once installed run SMACKERW.exe and you will be brought to the main menu of the tool.

The main menu of Smacker Tool

Using "Smack" tab encode the video, make sure to tick the checkbox at the audio tab if you want to process audio and video at the same time, set the output sound quality to 8 bit as well.

If you've got the audio and video separately, encode the video with "Smack" tab first, then use the "Mixer" tab to combine the audio (8 bit .WAV) and video (.SMK). There is a built-in player which makes it easy to check if the encoded video looks correctly.

After that you will get a new .SMK file which you can add to the game with MMArchive.

Patched

The patched version will not crash if the video is not encoded by the matching version, the limitations are not clear yet. So to encode a new cutscene for the patched version of the game you can just grab the latest version of RAD Video Tools. The encoding process and requirements are the same.

Some info about the original files

• The audio playback rate of the original files is 22,050hz
• The framerate is either 6 or 10 frames per second (at least for M&M VI and it doesn't mean that you can't have more)