Monday, October 18, 2010

Implementation Log 3: Time Management

Since our goal is to play four movies simultaneously, also, at some points mysterious scenes will take over the whole screen, there are some time management issues I have to deal with.

The basic timeline is like this:
menu screen -> mysterious event 1 -> first part of the movies -> mysterious event 2 -> second part of the movies -> mysterious event 3 -> third part of the movies -> mysterious event 4 -> mysterious event 1 -> so on

As you can see, with the only exception of menu, which will only show up once, all the rest will play in such order repeatedly. To provide the feeling of tension, it is best to minimize the loading time so that the transition will be short. Therefore, preloading the videos is necessary. Also, timer is required to make sure that the right videos are playing at the right moment.