WC3 Movie Viewer

wc3movie.zip
Creator	Lars Hederer
Download	Download
Filesize	220 kB

May not work with the Kilrathi Saga edition of Wing Commander III.

Archive Contents

• DOS4GW.EXE
• MERGEMVE.EXE
• MVEUTIL.TXT
• PLAYMVE.EXE
• PLAYMVE.INI
• SPLITMVE.EXE
• TRE2LIST.EXE
• TREX.EXE

MVEUTIL.TXT

Wing Commander 3 Movie Utilities
--------------------------------

Written 1998 by Lars Hederer
eMail: lars.hederer@t-online.de

This will provide you with basic functions for extracting and viewing
Wing Commander 3 movies outside the game.

I wrote this mainly for my own purposes and it worked for me, so I'm
not going to put further work into this. I just want to make these
utilities available to the public because AFAIK there are no other
utilities for extracting WC3 movies.

However, comments are welcomed, and if you can't get it to work at all,
feel free to email me--I'll try my best to help you.

Contained within this archive are the following programs:
TREX, PLAYMVE, SPLITMVE, MERGEMVE

Run them without command line switches to see the syntax.

TREX is used to extract .MVE (movie) files from the WC3 .TRE files
contained on the CDROM's.

PLAYMVE can be used to play .MVE files from your hard disk. You have
to edit PLAYMVE.INI before you use it and specify your WC3 hard drive
directory (usually C:\wc3) and your CDROM drive letter. What PLAYMVE
simply does is create a file CD1MOVIE.TRE in your WC3 directory which
contains the specified movie file, then it runs wc3.exe from CDROM.
The new CD1MOVIE.TRE will be played instead of the Origin "We create
worlds" movie. (Since there is no movie player for WC3 out the only
way to see the movies is to use the WC3 engine itself). I'm not sure
but I think you need to have WC3 CD 1 in drive for this to work.
If you have a Windows version of the executable, it should work as
well--simply let PLAYMVE finish creating the CD1MOVIE.TRE file, then
run Wing Commander 3 manually.
Note that you will not be able to see all "branches" of the specified
.MVE file unless you split it into its parts and merge these parts
together again--see below.

SPLITMVE is used to split a freshly extracted .MVE file into all its
parts. Often, several movie sequences are stored in one .MVE file, and
therefore these files contain "indexes" which tell the game where to
jump in the file if a specific sequence is requested. However, this
also means that using PLAYMVE only the first branch of each movie will
be played, since the Origin logo sequence which gets replaced by the
new movie only consists of one part. SPLITMVE will take an .MVE file,
extract every shot (!) to a single file, and these files can then be
re-merged together via MERGEMVE. All indexes are being removed by
this procedure, so you can actually view the complete movie file.

MERGEMVE combines several .MVE files into one big .MVE file. Input
files should be .MVE files that only contain ONE shot each (as those
generated by SPLITMVE), else it won't work.