Topic: How do I do this?

I have made many an interactive CD using Flash and Flashjestor tools. My resume is even an interactive, autorun CD.

But now I am ready to explore new horizons.

I have seem many games that have a movie "into" to their menu. I am pretty sure this is done with some sort of 3d program (Max, lightwave, etc.)

My question is how do they pull this off.

I am quite certain that they dont embed their movie into flash.

if you can point me in the right direction, that would be great.

"have a movie 'into' to their menu"

I don't understand this.

If this answers your question, Macromedia Director is able to do 3D animation.

woops misspelling

an "intro movie"

usually when you pop a game into a CD player, (PC game) it'll fire off some movie... then when the movie is done playing, there is usually a menu. Like exit, load, options, etc.

I am trying to find out how this is done. How do they get a movie to play at a specific size (sometime its full screen) and then over lay a menu that actually works.

I could just as easliy import an AVI into flash and run it from there... but flash will compress the heck out of it and I'll lose detail and stuff.

I hope that helps to clear things up.

Oooooh. I see.

Thinking of your PC game example, and assuming the other instances are similar, those animations are usually prerendered and displayed as an avi, as you guessed.

Using a large prerendered animation on the internet is usually out of the question (unless you're sure 100% of your audience has an *extremely* fast connection speed). On a CD rom, though, it should be possible.

The easiest way to do it would, in fact, be to just put it into your flash file. There should be a way to specify how much it is compressed, if at all (personally, I'd do the compression beforehand with some sort of codec and then try to keep flash from compressing it at all).

That's about all I can tell you; I don't have that much experience with flash, really.

ok, but I am trying to NOT use flash this time around... plus maybe I'll learn something new.

I am beginning to think that the movie is called from the program language that they are using... ( C+ maybe?? )

example: I purchased the new game "Morrowind"
When I click on the icon on the desktop to play it, a menu comes up, I choose play. It then will play a movie.... the name of the company fades in and blurrs a bit.. then it goes to a real fancy "ancient looking interface" and the name of the game fades in and twinkels a bit, then a menu appears.

The movie that is played is a .bik file. I do have a utility that can convert .bik to avi, etc and visa versa.

But the movie has interaction (the menu) and the quality is "movie quality" If I were to do this in flash, the quality would just not be there... even if I set the compression to the lowest setting. Also, you never now what screen res a viewer is running, which would really destroy the look/feel of a movie, unless it was all vector based.

So.. my guess is that the movie(s) are made in a good 3d program and rendered to a specific format. and then when the game is compiled, the code will call the movie and play it. Using the same code, they can generate a menu to "overlay" on the movie. This is my guess, I have no knowledge of c= or any gaming code, so I dont know if you can even "overlay" a menu.

I am going to keep look though... If I find something, I'll post it

its probably an autorun.exe. a compiled binary program that plays the movie first using a media player and then launch the flash.
you can do this in C++, Delphi, VisualBasic or whatever.