Video files
SecondRealipony.full.mp4
Here is the mega 1280 x 720p HD version. This is encoded in H.264 at 60 fps with a high bitrate, so be warned that it requires a strong computer to play! This may not work well on older machines or laptops or tablets, which may stutter or lose audio sync.
SecondRealipony.lite.mp4
This version is cut to half the resolution and bitrate, but still looks pretty good. Use this for playback on more modest devices like laptops and iPad.
Executable version
SecondRealipony.zip
This is a compiled executable version. Very beta at the moment! Download and unzip it. There is no installer.
Version 0.3 posted 16 August 2013 with the following improvements:
- Changed audio system to Windows Media Player instead of XNA's laggy MediaPlayer
- Added icon for the program file
- Escape key exits program
- Added resolution support via the command line
Requirements
- Microsoft Windows. Tested on XP Service Pack 3, should work on Vista and 7 and 8.
- Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 4.0
- Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
- Up to 1 GB RAM available
- 1280 x 720 resolution in windowed mode, unless specified otherwise on the command line
Known issues
The music may glitch slightly at the start of each scene. This is the program resetting the current audio position to keep it in sync.
On some machines, the prerendered 3d video scene does not play correctly, showing only the bottom half of the video. This is a known issue caused by Microsoft. The temporary fix is to uninstall Microsoft hotfix update KB2803821 until Microsoft releases a permanent fix.
Command line
You can specify window size by width and height on the command line. Example: SecondRealipony.exe 1920 1080
Use 16:9 aspect ratio for best results. It will work in other aspects but some of the graphics will be stretched or otherwise not look right.
If the specified height is equal to your screen height, the program will subtract a small amount to account for the size of the title bar. The program does not run fullscreen, because XNA does not seem to report correct timing info when in fullscreen mode.
Second Realipony accepts a string on the command line to specify a list of particular scenes. This can be used for testing or troubleshooting or just to watch a favorite scene. Each scene is represented by a single lowercase letter:
- a - Introduction
- b - Title screen
- c - Twilight Sparkle and the bouncing bookahedron
- d - Rarity and the gems dot tunnel
- e - Vinyl Scratch and the interference moire lines
- f - "Get Down"
- g - Rainbow Dash and the rainbow techno light show
- h - Shining Armor picture
- i - Fluttershy and the text scroller
- j - Applejack and the apple lens and rotozoomer
- k - Cutie Mark Crusaders and the plasma
- l - Cutie marks animated on the cube
- m - Pinkie Pie with party cannon and the vector bobs
- n - Derpy Hooves and the reflective raytracing
- o - Wonderbolts and the waves
- p - Princess Celestia bouncing picture
- q - Beginning of city world scene (fade to white)
- r - City world virtual reality scene (prerendered video)
- s - Special Thanks picture
- t - Credits
- u - End scroller
Thus, running SecondRealipony.exe dggr would run only the scenes with Twilight, Rainbow Dash (twice), and the city world.
Frequently asked question: Is the rendering realtime?
Answer: Mostly but not all.
All the scenes can run in realtime, though not always at 60 fps. My computer is a Wolfdale Core 2 Duo E6500 with Radeon 6670. Most scenes run at 60 fps on it. A few scenes reach between 15-30 fps in realtime, which are the Cutie Mark Crusaders plasma, Derpy raytracing, and Wonderbolts landscape. They all could easily be elevated to 60 fps by reducing the vertex counts or by moving my CPU-bound logic into HLSL on the GPU.
The video captures above are at 60 fps. They are produced directly by the code, rendering all the scenes at animation intervals of 1/60 second, running slower than realtime if necessary. Each frame is saved as a screenshot to PNG, then FFmpeg encodes the image sequence into a video at 60 fps. So the video captures are equal to the realtime rendering for most scenes and slightly better for the few slow ones.
The exception to all of the above is the city VR world at the end. That scene is rendered from Source Filmmaker and is not realtime at all. The executable binary will only be able to include this scene as prerendered video.