Second Realipony - Downloads

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:

Requirements

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:

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.