I’ll be damned, it worked! I managed to stick an AVI into the game and have it play on a texture. Turns out it wasn’t so tough. A raw AVI is a pretty straightforward file format, very well documented on MSDN. It’s basically just a bunch of BGR values with some location markers. Turning them into a handful of static textures is trivial. Then you just have to update the timer and pick the right frame.

I also created an animation in Blender. It’s pretty silly, some white rings and flashes and spinning bars. But when you throw it in the game it’s alright. Well, it’s not great, but at least there’s something to let you know it’s warping. It’s much better then the old system, which was just a hard cut to black.

Not sure what to add next. Back to play testing.