Beyond MP3? Alernative media and a rant about Powerpoint.

[Brand_X]

Has anyone tried making hypno/brainwashing files in any other media than MP3?

I experimented with PowerPoint which allows me to mix audio, pictures and video, and it ought to be fantastic... but as always with Microsoft, there is a fly in the ointment, and not just a little fruit fly; no this is more like a freaking Chinese Dobson fly.

PowerPoint is very, very easy to use - really quite beautifully simple - once you've got the hang of it (a couple of hours is all it takes) and in theory even a novice should be able to make actual GAMES with PowerPoint. But no, for some insane reason Microsoft decided that even in "Kiosk Mode" the option to pause and skip slides would remain. I can't begin to tell you how frustrating and buffoonishly stupid this is: because pressing the space bar skips through the slideshow, you CAN'T turn a PowerPoint presentation into a game. It does not work. At all. What were they thinking?

And secondly, there is an equally stupid flaw that automatically turns off audio when you want to add a sound effect. For example, say you want a button to make a "click" sound or add an vocal comment when a button is pressed; you can do that, but the background music will stop. I did find a partial workaround, but the original problem of the user being able to control the slideshow causes the audio to go out of sync.

Finally, the file size tends to be very large for no good reason (around 100MBs for a file with 30MBs of content) and is incompatible with 90% of other Windows user's computers. Crazy. If I uploaded my Powerpoint game, it won't run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 8, any version running 32-bit or any computer running a different version of PowerPoint. It only has a chance of working if your computer doesn't have PowerPoint installed.


PowerPoint would be awesome for making hypno games if it weren't for these appalling bugs. Does anyone know of an alternative program that doesn't suffer these kind of problems? Preferably one that is EASY to use.

[ParanoidLord]

Not a final suggestion, but you might want to experiment with Powerpoint-like software such as LibreOffice Impress - they may or may not have similar limitations; I'm not sure since I haven't tried to use Impress for anything but straight up power points, though. Perhaps working through something like Flash or Javascript would give you the power you need to set up elaborate, cross-platform hypnoprograms, but those would both require some significant programming knowledge.

[dark_wolf49]

Have you ever tried "Open Office " ?? It's free. Just google it. It is like Powerpoint.

[Brand_X]

I think I might have found what I was looking for, and it's a program I had downloaded three times before but never really did anything with. The picture resizing is a bit awkward, but all the features I need seem to be there. Looking promising.

http://www.adventuremaker.com/