Movies?

[Trumgottist]

What happens if the computer stalls? SLUDGE doesn't drop frames, which would mean video and audio will be out of sync.

Yes, as BigMc pointed out earlier, this is something that must be considered.

Maybe it's worth it to also check out that new codec Google is building. Just a suggestion. Maybe it's better/easier to implement/???...

Did you read my post? WebM is the new codec from Google (well, technically VP8 is the codec, but it's part of WebM), and that is the format I'm proposing to be supported by SLUDGE.

It would be nice if there's a way to play a movie in the background, meaning the game continues to run, and a way to halt the game until the movie has finished (or skipped). (OnMovieStopped event?)

What I suggested would mean that the movie runs in the same way as an animation. The engine would not be placed in a special state, so you're still in control. If you want to pause the game while the movie is playing, you can always use pause(). (Possibly in combination with calling freeze() before starting the movie.)

This way, you could play a movie full screen as a cut scene (and set up mouse clicks and key presses to skip the movie). Or you could play it in the background with the game going on at the same time… The idea is to make it flexible to use.

[Erwin_Br]

Oh, sorry. I only read the quote in your first post.  Cool. I've read positive things about WebM.

Okay, I see your point. Pausing the game is a perfectly acceptable way to go. No need for a specific event.

Is it possible to have SLUDGE drop frames only when playing a movie? Hmm, and if so, is that desirable, I wonder. Maybe we need to look at this broader. Is it possible to have SLUDGE drop frames in general? If so, it might be an idea to have an option in the project preferences to let the developer decide what to do with slow performance. A "drop frames" checkbox? I've seen this implemented in other software as well, but I don't remember which.

[xenogia]

What I suggested would mean that the movie runs in the same way as an animation. The engine would not be placed in a special state, so you're still in control. If you want to pause the game while the movie is playing, you can always use pause(). (Possibly in combination with calling freeze() before starting the movie.)

The Wintermute engine does something very similar with videos.  They call me entities within a scene.  So they are fully controllable, this is definitely the route I would take with FMV.

[Trumgottist]

Is it possible to have SLUDGE drop frames only when playing a movie? Hmm, and if so, is that desirable, I wonder.

Dropping frames from a movie should be possible.

Maybe we need to look at this broader. Is it possible to have SLUDGE drop frames in general?

That should also be possible. Desirable? My intuition says no (because of the way logic and display is tied together), but it is worth thinking about.

The Wintermute engine does something very similar with videos.  They call me entities within a scene.  So they are fully controllable, this is definitely the route I would take with FMV.

I probably ought to take a closer look at WME.

[xenogia]

I look forward to seeing what you come up with?

There a lot of FMV sections in my game.  Well as you can see from the screenshots, a lot is FMV. Haha

[Trumgottist]

I have now looked briefly at WME. The big difference between SLUDGE and WME here is that SLUDGE is designed to run at a fixed fps, which WME is not. This makes movie playback more straightforward in WME. Changing this in SLUDGE while maintaining backwards compatibility would be tricky.

The easiest solution to adding movie playback is to only add it for full-window playback. That'd make it useable for cutscenes but nothing else. It'd be easier because then movie playback wouldn't have to interact with the rest of the engine. Frames per second wouldn't have to match that of the game, and synchronising audio wouldn't be a problem.

The downside to taking the easy way out is that this is a very inflexible solution. You wouldn't be able to use the video playback as part of the normal gameplay.

I'm not saying that my previous proposal is too tricky to pull off, but I'm proposing this alternative to get some reactions. What do you think?

[BigMc]

If we would go for the complicated approach, would it be possible to have transparency in a movie? Otherwise it would be usable as an animated backdrop, but not much else, right?

[Erwin_Br]

I lean towards the easy way out, because it allows for a clear distinction: Use sprites for in-game animation. Use movies for intro's/cut-scenes.

Using transparency in movies sounds very unconventional, but I might be wrong. And the lack of transparency is a reason why most animations would be created using sprites, I think.

[xenogia]

I guess you could use the simple way, I'd just to have make in-game fmv's which are very small anyway as a certain amount of pngs.

[kjp]

Is my proposed implementation of movie playing good and useable? Maybe you have a better idea?

I think this is a brilliant idea.
I'm currently looking into creating a game with SLUDGE, and having Movies would be awesome.

[Trumgottist]

If we would go for the complicated approach, would it be possible to have transparency in a movie?

I don't think so. But WME does have the ability to add a mask to a movie, so that it can get a shape, so doing something like that would be possible.

--

Unless something unexpected happens, movie support will be in SLUDGE 2.1, which should be the next version. There's no estimated timeline on when this is going to happen, but it is going to be my main focus with SLUDGE from now on. (Unless a bug is found.)

Unless someone has an objection, I'll go with what I above described as the easy way.

[BigMc]

Please let me know when you contemplate a specific library to use.

[Trumgottist]

Besides commercial libs, are there any alternatives to the official one? I haven't found one.

[BigMc]

There are two free implementations of the decoder: the official one (libvpx) and the one from FFmpeg (ffvp8).

EDIT: I also don't know if one better uses the decoder directly or if there's some higher-level library to make it more convenient.

[Trumgottist]

Raeding about it, ffvp8 seems like a good alternative. (I haven't looked at how it's used yet, though.)