Animation solution?

[NigeC]

possible animation solution?

theres a flash open source player that's cross platform and can be used within applications.. the possibilities could be endless
http://www.gnashdev.org/

[Urs Holzer]

NigeC wrote:
> possible animation solution?
>
> theres a flash open source player that's cross platform and can be
> used within applications.. the possibilities could be endless
> http://www.gnashdev.org/

I wonder what Christian thinks about this. I also thought that one could
embed Mozilla's rendering engine. Doing that, one could for example
easily create in-game books (like the ones we know from Myst) with
advanced formatting capabilities. This would eliminate the need to
convert everything to images (which can be especially problematic when
you want to translate the game into different languages).

But as good as these ideas sound, I am sure they are extremely
problematic. For example they would complicate the building process of
Pipmak.


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[NigeC]

Flash is really light weight, you could call timeline events, alpha blending etc
BUT  I'm not a engine coder so i can only imagine how hard the task would be to implement such a thing, and like you say it would complicate things even more

[Christian Walther]

Urs Holzer wrote:
> NigeC wrote:
>> possible animation solution?
>>
>> theres a flash open source player that's cross platform and can be
>> used within applications.. the possibilities could be endless
>> http://www.gnashdev.org/
>
> I wonder what Christian thinks about this.

Uhm, I'm sorry. I just forgot about it.

I have briefly looked at the web site, but I don't see anything about
the embeddability you're speaking of. All I see mentioned is a web
browser plugin and a standalone player application.

I have to say, I don't particularly like the idea. For one thing,
wouldn't it introduce a lot of redundancy? Everything that Pipmak does,
Flash does too (and a whole lot more). It would make for a somewhat
schizophrenic interface from the point of view of users. For every
aspect of the project, they would have to decide, "am I going to do this
on the Pipmak side or on the Flash side?" Given the current state of
Pipmak in capabilities and ease of authoring (but knowing nothing about
Flash authoring), I would assume that the answer would often be "Flash",
at which point you'd have to ask yourself why you're using Pipmak at all
and not doing your project entirely in Flash.

We'd have to define and implement some interface between Lua and Flash.
I have no idea what that would look like, since I'm not familiar with Flash.

Also, I'm not sure what the exact problem is that you're proposing this
as a solution for. Movie playback? Surely integrating a Flash player is
at least as much work as integrating a movie decoder.

> I also thought that one could
> embed Mozilla's rendering engine. Doing that, one could for example
> easily create in-game books (like the ones we know from Myst) with
> advanced formatting capabilities. This would eliminate the need to
> convert everything to images (which can be especially problematic when
> you want to translate the game into different languages).

Oh dear. Can you check how far you get with the text support in 0.2.7
first? :) I could imagine that it might be useful to use something like
Pango, but a whole HTML renderer? That sounds like a pretty daunting
task. (Maybe it isn't, I'm not familiar with Gecko and how to embed it
in applications, but that's just my gut feeling.) Also, what is the
output of Gecko? I would assume it isn't a bitmap that could be directly
used as an OpenGL texture in Pipmak, but a stream of drawing commands
for the underlying platform's graphics API. That means you'd have to do
the last step yourself, somehow.

  -Christian


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[Urs Holzer]

Christian Walther wrote:

> Urs Holzer wrote:
>> NigeC wrote:
>>> possible animation solution?
>>>
>>> theres a flash open source player that's cross platform and can be
>>> used within applications.. the possibilities could be endless
>>> http://www.gnashdev.org/
>>
>> I wonder what Christian thinks about this.
>
> [...]

> I have to say, I don't particularly like the idea. [...]

I vote for using a simple movie decoder. In addition to Christians
reasons, I add the following one:
It should be easy for the user to create animations. He should be able
to do that with the software he wants to use. (I don't know how many
applications can produce flash animations, however I am sure most of
the video editing software can not do that.)

>> I also thought that one could
>> embed Mozilla's rendering engine. Doing that, one could for example
>> easily create in-game books (like the ones we know from Myst) with
>> advanced formatting capabilities. This would eliminate the need to
>> convert everything to images (which can be especially problematic
>> when you want to translate the game into different languages).
>
> Oh dear. Can you check how far you get with the text support in 0.2.7
> first? :) I could imagine that it might be useful to use something
> like Pango, but a whole HTML renderer? That sounds like a pretty
> daunting task. (Maybe it isn't, I'm not familiar with Gecko and how to
> embed it in applications, but that's just my gut feeling.) Also, what
> is the output of Gecko? I would assume it isn't a bitmap that could be
> directly used as an OpenGL texture in Pipmak, but a stream of drawing
> commands for the underlying platform's graphics API. That means you'd
> have to do the last step yourself, somehow.

I accidentally found http://www.ubrowser.com/
But to be honest, I really don't need such a feature. ;-)



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[Christian Walther]

Urs Holzer wrote:
> I accidentally found http://www.ubrowser.com/

Oh, that looks interesting. Thanks for the pointer! I'll have a look at
this when there's a Mac OS X version.

  -Christian


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[NigeC]

Most of the Flash cubic systems i've seen have been geared towards virtual tours, and aren't as smooth and refined as Pipmak is, a lot of Flash AS3 apps rarely run from the desktop without some user permissions being set so the player will actually be allowed access and online you'd be dealing ith loads that hardly make a game linear
there is free software that does flash animation, and if there was a way for Pipmak to call timeline actions it would be quite useful