Playing Intro/Loading Video

[zarch 587p]

Hi guys,

A quick search on the forums hasn’t shown anything useful/recent on the subject of intro/loading videos.

Essentially once peoplepress ok on the settings screen then while the game is loading it should play back a video. Once the game has loaded any key/mouse/whatever should then skip the rest of the video.

In Android there is no settings screen so it should go straight to the video while the app loads.

Has anyone done anything like this or even made a start on it? It’s a very common feature of games so something people will expect…

Thanks,
Z

[wezrule 619p]

At the moment there’s no simple way of doing it. Monolo_fan did release something, but it has no audio and he said it still needs a lot of development, so I wouldn’t expect anything easily useable in the near future, unless you want to do it yourself and then share it after <3

[iwgeric 203p]

In Android, there is a splash screen that can appear so that the user has something to look at until the app is loaded. It goes away automatically on the first update loop. No video though.

[oxplay2 158p]

so many people ask about video player…

maybe you will find something interesting here:
http://jmonkeyengine.org/groups/user-code-projects/forum/topic/video-rendering-system-for-jmonkeyengine/

if not, only wait for JME solution or make one yourself.

[zarch 587p]

Ugh, I’ve been doing some reading around and the java-video-playback situation is really horrifically messy!

It’s almost easier just to point a web browser at youtube and stream the video from there!

[zarch 587p]

Hmm, this thread seems interesting: http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/java-media-player/27100/view.html

[oxplay2 158p]

have you tried it?

[kwando 211p]

@zarch said:
Hmm, this thread seems interesting: http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/java-media-player/27100/view.html

Yeah, there is some interresting information there

[nehon 1243p]

mhhh this lib just looks like exactly what we need.
@Momoko_Fan please read the linked thread and consider this approach.

[zarch 587p]

Read through the thread it looks like “all” that would be needed is to grab YUNPM (they go through quite a few iterations in the thread and the most recent looks like it gives decent performance from what they are saying) and insert it into the correct place in the rendering system.

Assuming the proof of concept works we would also need to do a compile of ffmpeg without the problem codecs for each target platform and put the correct DLLs in the SDK for distribution along with the attribution/source stuff to comply with LGPL.

I don’t see a problem with restricting games developers to one or two open source codecs so we can avoid all the patent/etc problems that come with certain codecs. If a developer can’t cope with encoding their videos into a known format then they aren’t going to get very far anyway…

[nehon 1243p]

mhhh… not sure about the patent thing though
http://ffmpeg.org/legal.html
if you skip to the last question of the FAQ it’s pretty clear there are patent issue with the codec algorithm and not only with the content…

Apart from that i tested the bundled executable and it works fine…
Looks like it would be pretty straight forward to include it into the renderer.

But this license thing has to be sorted out before..

[zarch 587p]

According to the YUNPM thread (I’ve not confirmed this myself) ffmpeg comes bundled with a bunch of codecs, however if you build it yourself you can choose what codecs to include.

If you ditch all the patent encumbered ones (for example just use Theora) there are no known patent issues. The reason no-one will give a definitive answer though is the risk that someone is sitting on a submarine patent and waiting for Theora to become big before starting to sue.

…because software patents “encourage innovation” don’t you know…

So that’s why I said about building ffmpeg ourselves for each target platform and including the dll in the SDK.

TBH I don’t see a problem with restricting developers to a certain codec. If people can manage to make a video they can manage to transcode it and 99.9% of games will only be rendering out known and included video clips anyway.

[zzuegg 122p]

Just for a idea since in only read quickly trough this, it would be probably a good thing if the whole video rendering stuff would be something like render to textures, since that would allow to add videos easily as game content too, not only for an fullscreen intro.

Maybe even the ImagePainter is fast enough….

just a few cents

[nehon 1243p]

Yep, I agree.
Also we could somehow bundle an encoder for this particular format with the SDK.
@normen what do you think?

EDIT : this was meant to answer Zarch

[nehon 1243p]

@zzueg, actually it already has the capability to render to texture.

[Author]

Posts