Game Development Community

Flash .swf and .avi files from inside Torque

by Earle Lane · in Torque Game Engine · 12/06/2004 (10:13 am) · 5 replies

Is it possible to run a Flash.swf movie from inside torque then bounce back to the Torque files? What about .avi cut scenes?

#1
12/06/2004 (10:21 am)
There is an AVI resource but it is Windows only
#2
12/06/2004 (10:51 am)
Both these are possible but it will require some additions to the Gui system for shockwave files, and fixes and a movie library for the AVI gui fixes.

For shockwave I recommend this. It is called gameswf. Should be fairly simple to get this linked up into torque and working with a specially written Gui control.
#3
01/14/2005 (3:15 pm)
This might be a bit old, and I'll guess I'll revieve it, but the question about flash seemed to be answered but the .avi answer was never fully revealed. Can someone expand on the answer for running .avi in the TGE.

Thanks

radhat
#4
01/14/2005 (4:13 pm)
Movie support works fine on windows platforms. Just a little tweaking of the defines in guiAviBitmapCtrl is all that is needed to get that up and running, I believe that is it for windows. However to get it working on linux and mac is another story altogether.

However, there is a reference to a header "smpeg", which belongs to the SDL MPEG Player Library, see here. This solves the linux issue.

Now icculus reports that this library runs on "just about any platform" but the problem is it interfaces with SDL directly, therefore it is not a good solution for use on Windows or Mac platforms since Torque does not use the SDL for either of those.
#5
01/14/2005 (4:50 pm)
Loki bit the dust many moons ago, now. That website is... "fairly" out of date.

The official [but limited scope] webpage for smpeg is here: icculus.org/smpeg/. You want the CVS version.

It renders to an SDL surface, and is excellent for the purpose, if that suits you. Initialising SDL just enough to get you an in-memory surface is pretty trivial on any platform, and shouldn't tread on the feet of anything else you're doing [eg directx], if you don't try to intialise a display or an audio device.

Personally, I've been using ffmpeg recently, from ffmpeg.sf.net. I've been creating mpegs with it [mostly], but you can use it to decode movies of pretty much any type that it understands at the time. It's LGPL [translation: torque-safe, with caveats].

How well it works in windows, I don't know. But for linux, it creates pretty decent MPEGS [I've not tweaked anything at all, and got this out: icculus.org/jugglemaster/mpeg]

Adding ffmpeg support in certain places to torque is on my blue-sky todo list, but don't hold your breath.

Gary (-;

EDIT: Fixed daft tpyos