Animated Backgrounds

#1 Write an animatedbackground gui control..

simple really, there is a guibackground gui control, simply derive a class from that and write something to animate.

Phil.

#2 Uh...What?
I am still learning scripting could you dumb it down a bit for me?

How would you go about having an avi or gif as the animated background?

#3 anyone?

#4 Well, the control would have to be made in C++. I guess whether you use a format like AVI or GIF depends on what you need in the animation. MPEG might be more suitable as it's cross-platform.

There does already seem to be an AVIBitmapCtrl.

#5 ill look into that
thx

any other suggestions would be appreciated

#6 well you can do as phil said, but you would need to know C++

#7 I was looking at the AVIBitmapCtrl and there was a note that it was disabled.
When can I expect it to be re-enabled?

Does this function even play avi's?

#8 Seeing that noone seems to have created such a control, you will have to do the grunt work yourself.

Do as Phil said and create a new control. Then find AVI or MPEG playback code for C++ (or write it) and there you go. Animating backgrounds :)

Now, seeing you response to Phil's reply, I think we can safely asume that your C++ skills are not very good yet?
In that case you will have to either learn C++, or hope someone on here needs the control for himself, and writes it for you.

Good luck!

#9 I'd have thought that doing a streaming AVI control that was cross platform would be quite hard.

You could use something like directshow on PC, but then what about OGL support?

I'm sure there are some sources to play animations out there on the net, but I dont know what format they would take, best bet would be to try and resurrect the AVI background control.

Maybe someone can lookit and see how much has been taken out?

Phil.

#10 Maybe something similar to the .ROQ files used by Quake 3 or the .CIN files used by Quake 2. I think they were nothing more than a file of sequential .BMP files. Inefficient as a movie codec, but we're not talking about an hour long film here. I think they even had Adobe Premiere plugins for it at one point. As for AVI, I think the original AVI standard was similar - nothing but assembled frames. All the recent codec variants (i.e., DivX) deviate from this but the initial AVI concept was for simple, uncompressed movies.

Schnapple

#11 Torque already supports avi's & mpg's. Remember Tribes2 has an intro cinematic. However in the guiAviBitmapCtrl.cc, there is a comment that it was disabled because when GG removed the Intelectual Property(tm), they removed the audio libs, and thus audio streaming. As far as I know, audio streaming just needs to be re-implemented.


deRost

#12 Has anyone tried to get an AVI playing without sound?

#13 Is anyone using any opening cinematics in there project? If so, how are you going about this?

Thanks,
Mike

#14 BUMP

#15 I thought that Smacker Technologie's format was cross platform, but it does have to be licensed.

#16 bump again

#17 A few ideas:

Didn't id release the source for the ROQ encoder? What's the license on that?

There are open source MPEG-1 encoders and decoders.

Quicktime runs on all the Torque-supported platforms.

AVIs should be cross-platform as long as you stick to a portable codec.

www.csse.monash.edu.au/~timf/videocodec.html
Tim Ferguson's video codec page has ROQ stuff, including source for a decoder.

edit: Why does the url tag never work properly for me when I specify link text?