Game Cinematics

Hi,

the engine doesn't have a integrated feature for reading video.

But you can use a 3rdparty library, like libtheora (to read ogg theora video) : http://www.theora.org/
I did it for a project some years ago, unfortunately I don't have the code anymore.

You read the stream and send the result to a texture using MRenderingContext

Or using FFMpeg maybe, but I never tried : http://ffmpeg.org/

If you decided this is a task you want to take on, use OpenCV instead of LibTheora or FFMPEG. Because ...

1. OpenCV already uses those librarys for video playback
2. Getting OpenCV to play video on  texture is only a couple lines of code.
3. You get the added benefit of its builtin motion tracking, in a first person type game this feature could be used
to actualy look round a corner by slightly tilting and turning your head. Or controling a game in the sameway as Kinetic.

It would probable take 5min to get this feature implemented in the Maratis Engine and an hour for the Lua bindings. I could do it but everytime I even breath on those scon's build scripts they blow up in my face.

Last edited by zester (2013-01-11 18:46:01)

I have nothing to offer in the way of scons but for C/C++ and Lua this might help give you a better understand on how to tie C and Lua

http://code.google.com/p/zester/wiki/Lua_C

Scripting in Lua is very simular to Javascript except lighter and faster unless your comparing lua's speed and ease of use to Qt5 and the V8 Javascript Engine in that case Qt5/V8 win hands down.

Last edited by zester (2013-01-11 19:18:09)

The down side of liboggplayer is the GPL license, it's not a huge problem but it's not the best in case of commercial game,
I think theora is more permissive, but I checked it long ago.

I found this just now: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libtheoraplayer/

It has a BSD license. Will that be more permissive for commercial purposes, Anael?

EDIT:

More info here: http://libtheoraplayer.cateia.com/wiki/ … =Main_Page

Sample class here: http://libtheoraplayer.cateia.com/wiki/ … e=Tutorial

Last edited by sunnystormy (2014-01-29 18:50:30)

Hey, Anael. Glad you like it!

Is there a way of being able to manually map the texture of a game object through the engine's Lua interface? Please let me know.

Last edited by sunnystormy (2014-02-09 03:46:47)

Hi, sorry I missed this post.

First, here's how you will send the video data to a texture in C++ :

MEngine * engine = MEngine::getInstance();
MSystemContext * system = engine->getSystemContext();
MRenderingContext * render = engine->getRenderingContext();
MLevel * level = engine->getLevel();

// get a texture reference that will receive the video stream
char globalFilename[256];
getGlobalFilename(globalFilename, system->getWorkingDirectory(), name); // "name" if a local path like "maps/dummy.png"
MTextureRef * texture = level->loadTexture(globalFilename, 0, 0);

// send the video clip data to the texture
TheoraVideoFrame * f = clip->getNextFrame();
if(f)
{
    unsigned int textureId = texture->getTextureId();
    if(textureId == 0)
    {
        render->createTexture(&textureId);
        texture->setTextureId(textureId);
    }

    render->bindTexture(textureId);
    render->setTextureFilterMode(M_TEX_FILTER_LINEAR, M_TEX_FILTER_LINEAR);
    render->setTextureUWrapMode(M_WRAP_CLAMP);
    render->setTextureVWrapMode(M_WRAP_CLAMP);
    render->texImage(0, clip->getWidth(), clip->getHeight(), M_UBYTE, M_RGB, f->getBuffer());
}

For the sound I need to check, try to do that first and get back to me.