is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoom?

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bimshwel
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is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoom?

Post by bimshwel »

literally I would like to display a flash video within the game in some manner. I suppose avi would theoretically suffice but that would be impractical for online sharing, I imagine. Do you know if it can be done?

a long time ago I had an elaborate idea for an introductory series of scripts but I could never get the objects and cameras to do what I wanted because I am bloody awful at code-writing and that will never change. Eventually out of a need to express the idea I made a scrappy cartoon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhqA8iKSd1A and while that temporarily got me past the need to communicate that in doom form, inevitably I returned to the stuff apart from that, and thought it would be neat if instead of fixing the broken introductory level i just showed the (eminently fixable) cartoon instead. My estimation is that if I got anybody to download and run my wad junk, approximately nobody would start a game, see a message like "look up my youtube page to see the intro!" and then actually do that. But then what little sense the remaining content makes hinges to some degree on awareness of the airplane sequence. The number of frames in it would make it quite ludicrous to import and display as individual frames, especially if I had to use dumb old hudmessage.
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Graf Zahl
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Re: is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoo

Post by Graf Zahl »

No. Flash has several problems:

1. It's a proprietary technology with an installable runtime.
2. It's a security nightmare.
3 As a corollary of 2. many users will flat out refuse to use anything that uses Flash as its backing technology. Give me a website with Flash videos and I'm out in no time. Give me a game using Flash and I'll hit the delete button faster than you could say "boo!".

So don't even ask. It will never happen. Flash should die, it's too bad that even on the internet some supposedly professional websites still use it.
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Re: is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoo

Post by Arctangent »

bimshwel wrote:because I am bloody awful at code-writing and that will never change.
Well, if you've got something impairing you, then I understand. But if not, then it's almost certainly because you've decided that this was the case, and you've dug your heels in to make sure you won't be wrong about it.

Computing languages are just that, languages, and all coding amounts to is asking your computer to do things. The entire trick about it is figuring out how to do so in the relevant language - and often this is just breaking down what you want to do into individual steps.

Like, that intro suggests something so animated that anything descended from the idtech 1 engine probably isn't the best fit anyhow, but it also doesn't really seem like a stiffer facsimile of it would be all that difficult with ACS. A lot of work, yes, but cutscenes are a lot of work no matter what. I'd say the main difficulty would probably just be starting from zero experience but not bother to ask those with experience for pointers - something you can change over at the Scripting subforum, although if you're like me, you'd probably learn better with something that allows for more back-and-forth talk, like the Discord server.

Really, everyone's shit at coding when they start. It's not some magical art that you can inherit just by having certain blood in you, it's a skill like everything else. It's kinda preposterous to declare yourself incapable of it just because you weren't able to nail it immediately with your first time trying.
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bimshwel
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Re: is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoo

Post by bimshwel »

Graf Zahl wrote:No. Flash has several problems:

1. It's a proprietary technology with an installable runtime.
2. It's a security nightmare.
3 As a corollary of 2. many users will flat out refuse to use anything that uses Flash as its backing technology. Give me a website with Flash videos and I'm out in no time. Give me a game using Flash and I'll hit the delete button faster than you could say "boo!".

So don't even ask. It will never happen. Flash should die, it's too bad that even on the internet some supposedly professional websites still use it.
I was asking in the sense of: "is this already implemented?" not "is it morally sound that this format exists?" In such case that both answers are no, is there another low file density video format that IS implemented?

Arctangent wrote:
bimshwel wrote:because I am bloody awful at code-writing and that will never change.
Well, if you've got something impairing you, then I understand. But if not, then it's almost certainly because you've decided that this was the case, and you've dug your heels in to make sure you won't be wrong about it.
That is a somewhat presumptuous statement! I didn't just start, I messed with that particular aspect of things off and on since 2004. As I moved forward with others, that one remained unworkable. I drew the cartoon long after that. It is definitely easier to use features in zdoom than it was then, but this specific matter has always been a big holdup. I got as far as the two lizards entering the room with the captain and it looked stupid (the wrong kind of stupid) and was a mess. I only ASKED publicly because I tried so hard to deal with it.
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Re: is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoo

Post by wildweasel »

bimshwel wrote:I was asking in the sense of: "is this already implemented?" not "is it morally sound that this format exists?"
Which Graf answered "no, because[...]".
In such case that both answers are no, is there another low file density video format that IS implemented?
Not at the moment because they all contain extra baggage with them that make them unfeasible to include for the moment. Compressed video is a popular one to request, but it would either require us to bundle a codec with GZDoom (additional filesize bloat) or rely on the player having one present (which not only would confuse a not-unreasonable chunk of the userbase, but also open a whole new can of worms on how to detect and use said codec in a cross-platform way).

The closest you're arguably likely to get is to use sequences of images, but this doesn't compress nearly as well as proper video (since you need to store complete frames and not just deltas/changes and the occasional keyframe) and doesn't have any built-in mechanism to sync audio, so you'd have to roll your own in-game, which has a risk of desyncing since there's no way to communicate the state of the audio to the video or vice-versa due to playsim limitations (among other things).

A fair number of authors prefer to handle their storytelling and cutscenes using the in-game scripting engine instead; this has a slew of limitations to it, but is ultimately the safer option that won't rely on getting people to implement new data formats into the engine.
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Re: is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoo

Post by phantombeta »

wildweasel wrote:
In such case that both answers are no, is there another low file density video format that IS implemented?
Not at the moment because they all contain extra baggage with them that make them unfeasible to include for the moment. Compressed video is a popular one to request, but it would either require us to bundle a codec with GZDoom (additional filesize bloat) or rely on the player having one present (which not only would confuse a not-unreasonable chunk of the userbase, but also open a whole new can of worms on how to detect and use said codec in a cross-platform way).
One thing to note is that said extra baggage includes security issues, which seem to always be a thing with video stuff, for some reason.
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Re: is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoo

Post by Graf Zahl »

"some reason" being that video decoding is a very complex matter. Another problem here is that this is a patent minefield of the worst kind.
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Re: is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoo

Post by bimshwel »

Yes yes alright I see. There are so many audio formats supported it seemed to me natural enough to inquire about video types but I concede that those are considerably fussier.
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Re: is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoo

Post by Arctangent »

bimshwel wrote:I got as far as the two lizards entering the room with the captain and it looked stupid (the wrong kind of stupid) and was a mess.
Well, like I said, this might be more of an issue of engine choice than anything else. Stylized stuff in the Doom engine isn't impossible, but it very much is an 1993 engine designed for sprites in 3D world with only a handful of frames per animation to compensate for the fact that each frame needs at least seven others if it can be seen from multiple directions. As much as ZDoom removes a lot of the restrictions that would inhibit going far with it, it doesn't exactly remove the gargantuan workload involved in transferring a bouncy animation style into system made for motions with like four stiff key frames with absolutely zero tweening between them.

Heck, if you thought the end result of a scene where you as a designer had complete control of the camera looked stupid, imagine how stupid it'd look to you when a player does a turn-around of a character and the sprite only updates every 45 or 22.5 degrees. I mean, that's avoidable with models, but you'd still have to contend with everything else, and quick scan through your website doesn't make it seem like using models was your intention anyway.

( though I have to ask, if you're that certain you can't figure out coding at all, shouldn't you have someone else that can if you're intending to, y'know, make a game? )
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Re: is it possible to embed and play swf flash video in zdoo

Post by bimshwel »

I did not choose the engine, the engine chose me. To give a fuller explanation, I started in 2002 just changing the status bar face, then i made some monsters, then i made some levels (sort of, based on ones I lost in a hard drive crash prior to then) and then had ideas for something resembling a story. I conceived the introduction scene based on other scenes I had seen in zdoom wads. The project grew in complexity beyond my means without my intending it to, and each new version of zdoom breaking something did not help. Eventually I gave up for several years! I did eventually come into contact with somebody who was very good at coding and just happened to be doing something Doom related, and was going to help me pull mine together after he finished his but had has own issues (in part feeling totally unwelcome among doom communities) and I do not know where he is now. I pulled my material out of utter dysfunction without any help. And now I am asking for help again. Since it is not possible to put a cartoon in there, I will do something else. Probably import some of the frames, that show things which cannot be scripted, and the rudimentary script version I made in 2004 as a foundation for the rest. I am in much too deep to cut my losses and skip over to Unity or whatever else you might suggest.
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