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stupid question / grand idea

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pcates:

--- Quote from: toe. on August 26, 2006, 09:08:55 am ---poop.

okay. i cant do videos.

can i have it pull screenshots from random games and just have the foreground move?
making it random stationary pictures in the background and say a 5 second looping image in the foreground?

--- End quote ---

Check out 3d Arcade..... You can have screen shots on every visible game, and a video playing on the the selected game. I think you might enjoy the look.

Patrick

headkaze:
I don't know why some people can't see the forest for the trees. GameEx can have a theme exactly how this guy wants, and I bet you other FE developers wouldn't think so. You don't need any kind of special front-end to do things like this. First of all, using scripting is slow as hell. Supporting animation and layers of animation is complicated and dosn't always render good results. The algorithms for generating fire are complicated and hard to achieve realisticly. The best way to do this would be to create a video loop to play in the background using video editing software.

Using Adobe After Effects, for example, you can generate flames that will animate in a loop curling and flickering like real fire. There are also video loops of explosions and real fire footage that you could use and overlay on that picture. You can animate the smoke by removing it using Photoshop and placing it on a separate layer then, again using After Effects and some sort of sine wave distortion filter, you make the smoke appear to drift upwards. Then just loop the video over, GameEx supports fullscreen video in the background with video snap playback at the same time. Using the GameEx Theme Editor you can design the layout for the list and video snaps however you like. Then you can find some nice audio effects with the sound of fire crackling or whatever and place that in the video using After Effects.

First of all by using video software to create the animated background you reduce processor overhead because all you are doing is decoding the video frames. Generating a fire effect in realtime using fancy scripting or some other way would not only require a decent PC, but alot of patience and custom work by the FE developer. By all means take up youki's offer, but I don't think you will get the best outcome using the scripted method.

For me I did alot of video and animation at Uni, so I think it would be an easy effect to achieve. But video is definately the way I would approach this.

Ok, that was just my 2c.

Howard_Casto:

--- Quote from: headkaze on August 31, 2006, 10:37:24 pm ---I don't know why some people can't see the forest for the trees. GameEx can have a theme exactly how this guy wants, and I bet you other FE developers wouldn't think so. You don't need any kind of special front-end to do things like this. First of all, using scripting is slow as hell. Supporting animation and layers of animation is complicated and dosn't always render good results. The algorithms for generating fire are complicated and hard to achieve realisticly. The best way to do this would be to create a video loop to play in the background using video editing software.

Using Adobe After Effects, for example, you can generate flames that will animate in a loop curling and flickering like real fire. There are also video loops of explosions and real fire footage that you could use and overlay on that picture. You can animate the smoke by removing it using Photoshop and placing it on a separate layer then, again using After Effects and some sort of sine wave distortion filter, you make the smoke appear to drift upwards. Then just loop the video over, GameEx supports fullscreen video in the background with video snap playback at the same time. Using the GameEx Theme Editor you can design the layout for the list and video snaps however you like. Then you can find some nice audio effects with the sound of fire crackling or whatever and place that in the video using After Effects.

First of all by using video software to create the animated background you reduce processor overhead because all you are doing is decoding the video frames. Generating a fire effect in realtime using fancy scripting or some other way would not only require a decent PC, but alot of patience and custom work by the FE developer. By all means take up youki's offer, but I don't think you will get the best outcome using the scripted method.

For me I did alot of video and animation at Uni, so I think it would be an easy effect to achieve. But video is definately the way I would approach this.

Ok, that was just my 2c.

--- End quote ---

I agree with you completely, but that isn't what he wanted.  He wanted the background to be interactive.  And I can understand that, nothing says "canned animation" more than a looping video in the background that doesn't react to the stuff going on in the foreground, even if it's the coolest video in the history of videos.  Now if the video is only used a ambient movement then it doesn't matter but I gather that the stuff in the background woudl pretty much be the whole skin except for the list. 

With that being said, here's the thing......  You can't do flames in a video  loop, nor can you do smoke in a loop.  I don't mean it can't be done, as you explained it's pretty easy to do with the right tools.  What I mean is it looks....well like a canned loop.  If you want to have it look fairly organic then you have to use a butt-load of frames (or some wiggling 3d sprites) and use some sort of an random algorithim.

I agree about the scripting thing btw.... dk is scripting free (or at least as far as users know it is ;) ).  Most animation effects/layers are performed by a series of uncompressed images dropped in the appropriate folder or by streaming a video file.  Imho scripting is only useful for transitional effects (like the skin startup and closing, or when launching a game). 


The processor overhead thing.... I can't agree with that one though.  it depends on how the video is being used.  I think gameex uses a very simple overlay, in which it's no processing overhead (just enough to play a vid in windows).  If you are doing something more complicated however (like me, I put all vids on polys so I can do all kinds of crazy blending effects) then depending upon the platform you are using it can be quite taxing on the processor.  On top of that, windows just doesn't like to play a lot of vids at one time, even on really good end-user pcs.  That's why I nixed the idea of using real videos for each of the vid screens right off the bat.  It can be done, but can it be done at an acceptable framerate while scrolling through a list and dynamically updating game artwork... I doubt it. 

I think the skin is a nice idea, but like yourself I think it's more a user responsibility to get it made.  If someone want's to throw me the finished animation(s) I'd be glad to make sure it works with dk, but I'm not willing to do the other end of it. 

Havok:

--- Quote from: headkaze on August 31, 2006, 10:37:24 pm ---I don't know why some people can't see the forest for the trees. GameEx can have a theme exactly how this guy wants, and I bet you other FE developers wouldn't think so. You don't need any kind of special front-end to do things like this. First of all, using scripting is slow as hell. Supporting animation and layers of animation is complicated and dosn't always render good results. The algorithms for generating fire are complicated and hard to achieve realisticly. The best way to do this would be to create a video loop to play in the background using video editing software.

Using Adobe After Effects, for example, you can generate flames that will animate in a loop curling and flickering like real fire. There are also video loops of explosions and real fire footage that you could use and overlay on that picture. You can animate the smoke by removing it using Photoshop and placing it on a separate layer then, again using After Effects and some sort of sine wave distortion filter, you make the smoke appear to drift upwards. Then just loop the video over, GameEx supports fullscreen video in the background with video snap playback at the same time. Using the GameEx Theme Editor you can design the layout for the list and video snaps however you like. Then you can find some nice audio effects with the sound of fire crackling or whatever and place that in the video using After Effects.

First of all by using video software to create the animated background you reduce processor overhead because all you are doing is decoding the video frames. Generating a fire effect in realtime using fancy scripting or some other way would not only require a decent PC, but alot of patience and custom work by the FE developer. By all means take up youki's offer, but I don't think you will get the best outcome using the scripted method.

For me I did alot of video and animation at Uni, so I think it would be an easy effect to achieve. But video is definately the way I would approach this.

Ok, that was just my 2c.

--- End quote ---

So quit yer yapping and prove it...

I believe the expression is "put your money where your mouth is?"

Wait... I can hear it coming...

"I don't have time for that - much too busy..."

What's the point of you guys saying my FE can do this and this and this, and it's simple, and it's great, etc etc etc...

But, when a user goes to install the front end and choose a skin - plain vanilla options...   :angry:

I know, I know... "It's up to the user to do that part..." Well, give us an idea of your FE's capabilities - make a few skins that make our jaws drop and then I'll believe all you say.

headkaze:
Well, I don't really agree with you on the video looking too much like a loop thing. A video plays at about 25 to 30 fps and is enough to give the illusion of fluid motion. Think of those DVD menu's at the start of movies that loop over, but instead of having it loop in 30 seconds, why not have it loop after 5 minutes. It won't look that much like a loop after that. I have an animation that loops in the background of my Soul Calibur theme and I don't notice it looping, it just looks like a cartoon playing in the background to me. And it's really just a background, the main concentration is on selecting a game to play, or if you leave the controls alone after a while it starts the attract screensaver which will launch random Mame games and let them play for a while before changing to the next one.

Also, I know exactly what your talking about with Direct3D. In fact I went through a faze when I was playing with MDX9 + C#. I used DirectShowLib which is a wrapper for DirectShow use in .NET, and decode the frames of video onto a texture. Incidently I found if you make the size of video the same size as a default texture eg. 256x256 you can get a very nice FPS boost when writing out the video frame as a stream into the texture.

I had alot of fun with Direct3D and C#, in fact I managed to get the XBox 360 ripples in a circle effect going using a Vertex Shader. I agree the future of FE's is to go this way.

And where is this mystical FE of yours Howard? :P

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