Oh, thats good. I may use VLCJ later too, if it is LGPL, I really like it. But I dont need to, currently anyways, cause I’m not having much story in my game right now (And I’m not too god in making movies anyways 
)
Has anyone successfully tested VLCJ on Mac/Linux? Last time I tried building from source I got a lot of unexplained linking issues.
Well you know, its not that easy.
The idea is to have VLC installed and VLCJ links to this “vlib”.
However thats complete crap right there, since you cannot force a user to install VLC or expect that they have it installed.
So what you do is, ship everything you need with your game and link it yourself, like private JVM.
So I have a vlib folder, similar to the lib folder.
System.setProperty("jna.library.path", "vlib");
and in the vlib folder you need to have specific files like libvlc (per platform) and the codecs. (of course only codecs that you are allowed to redistribute and use, meaning theora and ogg - not ALL codecs)
So its copy work - but once done, it works.
I haven’t tried that hard to get it to run, but all you have to do is to copy from the installed folder on a mac and on linux, the files that you need.
On linux I just couldn’t find those all that quickly so I couldn’t try it yet.
Mac is officially supported by VLCJ and Linux should be even less of a problem. Since VLC works so good on it.
Well guys, thank you very much for the help… this is really an awesome community!
I think I will just not do videos for the moment - I will keep programming and, on the end, when I know more java and I have a semi finish game, then I will confront the video issue, probably with the help of vlcj, that sound quite good.
3RGORttEnzA
I know this guy - he doesn’t like JRPGs
Go figure…
I love MGS4. I watch 20 hours of cutscenes for a decent story giving context to gameplay.
As you have more story you need more exposition.
The more it is the harder it is to do simply ingame.
Also 2D and 3D are totally different stories. A 2D game doesnt even offer the option to convey complex scenes ingame, even if you wanted to script it all.
I could say more… but I could write a whole paper.
Imo story-telling is, to me, the most important part of a decent immersive game. (Actually to all media: movies & books alike. Even music should strife to have meaningful lyrics, or none at all.)
Of course I say this while games like COD, Farmville, Wii Sports are top-selling; but hey Final Fantasy games aren’t doing too bad.
But even in games where unique gameplay plays a predominant role, story and characters make it great: Portal 2 would be boring without story and characters
I only think highly of games which had much emotion context…
Thats why people say FF7 is the best game ever - everyone has sincerely touched by it. And they can still recall those feelings.
And all those shooters already look the same now, forgettable; Remembering back, it will all be a blur.
I also directly disagree with his philosophy that gameplay should stand on its own - I’m just not a fan, I need to care, I have no ambition without emotions.
Would like to point to Deadly Premonition aka Red Seeds Profile: Many say its utter crap and many say it brilliant. It has a horrible gameplay and a great story and characters.
Well the point is cutscenes != storytelling. I agree with that. I don’t know if the guy likes JRPG’s or not, but he goes on to say that dialogues in RPG’s are fundamentally different from cutscenes. For instance, dialogues in RPG’s usually give you choices along the way ( This is a good thing ).
The issue with cutscenes is that it disconnects you from the game. Instead of being part of the story, you’re sitting on the sidelines observing it.
I suggest skipping cutscenes altogether and focusing on storytelling. In general, this means playing out a scripted scene in the game engine/world where you’re still in control of your character. Simple and effective and a lot better than cutscenes imho.
[EDIT]: Storytelling in video games can be so much more than simple 1 dimensional movie effects.
Buh? ???
This remains true of course.
You can certinaly try in a 3D game. in 2D, I dont see how you would do that, without sacrificing complex scenes.
Overall it is possible… Egoraptor also says that if things happened to you directly, the impact is much greater.
However, at least for now, I’m not as arrogant as to believe I could change story telling in games in a way the industry has never thought about and innovate it and stuff. Therefore I lack game making experience; and story telling experience for that matter.
Guess you didn’t play MGS1-3.
[quote=“Cero,post:29,topic:39100”]
Certainly it wouldn’t be much harder than creating a FMV from scratch. I’m not sure what world you live in where animating FMV cutscenes (especially higher poly 3D scenes) is easier than programming some simple game logic.
if player enters cutscene zone
trigger music
add letterbox / vignette / effects
limit/prohibit player movement outside of the zone
play story voiceover
run NPC AI
I have to agree there’s certainly a place for cutscenes. But they should be used sparingly and only when absolutely necessary and or when they’re definitely worth it.
[quote=“davedes,post:30,topic:39100”]
Well that part is obvious and I wrote it years ago… It doesn’t replace real cut-scenes though.
Also they do not have the details you need. If a scene wants to point out that the character now does a very subtle movement: using video you can do it very cinematic; ingame, you could hardly even tell, since a finger is maybe one pixel… and even if you could, it wouldn’t look cool.
If you want 3 Dimensional things to happen, rapid changes in scenery…
Especially a space battle is something you cannot do with youre engine, if your game is not a spaceship game, and creating such a 3D scene is not all that hard of course
Or I dont know… What if you want to focus on a Pool table as the players have a little match. But you’re game is a sidescroller.
Making video doesnt mean 3D render scenes, but now you can show all scenes and all details you want.
And its very convenient.
I come back and visit the topic of Java video every 6 months or so I’ve actually been working with Java and video on and off for over a decade. It genuinely is a sorry state of affairs but last time I looked Xuggler was getting closer to being useful (albeit pretty large). VLCJ when I last looked was useless but this seems to have changed.
Cortado might be working better now too. I will possibly be reinvestigating Cortado in the near future. It is particularly appealing for being a) pure Java and b) unencumbered, apparently.
Cas
I looked at it this year… and it was horrible.
Give us a ring when it changes =P
Shipping VLC is not ideal either. Uncompressed it’s about 80MB, with 60MB worth of codec DLLs.
With some LZMA and discarding all codecs that your game doesn’t use, you could probably trim it down to a few MB.
Having said that, I’m delighted with the ease of creating a player. If only Windows natively supported creating a ramdisk like Linux, I’d call it solved.
Yeah I did that - 13 MB uncompressed.
If it’s for a simple 2D game, why don’t create animation using e.g Tween lib?
I tried it in Chrome and you’re right!
A much better version is up, but I can’t get rid of that youtube logo even though I own the copyright… :-
I think this could work ok with a better embedded player.
I know this topic is old, but there is also jjmpeg for decoding.
It’s fairly easy to write a Flash exporter using JSFL, then taking the data from a Flash file to animate stuff in-game. I wrote a version of this for iOS in about 3 days. JSFL exported the data to JSON then I used a JSOn library to convert to the iOS HashMap equivalent, then it’s easy to read the data and write a simple animation player.