[Idea] Yea, Quake in Flash, but.. what about Flash in Quake?

[Teiman]

Crazy idea follows.

It could be possible to embed Flash in Quake, so a SWF file is rendered into a texture? maybe on the interface of the game?.

[frag.machine]

AFAIK, as long you can periodically obtain a RGB bitmap to updte the GL texture, it's possible. Doom3 has some kind of markup language that allows to generate the computer screens textures, maybe something along this line would be of more practical use.

[Sajt]

Indeed. But... DON'T USE FLASH!!!

I can see something like this be useful for SIN-like consoles.

A while ago Black added "Gecko" support to DarkPlaces, which apparently allows webpages to be rendered to textures. But I've never seen it in action.

[Spike]

the offscreen gecko stuff that black used will likely never be able to run flash. There may be other ways to do it... but it won't work well in windows.

[mh]

The user may have the Flash plugin disabled or even not installed. Unlikely I know, but still possible.

Flash video can be quite CPU-intensive also. A format like .cin or .roq would be much preferable (as well as being an open source format).

Final consideration is framerate - video-to-texture rendering would require updating the texture object for each frame change, which could be expensive (especially if the texture needs mipmapping, and even more so if the source video is not a nice clean power-of-2 in size).

[r00k]

Crazy idea follows.

It could be possible to embed Flash in Quake, so a SWF file is rendered into a texture? maybe on the interface of the game?.

Screenshot!

[frag.machine]

Flash video can be quite CPU-intensive also. A format like .cin or .roq would be much preferable (as well as being an open source format).

.cin, .roq or even .avi aren't interactive, so you can't simulate Doom3-like consoles. Unless we are talking about a multi-scene file with support to "cue points" where you can change what animation part is playing (much like the way animated textures works in standard engine).

Final consideration is framerate - video-to-texture rendering would require updating the texture object for each frame change, which could be expensive (especially if the texture needs mipmapping, and even more so if the source video is not a nice clean power-of-2 in size).

Actually you don't need to upload to the texture every frame. When I implemented render-to-texture in Q2K4 I used a fixed 20Hz rate that gives a smooth enough visual effect. Stills a fairly high frequency, but viable for most current hardware.

[Spike]

You can supposedly do the texture uploads in a separate thread. On modern dual core cpus, you'd be just wasting it otherwise.

And yeah, most videos animate at 24 frames per second or so. its a bit pointless to upload it when its not changed :)
more seriously though, if you're uploading 3 lightmaps 10 times a second, a video isn't much worse. Yes, there's a performance hit, but the upload itself will give a limited performance drop. You'll not halve the framerate, although decoding it could. Threads ftw.

[qbism]

Could quakeflash run inside flashquake?

[dreadlorde]

What would be the point of this, other than to suck? Seriously, why would you want to use flash for textures?

[Downsider]

I assume to have video or interactive content, like a touch-console.

[dreadlorde]

I think most sane people agree that it would be better to do that in C or QuakeC, and not introduce Flashes buggy-ness, bloat, complete lack of being able to be secured, &c into Quake. Plus Flash runs like crap on pretty much all three of the platforms it runs on (Windows, OS X, Unix).

[Downsider]

Would certainly make content creation a breeze.

[Sajt]

Yes, yes, we have all already unanimously agreed that Flash is evil and inappropriate, so there's no point in disagreeing.

A simple system for Doom3 or SIN like consoles would be cool though. It would be funny if it were done in MenuQC embedded within CSQC which then communicates with SVQC. Too much for me to think about right now anyway...

[Chip]

Yes, yes, we have all already unanimously agreed that Flash is evil and inappropriate, so there's no point in disagreeing.

A simple system for Doom3 or SIN like consoles would be cool though. It would be funny if it were done in MenuQC embedded within CSQC which then communicates with SVQC. Too much for me to think about right now anyway...

It would be funny to have a 3D shooter game complain it needs Flash before running it. I assume a computer with an older version of Flash, or a broken one.

I understand the game might have a bundled Flash version, but anyway, what's the point of taking care of yet another OS compatibility issue?

Last, but not least, Quake's a shooter, not a point-and-click game. Case closed.