SWF Flash in Irrlicht.

mathijsB · Post by **mathijsB** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 8:03 pm

Irrlicht sample

Hey,

Recently I have been working on a port for irrlicht version of my flash control for 3d rendering. Above are some screenshots of it. It is based on the original Adobe Flash Control, yet adds quite a lot of functionality. I have listed a few core features below.

*Since the flash control is drawn on a texture, it can also be used on 3d surfaces. For example, in game computer terminals, movie displays, etc.

*Works with c++/.NET/delphi, build on a powerful c++ core.

*Works in fullscreen mode and handles mouse and keyboard input that you pass to the control fully.

*Synchronous and asynchronous communication with flash. This means, you can call functions inside the actionscript inside your flash control. Visa versa actionscript can call functions inside your applications. In both cases return arguments can be returned to the calling application.

*Optimized for speed, rerendering only happens when the flash control updates and at a framerate you specify. The rendering is implemented fully double-buffered/threaded.

*Fully engine/directx/opengl independant. By a provided set of classes you can implement this to work with virtually any rendering mechanism. For irrlicht a full implementation is available with the sample.

*Custom sound handlers, hook your own sound handler to the control and let your application’s sound system play the sound for flash.

*You can provide your own flash player. This means you can deploy your applications without worrying about any problems by users using other versions of flash than the version you tested with.

*Full flash transparency and translucency supported

*Allows you to set your own handler for cursor changes, for example, when you mouseover a button in Flash, you can link your own cursor to that that fits in the theme of your game.

The irrlicht sample is build upon the terrain rendering sample that comes with the sdk. Currently it just works with DirectX and the fast software renderer. I am not sure why the texture doesn't seem to work with opengl, since locking and unlocking of the irrlicht texture isn't failing. Maybe someone with some more irrlicht experience knows why?

More information and the full sdk can be found on my website at
http://mathijs.jabberjab.com

Greetings,
mathijs.

krama757 · Post by **krama757** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 8:19 pm

Damn! This is genius!

I never thought of using flash for my chatting/inventory/etc. I've been hard coding that stuff with irrlicht and its been quite interesting

I will check this out right now, thanks mathijsB, not only for the implementation but also the idea!

christianclavet · Post by **christianclavet** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 8:31 pm

Wow! This is great! I will certainly check this soon.

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 9:05 pm

Looks really cool. Would make a good choice for online games as flash has all the scripting and network stuff you could ever need, plus a user-base of thousands of artist/programmers who can already use it.
Good luck with it

krama757 · Post by **krama757** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 9:08 pm

Hmm, any of you guys finding the interface to be rediculously slow?

I still get ~400 fps, but typing into the flash text field is suppppeerrr slow and I can barely press the button (it takes forever to respond).

mathijsB · Post by **mathijsB** » Sun Jan 20, 2008 4:17 am

krama757 wrote:Hmm, any of you guys finding the interface to be rediculously slow?

I still get ~400 fps, but typing into the flash text field is suppppeerrr slow and I can barely press the button (it takes forever to respond).

Mh, looking into this one, the input is indeed a little slow here, though this only happens in the irrlicht version, and not in the general directx versions. So I might be using irrlicht wrong somewhere...

sudi · Post by **sudi** » Sun Jan 20, 2008 4:37 pm

this prog doesn't even start on my maschine. do i need anything? and there is no message in the console which could tell me why i crashes righ on startup. everything seams to load fine but after the textures are loaded it just crashes.

mathijsB · Post by **mathijsB** » Sun Jan 20, 2008 6:52 pm

You need to have the latest version of Flash installed. I think thats the most important thing, other missing stuff won't cause a crash.

krama757 · Post by **krama757** » Wed Jan 30, 2008 8:30 am

Any updates mathijs? I am eagerly waiting for some update to the speed that the flash runs in irrlicht.

Morgawr · Post by **Morgawr** » Wed Jan 30, 2008 8:31 pm

This looks AWESOME!

It will come in handy for a GUI RPG-like and stuff like turn based battles for my game... I might try that out

GREAT job man

mathijsB · Post by **mathijsB** » Sat Feb 09, 2008 11:23 pm

small update from my side: I finally have some time now to look into the irrlicht speed issues and hope to have an updated irrlicht version in a matter of days.

krama757 · Post by **krama757** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 8:47 am

No breakthroughs yet? Been a while since you last posted an update

No rush though....its just Im excited at seeing such an amazing tool being developed.

Zeuss · Post by **Zeuss** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 11:14 pm

This is pretty awesome, could you imagine some of the possibilities:

If you have an extendable filesystem, you could add the ability to load files from the internet and then stream updated flash content to your game.

Anywho, mathijsB would you be willing to add and maintain this to the irrlicht plugin project?

FuzzYspo0N · Post by **FuzzYspo0N** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 5:47 am

u shud check his site. its not free or anything, its quite severly limited

but its still cool

Zeuss · Post by **Zeuss** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 8:03 am

I'm not going to take stuff without permission