Irrlicht Engine

There wouldn't be... by any small chance, a way to play videos using Windows Media player within the engine? I've seen an application programmed for 3D GameStudio that plays a MPEG video and then launches the game. (Realspawn created this) I don't know much about Win32 programming but I was wondering if Niko could whip up something for Irrlicht thats similar to that. I just need a way to play my intro movie...

Thanks in advance!

An easy way of doing this without adding mplayer support to irrlicht is to do it the way that the Lego Alpha Team game does it. It launches a exe file that displays the intro video. And when it's finnished it launches another exe with the actual game.

This is of course the quick and dirty solution.

DarkWhoppy wrote:There wouldn't be... by any small chance, a way to play videos using Windows Media player within the engine? I've seen an application programmed for 3D GameStudio that plays a MPEG video and then launches the game. (Realspawn created this) I don't know much about Win32 programming but I was wondering if Niko could whip up something for Irrlicht thats similar to that. I just need a way to play my intro movie...

Thanks in advance!

someone would need to write the code to read in an avi file, decode it and then present each frame of the movie in sequence. a CAVIScenenode! not that hard, but you'd need to have the avi decoding information to do it. a very cool feature thou, if someone wants to go ahead and write it. actually, i think i saw a post somewhere in the forum that talked about the CAvi class for creating avi's from within irrlicht. i think that same class can be used to read avi's too

There is already code on how to play an AVI file at nehe.gamedev.net , its pretty simple, and could easily be adapted to Irrlicht.

It shows how to load each frame as a texture using OGL and maps that texture to a Quad. This way you can not only play your movies, but you can have in-game .avi textures as well.

AVIs file sizes are too big. I've compressed my intro to an MPEG and it went from 10Mbs -> 1.2Mbs. Using Windows Media Player would greatly help for those 56Kers when they download the game. I'll look around for some info on how Realspawn did that application for 3DGS.