Re: [opendemo-devel] Re: plan for OpenDemo editor

[Dr. U. G. <gi...@ph...>]

Hello!

Just to keep a record of all my holiday changes:

tools/odcut/odcut.pl is a really similar replacement for DEMcut from the old
Quake1 days. It understands almost the same commands and can write to a named
pipe or a file. It is written purely in Perl. The core XML functionality is in
tools/odcut/odfile.pm and is currently too slow (DOM is too complicated for
our simple needs). I think about a C reimplementation as a Perl module
(something I never did before but need to learn anyway) using SAX.

Features:
	* read in OpenDemo files
	* switch between these demo files
	* close OpenDemo input files
	* select the output file (or pipe)
	* write the XML header
	* write a single frame from the current input file
	* write a range of frames from the current input file
	* range can be played forward and backwards
	* write the XML footer
	* output frames are manipulated, so that the sequence number is
		increased every time a frame is written
	* output frames are manipulated, so that the time of the frame is
		increased by the length of the previous frame
	* output frames are manipulated, so that all absolute times in a
		frame have the same difference to the frame time in the
		output file as they had in the input file
	* interactive mode waits the correct amount of time to synchronize
		written output with the time mentioned in the frames
	* interactive mode repeats the last output frame over and over but
		corrects (as usual) the sequence number and the time

Missing:
	* delta decompression is already started but does not work.
	* delta compression is not started at all.

The interactive mode makes it easy to let odcut.pl write into a named pipe and
let Q3A+OpenDemo read from this pipe. In this way Q3A+OpenDemo can be remote
controlled (similar to what KeyGrip2 does).

I already started a WxPerl based GUI for all this. It does not do anything
useful yet but the graphical elements are almost all there and event handlers
are connected to the various buttons.

Before I forget it, odcut.pl can write to a pipe but OpenDemo must be compiled
from CVS to get the pipe reading feature. The last binary release of OpenDemo
can only read in a normal file edited with odcut.pl.

Bye, Uwe