Re: Development of Video on Pipmak

[Christian W. <cwa...@gm...>]

Hello Val

> I represent a french team developing a free game using Pipmak engine.
> We know that the video integration is not yet done for Pipmak.
> However, we’re going to really need this feature and it’s the reason why we
> offer our services to develop voluntarily this feature for Pipmak.

That would be very welcome! Video support is about the most requested feature
currently, it's quite a chunk of work (I assume), and as you may have noticed
I have been busy with a lot of other stuff besides Pipmak lately.

> We noticed the first video implementation you  would like to do is for Ogg
> Theora.

I don't insist on that, it's just what seemed easiest to me, at the first
glance. I'll accept anything, as long as it's GPL-compatible,
non-patent-encumbered, and runs at least on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

> Would you be interested by our proposal ?

Sure! Even if, hypothetically, it shouldn't turn out to my liking, I think
having something is better than nothing, and it can always be improved later.
So, contributions are welcome. And, of course, you're free to do it any way
you like for your own use (within the licence), no interest or permission
from my part required.

> Do you have a development standard to give us ?

Not really. There's a short document about the general architecture at
<http://pipmak.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Notes_on_Pipmak%27s_architecture>
(will probably move to
<http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/pipmak/index.php?title=Notes_on_Pipmak
%27s_architecture> soonish). In terms of code style, just stick to the style
of the existing code. Once your code makes it into the official trunk, you
will have to live with me messing around in it to adapt it to my ideas (which
develop as I go), but I try to do that in a cooperative way. ;)

In general, I'd say, just go for it, and we can discuss specifics as they
come up. I'm here to help. You're welcome (even encouraged) to use this
mailing list for discussions, and once you have posted something that shows
that you're serious about completing this, I could give you an SVN branch to
work in too, if that's desired.

> Have you started to work on this implementation ?

No.

> If you haven’t, have you thought about it and what are your advices ?

I haven't spent a lot of thought on it. My general idea is that, in the Lua
interface, movies should be objects as similar as possible to images (just
with methods like play, stop, go to a specific frame...) and should be
accepted everywhere images are accepted (patches, node backgrounds).

Thanks for your interest, and let us know about the progress of your game
too!

 -Christian