Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Wishlist => Topic started by: bbosen on February 22, 2012, 05:26:27 AM
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I wish offline missions included a provision to play video clips during the briefing and at designated intervals during the mission. This would be very useful for instruction and could be used to add a lot of entertainment value.
At the discretion of developers, the clips themselves might be accessed from:
-- The mission download (which could store them on the user's local disk), or
-- Some web site through a URL designated within the mission code
:salute
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I might be wrong, but you may be able to upload a gif to play as a film. You will have to ask USRanger, as I thought I saw his Rumble II mission do this sort of thing. I may have just imagined that though. I definitely saw animations included there somewhere.
But a brief clip would be nice!!
:aok
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In addition, I'd like to see this feature for SEA and AvA. When you log in and choose your side you get a "play briefing" pop up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Lt-X0wZQYE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzkP0rAwjEg
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If Cobra is ever added to the game then the Storm Shadow could be used for their briefing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONAIdJniOp8
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In addition, I'd like to see this feature for SEA and AvA. When you log in and choose your side you get a "play briefing" pop up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Lt-X0wZQYE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzkP0rAwjEg
Yes. That too! Once coded for offline missions, it should be easy to add to any appropriate online situations. Mission briefings of all types could benefit. You could also create video clips for "winning the war", achieving some mission objective, getting killed, etc. Some logic might be necessary to decide whether or not to play these video clips for everybody, or only for those that "opt in", or only for those intimately affected by a specific event.
....As I think about all of this, I worry that implementing all of them might complicate things too much. But I do trust the developers to choose what they can handle and postpone or discard the rest.
:salute
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Yeah, dont know what kind of development it would take. I would think it wouldn't be too difficult to code it to upload a .wmv but I wouldn't know.
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I'm sure that coding to upload a .wmv (or other video clip) would require far fewer resources than those required to PLAY the corresponding media. Although the standard function libraries of virtually all coding toolsets include pre-baked utilities to play these movies, it is likely that HiTech's video environment is already customized (to optimize performance of the simulation), in a way that would complicate use of these standardized toolsets. HITech will know what to do if he decides to let us play video clips, but he may need to get his code to jump through some hoops to preserve state, invoke a more "standard" video environment, play the clip, then retrieve state, re-enter the optimized sim video environment, and resume simulation. (The same could be required of the sound environment.)
This could turn out to be one of those requests that seems very attractive on the surface, but whose implementation might be costly enough to delay other priorities. In the final analysis, I trust HiTech's judgment in this. I just wanted to get a discussion going on the merits of the function should HiTech be willing to consider it.
:salute