Source Media Arcade is an all-in-one media center experience for your PC. Shortcuts to your files, games, and movies appear as full-sized arcade cabinets, hand-held tablets, or mounted view screens. You access your media items simply by walking up to them and pressing the USE key. In version 2, you are able to play in MULTIPLAYER mode where your friends can come join in on the fun.
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| piscian | May 15 2011, 8:53pm Anchor | |
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Hi, quick question. what's the word on ambient soundtrack for the arcade? Not neccessarily something to be launched but in the game itself. How does launching Video in game work? I can only get it to launch with whatever my default player is. Is there an ingame video player? I know source has some playback abilities. I saw the fraps video and got curious. If so what codecs are supported? how to? The source sound player is the only thing I'm seeing for the first part. Also my programming is weak I'm an ISP/Docsis engineer so while I'm on the wrong side of the spectrum I can pick up things pretty quick and would be willing to help out with testing or workload depending on what it is. In the mean time passing this project to one of my counter-parts who does scripting to see if he wants to help out. |
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| SM_Sith_Lord | May 16 2011, 12:56pm Anchor | |
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In-game audio: In-game video playback: A note about video-playback performance: Even with professional coding, we can't expect the user to be able to have 10 full-length videos playing back at the same time without significant performance loss. A simple and common solution would be to limit video playback to 1 item at a time. For example, what ever cabinet the player is currently looking at could also be playing the video on its virtual screen. A note about video-streaming: We can't expect clients to be able to stream a video from their hard drive to all the peers in the mod without significant quality loss. This is due to crappy upload rates of residential internet connections. The best we could hope for, without involving central servers or p2p network techniques, would be to have the video streamed in web-cam quality resolutions. However, all video streaming implementations are beyond my knowledge of programming, so video streaming of local files off a client's hard drive is unlikely to make it into future releases. A far more promising technique for streaming videos in-game would be streaming the videos from a 3rd party's server, such as YouTube. Plugins exist for GMod that accomplish this very feat, however, these plugins are written in Python and implementing something like this into Source Media Arcade (which is a C++ project) is beyond my programming knowledge. However, with a little help, it seems like it would not be too difficult to implement streaming YouTube video playback. Thank you for spreading the word about the project, I am always looking for talented people who are enthusiastic about the concept. I will need help if this project is ever going to get where it should be, although the next version will be a huge step in the right direction. |
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| piscian | May 17 2011, 5:28am Anchor | |
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What I started heading towards after the thread post last night was changing the ambient soundscapes to a .wav of my choosing but the soundscape is linked to source sounds.gcf in the main hl2 directory and I don't know how to link it to a GCF in the mod directory. "Playsoundscape [soundscape name]" works fine via console. If I can figure that part out I think a jukebox object could be built and linked to a song or playlist locally or web based. I think (I'm dumb here) it could be made to auto stop start various soundscapes which are actually the song playlist links. I tried attaching a link to a foobar playlist tonight to an object but it crashes the mod. Testing it again with regular windows media player playlists today. I think I'm just getting greedy as the mod is so perfect already. I wish I had time to dive deeper into C++. Knowing how to troubleshoot cmts modulation profiles or ospf message digest hash keys doesn't do me much good in this source modding stuff. edit: thinking about it just having another gcf won't be enough because the sound files are in the GCF and while that could be changed linking to web based stuff would be far more difficult. I'm probably heading in the wrong direction with soundscapes anyway. Edited by: piscian |
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| SM_Sith_Lord | May 17 2011, 9:29am Anchor | |
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I'm not sure exactly what you doing. It is possible that you could get some custom sounds playing in-game by hijacking a Soundscape, but it would only play the files that you manually typed into the file. Remember that you can alt-tab with no delays in SM Arcade, so you could always just spawn a link that launches your media player or one that launches a media player playlist. However, if you really want your MP3's to be playing from within the Source engine, there is a console command to launch a built-in MP3 player. Just use the command "mp3" to open the mp3 player. Aside from the UI of the player itself being pretty ghetto, another problem with using the in-game MP3 player is that it mutes the music when ever you ALT+Tab away from SM Arcade. |
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| piscian | May 17 2011, 6:16pm Anchor | |
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My ultimate goal would be to make the music experience transparent to the user. Just messing around, but from reading your plans idealy in the multiplayer environment the source arcade would be hosted on a remote server. An object like a jukebox would be linked to a music source hosted on the server or another streaming service. The client would log into your hosted source arcade and be able to walk up to said jukebox object click it and have the music play from within the app without any clientside media player needing to be launched. It's an enormous task but in the interim I was trying to figure out a way to link and play music in the source arcade locally without any client media player being launched. Yeah alt-tab would mute sounds thats understandable. The mp3 tool is an idea, but though it's in the source app it's still not transparent to the user. I've seen CSS servers using Mani mod that have user controlled server based streaming music and I think that's the route I'm gonna investigate, but again this is my first experience with modding source. I've a long way to go. I agree streaming quality video in the app even if you could get codecs built in would be a resource monster. I'll get back to you if I find anything worth adding. Looking forward to seeing where you go with the multiplayer in beta 2. |
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