Requests for additional extensions (?)

[Rado1]

Dear all,

as a developer of several external libraries for physic engines, skeletal animation, sound systems, OUYA, Android controllers and sensors, etc. I would like to know your requirements for additional extensions of ZGE you miss at the moment. Would you like to have support for some 3rd-party libraries, PC or Android-based devices (Google Nexus Player, Cam Trax, Leap Motion), or gaming systems APIs (e.g. Google Play, Steam, Game Jolt, ...)?

In order to develop API for a physical device I would need it; and from this POW, supporting stand-alone libraries and gaming systems is much easier... but still interesting if someone needs, e.g., to make money and/or prestige with ZGE on app stores.

Rado1.

[VilleK]

Good initiative.

What springs to mind is support for Occulus Rift. Although I do not own such a device or know anything about how much work would be required.

[Rado1]

What springs to mind is support for Occulus Rift.

That's an interesting device. With their C++ SDK is quite easy to track positioning sensors, but more challenging part will be rendering. Oculus SDK supports also rendering by OpenGL so with a little luck it could be doable easily also in ZGE. Unfortunately, the device is not so cheap ($350) so I'll probably will not buy at the moment. But I'm open to gifts like this

[StevenM]

Would you like to have support for some 3rd-party libraries,

Thanks Rado,

OpenCV is a must have computer vision library. Available to most programming languages, it is something I miss in ZGE. Even though it's a huge library - it only takes a few lines of code to do things like Face detection and motion tracking. Well documented and lot of examples on the web.

[Rado1]

Hi StevenM, what would be (your) desired usage of OpenCV in ZGE? I do not know about it too much, but at the first look I could imagine that OpenCV can be used in image or video editor, but how to use it in ZGE? You are right, OpenCV is quite a huge library maybe you have some special needs... do you have?

[Imerion]

As said, very nice initiative! There's nothing I can think of for the moment, but I will think about it and return.
More Android-devices woulld be cool, I'd use that, and I guess the STEAM API would help a lot making ZGE more popular, so those two are certainly interesting.

Also, Occulus Rift would be awesome, but I don't have the money for one either at the moment so I wouldn't be able to use it anyway. Interesting idea though!

[StevenM]

Hi StevenM, what would be (your) desired usage of OpenCV in ZGE? I do not know about it too much, but at the first look I could imagine that OpenCV can be used in image or video editor, but how to use it in ZGE? You are right, OpenCV is quite a huge library maybe you have some special needs... do you have?

Check out youTube vids for opencv.

Mostly the core features motion tracking, object, face tracking/detection would be most useful for ZGE. The lower level stuff is more useful for industrial and research applications. Apps that can replace a face in a a photo or video with someone else face, control a camera through head movement, count faces in a crowd, track pedestrians, auto crop a portrait from any photo you take, recognize and search for a face in a photo...All posibilbe with opencv, and quite easy to do.

[Rado1]

Mostly the core features motion tracking, object, face tracking/detection would be most useful for ZGE.

I see. The problem would be to feed ZGE with realtime camera output, at least on Windows and Android. It's probably doable, but I have no idea how at the moment... should be explored more. Maybe somebody (Kjell?) has some ideas.

[Kjell]

Hi Rado1,

The problem would be to feed ZGE with realtime camera output, at least on Windows and Android.

I'm not familiar with OpenCV, but i suspect you can simply get a pointer to the camera data .. which you can easily pass-to & use-in ZGE ( as texture data ). That's how it works with ( the stereo infrared data of ) Leap Motion as well.

By the way, perhaps a bit controversial among some developers .. but a wrapper for a ( Android ) in-app purchase or advertisement platform could be useful as well.

K

[Rado1]

Explored little bit more and it seems that OpenCV could capture video by itself... there is a VideoCapture class and I found some examples how the capturing output can be displayed with OpenGL... it maybe could work also on Android with JNI... i'll maybe study OpenCV more.

By the way, perhaps a bit controversial among some developers .. but a wrapper for a ( Android ) in-app purchase or advertisement platform could be useful as well.

I also thought about this. We have IAP suppport for OUYA, why not for Google Play? I need to have a closer look at API and support for NDK.

So OpenCV and Google Play API are good candidates for further extensions so far. Are there some developers here who would really use them?

[StevenM]

Mostly the core features motion tracking, object, face tracking/detection would be most useful for ZGE.

I see. The problem would be to feed ZGE with realtime camera output, at least on Windows and Android. It's probably doable, but I have no idea how at the moment... should be explored more. Maybe somebody (Kjell?) has some ideas.

Yes - Though opencv can work with input images - the live cam seems to be what most people are interested in.

OpenCV has built in functions to stream read and display video capture,

the read video stream would be fine -
cvCaptureFromCAM(CV_CAP_ANY); //Capture Stream

The data gets processed per frame by opencv, and returns things like rectangular coordinates of detected/tracked objects, number of objects detected, name of a detected item...

but how that would display in the ZGE windows is something I would not know. Ville created an experimental live cam for the ZGE visualizer, i'm pretty sure he knows a way.

[Rado1]

FYI I just created a demo of external library for OpenCV, see this topic for details. If you like it I can continue with its development...

[Rado1]

After some disappointments with OpenCV memory leaking I decided to temporarily stop working on ZgeCV and to try something different...

Because there are some improvements with sprite support in ZGE, what do you think about external library for 2D skeletal animation? For instance, a wrapper for spine-c, a c++ interface for Spine animations. Or are there some better, maybe more standardized, formats and editors for 2D skeletal animation?

[Kjell]

Hi Rado1,

Because there are some improvements with sprite support in ZGE, what do you think about external library for 2D skeletal animation? For instance, a wrapper for spine-c, a c++ interface for Spine animations.

Something like Spine shouldn't be a external library ( in my opinion ). The Unity / Flash / LÖVE etc runtimes are written in their native language as well. Aside from that it's also commercial / paid software ..

Or are there some better, maybe more standardized, formats and editors for 2D skeletal animation?

Why not simply use your own skeletal animation extension and simply use a flat mesh / ignore the z-axis?

K

[Rado1]

Something like Spine shouldn't be a external library ( in my opinion ). The Unity / Flash / LÖVE etc runtimes are written in their native language as well. Aside from that it's also commercial / paid software ..

I mentioned Spine, because it provides a good editor (probably the best for 2D skeletal animation) and public C++ API. So in this case the extension could be done in an easy way.

Why not simply use your own skeletal animation extension and simply use a flat mesh / ignore the z-axis?

Hmmm... the problem is mapping of sprite positions, rotations and sizes to 3D skelet. And also a good editor. But I'm not 100% sure, maybe I'll do some more exploration of this possibility.