ZGameEditor forum

I'd like to have a short intro before the game starts, like a short animated gif, something like this:
(link)
(if you just click on it, give it a bit of time to load)
So nothing special, just images changing on the screen with a bit of slidings and effects (not even synchronized with sound). I realize ZGE is meant for other things / I shouldn't be doing this but a nice intro would really help set the mood... doesn't hurt to ask I guess.

I don't know any cross-platform way of doing this, but for windows you might look into converting a animated gif to an avi file and use some Win32 API functions to display it. I don't remember if we have had any such examples before? If Kjell is around then maybe he know.

I understand, maybe it can be done like that. Thanks for the suggestion, I didn't think of that!

I know this is an old thread, but I am trying to get an avi to play at the start of a game, as an intro exactly as rrtea mentioned. Any ideas?

Hi jinxtengu,

There's no easy way to play a video without a DLL. On Windows there's the AVIFile interface .. but you can't use that from ZGE ( you'd need to write a wrapper ). And MCI commands don't really play nicely with a OpenGL application, it's possible to make it work but it's not exactly clean solution.

I'd advice going with a decoder DLL for a specific codec of your choice instead of a library that supports a "blanket" of codecs. You don't want to ship with a 100MB DLL just to play a 5MB intro AVI.

K

What I did for my intro is just show a bunch of images separately / in succession, using a Tileset component (so like a slideshow). It wasn't the same as playing a gif but it allowed me to time the music and sound effects very easily within ZGE. Not sure whether this solution can work for you, depends on how detailed your video is.

Thanks for the responses. I think I'll be able to figure something out.

In response to rrTea, I'm curious about the game you mentioned, in that I wouldn't mind checking it out. Do you have a link to where it can be downloaded from?

I don't have a build online anymore but I managed to find an old video of what it looked like at one point in time, not the most recent version (I rearranged the story later) but that's the system I used:
video (right click & Save AS… skip to 01:12)