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Oh hey, I remember thinking about that! I'll have to second that suggestion even though I'd never ever ever be able to use it, lol.

I can give you the ability to overlay an MPEG1 file over part or all of the screen. (It would be atop the screen, rather in the background like a video file.) MPEG1 will be the only format supported, as I'm not a miracle worker.

I just did a technology test, and got to see Studio Ghibli's little known music video "On Your Mark" from within PyGame. So it should work... I need to solve some issues, like what happens if a user tries to save the game from inside a video. (Or more properly, how to suppress that.)

PM me to let me know when you need it by.

Edit: Wow, that was easy. MPEG-1 support is now in my codebase. You can read the documentation here.

Is this only for mpgs or can other files be used as well? I'm particularly curious about swf support.... =)

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It's only for MPEG-1 files. That's because there's a library that's part of SDL/Pygame that can handle MPEG-1s. To support SWF (or any other format), I'd have to right all the integration (and perhaps the decoding) code myself... and that's way too much work.

The MPEG support is in no real rush for me, as I suspect I'll be considering something like it late fall, after everything else is done, so realistically - next year ^_^. I just wondered, because while in our system it's possible to play videos, it's exactly the same problem you mentioned - it's atop rather than in the background. So if it's impossible, it's impossible, it's not like I critically need it - I just thought of say an overlayed figure while the BG is moving - it'd be a nice touch. Anyway, general movie support is great!

I think it would be pretty tough to handle overlayed video well, just due to the way that video is played on a modern computer, with acceleration and all that. Not impossible... but not easy, either.

How high of a framerate do you need for the background movie? It might be possible to do something using Ren'Py's own layout engine, using the animation feature or something like that.

Well, with some work, I managed to get overlayed movie support going. Ren'Py can now composite characters over a movie background. It's fairly slow when done this way, as we can't take advantage of hardware acceleration support. Still, for a 640x480 game it might be fast enough to be useful.

I have no problem displaying things at 1024x768 using the hardware accelerated fullscreen, on the other hand.

*bows down* This is just... I don't know, sometimes I think the world is divided into people who talk and people who deliver. It's just too bad I can't use it right now, but I'm sure going to be doing some testing - and I finally have an excuse to "borrow" that hi-tech digicam from my bro

Thanks, mikey, for the kind words.

I'm coming up to the end of the 4.5 development cycle. I redid the rendering code to make it faster (seeing the next screen can take as little as .01 seconds on my computer), and added not one, not two, but fourteen new transitions. (Different variants of wipes, slides, and rectangular irises.)

I still have a few changes to make related to the customizability of the game menu, and a few extra surprises to add in. But if people want any new features in the 4.5 series, now's the time to ask for them. I'll probably cut the release in a few days, and then it's on to an IntRenAiMo project.

In the immortal words of Teddy Roosvelt: Bully!

PyTom, I have a request but you don't have to get it done now if you can't get to it.

Can you add more text properties? I would like to add emphasis on certain words in the say statements with bolds and italics. If you want to throw in underlines and so forth, it's up to you. Thanks! ^_^

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Okay, first things first. Do you want to have entire passages of text in bold or italics? If that's the case, that's an easy change that I can get done fairly quickly.

What's harder is mixing bold and italic text with normal text. This would allow individual words in a passage to be bolded/italicized. This is actually a bit harder, as it will require me to go and add something not unlike html or bbcode to Ren'Py. We'd need to be able to say something like "This is {b}bold{/b}. This is {i}italic{/i}. This is {color=#f000}red{/color}. And this is {size=+10}big{/size}."

That's harder, but something that I plan to do eventually anyway, as it's the general solution to the problem. (Something which always appeals to me.)

So I think another question is how soon do you want this?

#1: The harder one.
#2: If you can do it - before NaNoRenO. If not, I'll think of another solution. Hmmm.... Better yet, unless someone else requests it, hold off until after March. I'll use an alternative method... hee hee heee...
Thanks PyTom! ^_^

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Ren'ai Games (Archived)
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I'm going ahead and implementing it. Probably in the first release with it, they'll be {b}, {i}, {plain}, {size}, and {font} tags.

Didn't you have a game that was due out before the Mo?

Yup, I am... ^_____^

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Ren'ai Games (Archived)
Manga Tutorials
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Waaaaaait a minute... Such a big smile... *checks the Valentine's day thread...*** Hmmm.... Wonder, wonder...