DRD Team

Is it possible to have the game pause and call up media player to play a movie file of some sort, then return to the game?

If so, how is it done?

No, it isn't. The only way to achieve cutscenes is to script them using ACS.

Or fraggle.

Drat.

Just so you know - in case you see people mentioning it, there is supposed to be a feature in Zdoom that does exactly what you ask (it has been there for years).

However, it never worked properly, was never actually used by anyone (in a released project at least (possibly because it never worked properly and was liable to cause crashes or other annoying problems)) so there was a general lack of interest and it never really got supported. It doesn't work (or perhaps has been disabled) in GZdoom and now doesn't work in Zdoom either (I just tried and the video played (I could hear it) but it only showed a black screen and it was difficult to get back to Zdoom). It is very unlikely to ever be fixed. It's more likely that it will be removed entirely.

The reason I am interested in it is that I am about to convert another one of my project, The Ultimate Chex Quest, over from Legacy to GZDooM.

The original version of Chex Quest had animated cutscenes with it ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSpGQ5AVJpI ). I plan on adding my own animated cutscenes the T.U.C.Q., and need a good way of doing it. (The original one was pretty crude, so I am hoping to do my own new animation.)

I have already gotten a version of the animated cutscene to work using a camera and fraggle script, but packing the wad full of animations is extremely awkward, and will take up a lot of space. It would be much easier to make the animations external and call them from within the game.

I tried PlayMovie some time ago with the following results

http://forum.drdteam.org/viewtopic.php? ... ght=#17913

Therefore, there is no point of using it in GZDoom. However, I agree, it would be a great feature.

I used to do this in ZDoom years ago. Never had a problem with it. Don't know what the big deal is. Must be busted in the newer versions of ZDoom and GZDoom.

If you want, email me and I'll dig up what I did at the time.

PlayMovie doesn't work with OpenGL. As a result I disabled all associated code.

Any thoughts on the future of this function, or another compatible version of it?

Yeah, better forget about it. The fact that it is Windows exclusive makes it a little unappealing anyway.

PlayMovie was cool,the only thing was what I didn't like about it: the method of playing.I could not define to play the movie from the wad itself.Without this the function is nearly useless.(however the movie can increase the wad's size)