Sgine + VLC = Awesomeness

I have long been interested in being able to play video in OpenGL and if you look back at previous posts I've made here, as well as posts at matthicks.com you'll see most of my previous work has been around the use of JMC (one of the only cool things to come out of JavaFX 1.x). However, it had significant problems playing specific kinds of videos and was just generally buggy. In this new remix of Sgine I'm adding a new project that provides complete support for VLC through the use of the VLCJ project.

Here are a couple screenshots taken in my testing using "Better Off Ted":





Still very preliminary, but both sound and video are displaying flawlessly on the screen. The great features of VLC include the ability to play practically any video file or stream, record from a webcam, watch DVDs, play audio, and even record the desktop. This will open the door for lots of useful non-game applications utilizing Sgine I hope.

It will probably be a while before I commit this new project as I still have a lot of tweaking and customization to do before it's ready. Additionally, this will likely rely on the still undefined scenegraph model for this iteration so check back frequently as there's much more to come.

Writing Tetris

I'm currently in the process of writing a couple small games in an effort to use Sgine for some real-world game development in order to fill in any wholes and evaluate how easy it is to use in a complete application. The first simple game on my agenda is Tetris. I'd say I'm about half-way finished writing it, and I think it's coming along pretty well:



As you can see I'm using 3d cubes to represent pieces and though the game itself is still played on two dimensions the appearance is in 3d slightly translucent and rotated on the x-axis in order to give it a little more depth. I'll post a link to play the game once it is finished, but I know many people have asked if there are any practical examples of Sgine and I just wanted to send out this note to let everyone know that there will be soon. :)

Also, you can't see it from the screenshot obviously, but I have the original Tetris theme playing in the background on loop. Oh, how it takes me back to playing on the Gameboy as a kid. :)