Flic flickering

[simulacra]

When starting a FLIC movie, the screen goes black very briefly before displaying the film. This makes my fullscreen animations that start with the room graphic not look so smooth as they could have. Is this possible to fix somehow?

[Pumaman]

The screen is cleared before the FLIC starts in order to ensure that there are no traces of the room left over if the flic is smaller than the screen.

If this poses a big problem for you, it can probably be changed.

[simulacra]

But my FLICs are the same size as the screen. This is not a big problem, but it would be nice if the clearing was optional.

[Gilbert]

Well, in addition I think it can be cool if in addition we can play a FLIC unstretched (already possible) but without clearing the background (what we're in) and you can set manually the coordinates of the upper-left corner of the movie (I think the text scripting functionality is more flexible now, so we can use optional parameters for this, without breaking old usage).
It's just a suggestion and I don't know if it's of interest to many users (actually I don't care about it, as I'll probably never use any FMVs anyway), so I haven't add this to the tracker yet.

On the other hand, as far as games using FLICs that I had played, that brief flickering doesn't seem to be that noticiable (maybe it also depends on the resolution and/or colour depth), which is acceptable to me, I think it's up to you on whether it's acceptable though.
Personally if this is not hard to implement, I'm on the "for" side of implementing it in the next version.

[simulacra]

What makes FLIC really nice is the portability. I think your suggestions sound reasonable. But it really is up to CJ.

[Pumaman]

It wouldn't be too difficult to add an extra option to PlayFlic to tell it not to clear the screen, so I'll certainly consider this.