I've met another trouble with removing hacks from AGS to be able to update it keep every port with latest version of Allegro. I described it here: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/407
In short, there is only one way that will work on all platforms for now: to load up whole FLI movie into memory and play it that way. How good is that? Depends on how large flics are. Is there any limit for them?
Alternatives are:
- patch Windows version of Allegro and let it play FLI from custom game package. But other ports will work only if FLI video is lying in game directory as external file. This effectively breaks all the existing games with FLI videos, until someone rips FLI out of package.
- find another library that plays FLI and add its as a new dependency to AGS.
- copy whole FLI player into AGS.
What about letting FLIC go entirely and support animated gifs instead. AFAIK the functionality is almost identical and it is way more common. Apart from Scavenger nobody is currently using .flc anyway. Short video sequences can even be done by loops and views (which is what I did back in the days).
Supporting ancient games can still be handled by Scumm VM ;)
But I start getting the level of despair of what it means maintaining all those hacks and backwards compatibilty.
Definitely just add GIF support instead of FLC, I'll just rerelease my games that use FLC to use GIF instead, it's actually a way better format anyway (GIFs are tiny, FLCs aren't).
And I only used FLC because it was the only thing that could play videos in 8-bit format. If GIF was supported instead, I wouldn't mourn the loss of FLC at all. (I'm actually really sorry about this, I really should have used a view instead)
If only this was suggested earlier, but I am at the point where I must finalize the new release, which means I cannot spare any time for new formats right now. I just need to find a quick optimal solution...
Then I'd say: if you can actually find another library, go number 2 (maybe that would even support gif :) ) Otherwise I'd suggest to load them into the memory.
@Scavenger: How big are your files? Mine didn't exceed 2 MB if I remember correctly.
Btw. I would have suggested GIF support earlier, but since I can't help with the implementation, I didn't want to add more raise the stress level with even more demands ;)
Would this be of any help?
https://github.com/aseprite/flic
I proposed my patch to Allegro team. In the past they accepted a patch to MIDI functions that AGS needed.
The issue with these is, even if they are accepted, whether Linux users will agree to build Allegro 4 from WIP branch (since it is not know if there is going to be actual new Allegro 4.* release).
If this works, the issue may be solved, at least for now.