Integrated Webbroser Panel

[JoTo]

As the title says my suggestion here integrated webbrowser panel.

As you know its allready possible to integrate pictures into maps, so I thought it would be cool if that would also be possible with video clips and then why not a complete webbroser panel for the most flexibility.

That would open a lot of possibilties, like integrating videos and pictures and projecting them onto a wall, server admins could use it to post actual server and clan infos with all the features webbrowsers allow the easy way, or pimp up maps with other pictures.
If it would be possible to also have a webbroser as an integrated overlay more features would be possible like server administration, player live information, live chatter, server shop, clan fan article shop, live streams, and and and, well just a few ideas but in general everything you can today realize with web techniques.

[Elgan]

berlkium and awesomium

might have the names memorized slightly wrong.

but of course this would be client side patch stuff, and quite frankly a lot of work for not much gain..I thought uw ere going to say integrate it into the UI ....for server browser or mod downlaoding or something...

and I found berk a bitch to compile for different platforms..awesomium is great ,


I cant imagine this is a priority tho

[JoTo]

I just wrote it down here so its not lost somewhere in nirwana, but it has no priority. Absolut priority has for me the autodownload function.

You mean with UI the intro screen in mohaa ? Well if lets say awesomium would be incorporated in the game engine it should be possible to access it from the UI. Features you mentioned like server browser or mod downloading and more should be possible.

The big advantage using a webbrowser would be that its a platform inside a platform and a possible developer base is much higher than if (probably Razo on his own) would implement it natively into the engine. It would speed up things I guess, basically everyone with webdev skills can develop something for the game. And Im sure once this is setup more ideas would arise.

(I remember now, was it idea of you James ?, someone talking about implementing mini-Tetris while being in spectator of objective game mode, stuff like that would be easy going with webbrowser panel)

[heatsinkbod]

Got me excited Joto

[James]

Yup, wow, you have good memory! My idea was with pong, but same concept yes.

My idea was like this..

if(gametype == objective && if you're spectating)
{
render a small tetris game within the game itself via openGL
}

Sure you can do a browser "theoratically", but it would have to be rendered via OpenGL. I don't think there is any other way to render the browsers. Most of our modern day browsers are rendered via OS specific syntax, but I don't think that same concept could be used to render on top of a game, so it would need to be done in OGL.

[Razo[R]apiD]

Well, this is an interesting idea, but I don't really know yet how we could inject it as a texture and project onto walls or include it as mohaa UI widget so you can combine it into menus etc. I could only draw it on 2D space for now.

But it's possible and doable etc. We would need to really think about use cases though. It would be really interesting if we could combine it with another concept of ranked servers. Players could fire up MoHAA, embedded browser would load JS application and you could log into your account, have a match-making system, chat with people etc.

[James]

I'd say 2D space is fine. There is no need to get into anything crazy.

I looked into Awesomeium and it looks pretty solid.

[Razo[R]apiD]

Well, I think we should decide what we want to achieve with it. It's not worth spending time on doing uber generic concept that won't be really used. But if we come up with a dedicated solutions, I'm going to add this as soon as we make client run stable.

[James]

My initial idea with the tetris\pong game was based on this intention..

When I play in an obj or a freezetag game and the server has a lot of players and the match is taking some time, I don't have the patience to sit and watch until the match is done.
So I thought it would be cool to drop down console and do something like
pong 1 or tetris 1

and turn on a tetris game within your MOHAA game (this would be cleintside obviously). Then if the match finishes and restarts, your tetris game would pause and resume when you turn it back on.
As far as having a built in browser is concerned, I'm not really sure what incentive it would give the game or user aside from just allowing them to keep themselves busy while the objective match\game is still running.

[JoTo]

awesomion website: http://awesomium.com/

example awesomion integrated into torque3d engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frznHHWPAZE


I think this is pretty neat that they made a bridge between the webbrowser and the script engine, something like this I had in mind for it, no idea how hard it would be to include into our mohaa though.

I agree with Razo, we should make detailed concepts first of things we would to archieve with this before even trying to implement this.