VisualStreamPlayer

A real-time media player for Unreal Engine 1 written in UnrealScript which draws frames on a ScriptedTexture. No audio is played.
Includes a streaming software.

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Streaming a local video with alpha clip

Streaming a video from the web

Multi-screen support

How does it work?

Streaming and drawing colored pixels requires too much data to receive for an old engine and too much computation to process it.

To overcome this, a font where glyphs are individual colored pixels can be used.
This way the media streamer just needs to send a character sequence where each character is represented by a colored pixel in the font.
Thanks to this we can draw lines of pixels rather than each pixel individually.

The colored font is created with FontFactory (a UE native class), which takes an image, where pixels are arranged to be interpreted as font glyphs, and converts it to a font which can used in-game.
This means we have to generate an image where each colored pixel is associated with a character according to how FontFactory interprets the pixels structure.

When calling drawText() the ScriptedTexture palette will be used. To prevent miscolorization we sync the palettes among textures and fonts.

Usage instructions

For mappers

As a mapper, you have to make sure display textures are aligned to fit the whole frame, display surfaces are aligned to each other in case of multi-screen setups and that textures are using the correct color tables.
You can find some setups within examples\ and an example map.

Here are the steps for a simple single-display setup.
After deciding on what color palette to use:

1. Create an image with the chosen palette that will be used for the display and import it as a Texture

2. Create a ScriptedTexture (ideally 64x64 on 469) and assign the previously created Texture to sourceTexture

3. Create a map and apply the ScriptedTexture on a surface

4. Align the UV to fit a whole frame on the surface. Keep in mind that the actual size of the drawn frame will be 1 row and 1 column less for technical reasons

5. Add a VSPDisplayManager and set at least these properties as following:

   • palTex - Assign the Texture
   • palFont - Assign the Font
   • scrTex - Assign the ScriptedTexture

For server owners

For the sake of this guide, it's assumed you're going to use the example streamer from this project. Therefore, refer to the section Streamer in Running the Examples.

Build Instructions

This guide is about compiling the core packages. If, instead, you are looking to setup the streamer, refer to the section Streamer in Running the Examples.

You can either copy the packages from packages\ to the game root directory and build them the way you'd build any other package, or you can follow the steps below (on Windows).

NOTE: UCC doesn't recognize paths that contain spaces.

1. Rename make.ini.template (within packages\) to make.ini, open it and set Paths (in the section [Core.System]) with the path to the game core packages
2. Open a terminal within packages\ and set the GAME_PATH environment variable: set GAME_PATH=C:\Game\Path
3. Run make.bat. This should create the package in the System directory of the game

NOTE: It's not necessary with 469 servers/clients but you may want to give a unique name to the package.