how about a super slim minimalistic (EZ)Quake binary that allows demos to be played directly in browser (embedded with an OCX control) by streaming MVD from some place (like from QTVs new function of playing demos)?

would be another landmark for QW and general FPS technology

this has already been achieved for fighting games on GGPO

however the replays are really small (~22 KB on average).
demo filesize problem in QW could be solved with MVD streaming.

I think the size of the models, maps textures etc will be a problem

tbh, it's a huge project and it's manpower we don't really have, unless someone dedicates a lot of work into that. There's just so much else we could do

320x240 won't work on a webpage?

I like the sound of that.

Maybe. Maybe not. Let me explain ...

There is the Shockwave Flash Quake thing that someone made. Someone could ask him for the source.

http://necromanthus.com/Games/ShockWave/quake.html

/just raw thoughts

hah, funny shit ;]

From coder's point of view I can't even estimate the time it'd take to do this. Any hints?

Would take three hours for Qqshka once he's released from the Novgorüdniyj coal mine in the east!

That Shockwave qw looks quite nice.

One other idea that came up thinking about this was to make a generic demo to vid tool which would automatically make a good vid with nice settings.

Could have settings like:
Graphics type
- plain
- faithful
- eyecandy
- particle madness

Resolution
FPS
Encoding
etc.

Would also be a really nice service if you could simply upload a demo to a site and the site would automatically create a vid from it to display directly with a flash video player.

Also concerning the filesizes. We are talking about really quite small files even if they are 4on4. These are like upto 6mb in mvd, add to that support for gzipping, you can prolly get to like 2-3mb. Also do we want to be able to view all povs, to have it like a real environment in that sense. I guess I would. I would love to watch live streams from a browser based player :]

The question is:
Why would you want to do this when you can easily watch the MVDs in all their hi-resolution glory in the original engine?

Well just as a really simply real life example:

Now that I don't play qw, I don't have qw installed at all because I'm such a fiend for it. I've also taken out my better graphics card because I don't really need it and the new Zalman fan on it was too big for the case to shut correctly, so now I'm running a builtin shitcard that apparently doesn't even work out of the box with nQuake (I tried . So if I want to be a casual follower of the scene for the time being and for example view interesting demos from recent games from somewhere else, I wouldn't have to worry about installing much of anything.

We're trying to get hold of ppl who would be able to add support to ezQuake to output video data in such a form that it can be used in for example in VLC Player as a source and from there broadcasted in whatever way.

Any help is highly appreciated.

I've been asking developers about this for ages, would be pretty cool with a engine that just instead of outputting anything to the screen, just do a mpg stream

Ogg Theora ftw! (Well, not yet maybe)

The most simple way of doing this would be on *NIX system - instead of writing images to the drive (video people usually do it this way?) the image data should be piped to some cryptic videolan command line and sent to a remote located RTP server like Darwin Streaming Server or Helix Server?

It will take quite some hardware ressources though! You need to be able to the usual QW rendering and some decent image resizing and realtime video encoding.

I think this is a waste of a lot of effort and time for nothing! Quake players used to have a copy of the game installed in their machines! Like 5h17h34d said, if I want to watch a demo, I'll watch it using Quake. If the machine I'm using don't have a graphic card, I can always use the software version of the client. It's 1000 times better than waste my time converting a demo into a huge video which I'm going to watch one time.

And I'm a player, ask a non player if will he waste his time converting QW demos into videos?

I don't want to be rude to you vegetous, but with this quote it's hard to not be rude as the main reason for a feature like this is to attract players that do not play Quakeworld today.

Edit:
Imagine the ideal scenario: every game you play could within like 15 minutes after the game be available on a site like Youtube (maybe not as big, but you get the concept) for any player to watch the game after having downloaded some plugin to the web browser, even if he doesn't have Quakeworld. It's a part of spreading the word to get more players, which in turn makes one of our hobbies survive to the 22nd century etc.

Great, three features! Who gives more? :-) Anyway, which of these three seem the most important to you?
1 - web plugin
2 - demo to avi converter
3 - current action to mpeg stream functionality
(2) and (3) seem quite connected .. I can imagine that by solving (2), (3) gets automatically solved too, and vice versa.

Most important: #1
Most reasonable when taking time to develop etc into consideration (after having read the developer reactions to this thread): #2/3

Can you name a player that started playing Quake because of an awesome movie he saw? I can't (been honest)!

The fact you'll be able to quicly add any movie's match to Youtube means nothing, if there's no public to your videos!

I agree that convert some top commented demos into videos and host it somewhere, should be something handy, to, for example, show the qw gameplay to a friend. But do not fool yourself my friend, there's no crowd out there willing to discover Quake! And a bunch of videos will not change this!

I think that developer's time (ezQuake) should be used to do what they are doing right now, making it as easiest as possible for new players!

Gzip using max compression is more like half the size of the original file at best.

There should be several players who started out like that on this very forum.

Here's one

Wouldn't it be more easy to make a java quake?

Well isn't that kinda what we're talking about here? (which seems to be such a huge task that the current Quakeworld programmers can't even estimate the time consumption)

no it's not about Java or Flash.

GGPO uses an OCX (Object Linking and Embedding) control which launches the emulator (DirectX 9.0 compliant) directly in the browser.

so i was thinking of linking EZQuake to the browser through such control..
but a really stripped down version of EZQuake to not put a lot of strain on the user's system making the browser or workspace unusable.

btw there's a java quake2 version

And?

Why not convert your demo to avi and embed? I know its not the technical-point, but if watching demos on the web is the main focus why reinvent the car just to listen to the stereo?