Source Media Arcade (Mod coming soon!)

[SM Sith Lord]

Hey everybody. Some of you might know me as a mapper, but this summer I set out to make a Source engine mod. I was hoping to have it completely finished by now, but due to the insane amount of only semi-expected set backs, its initial beta 1 release has been pushed back to the end of October, BUT it is far enough along now to really show what its about.

Source Media Arcade ModDB Profile

There are many videos on that profile demonstrating a handful of the features that SM Arcade has to offer, and I'm adding more as I find time to record them.

"Source Media Arcade is like a 3D frontend to everything you have on your computer. Use it to organize, view, and launch any game, application, or document that you might have sitting on your hard drive somewhere. It allows you to customize any Source engine world map in real-time with links to your personal media or documents, effectively turning any map into your own personal 3D desktop. Use it to create or customize virtual arcades, image galleries, or movie screening theaters that show and launch YOUR media directly from its location on your hard drive! SM Arcade can launch anything that Microsoft Windows can launch. Pictures, videos, games, applications, web links, folders, etc. SM Arcade also caterers especially to programs that take command-line arguments, as well as Steam games and links."

Video of how to automatically detect your Steam Games and have them populate an arcade:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/source-media- ... team-games

You can read the SUMMARY page on the ModDB profile for a long FAQ that explains a lot about how SM Arcade works.

The official forum and wiki for the mod are still under development, so I'll do my best to monitor this thread to answer any questions you guys might have.

SM Sith Lord

[Mr. Happy]

whoah

that;s really impressive

[Armageddon]

That is very impressive.

[Nightwolf70]

Sounds awesome, kinda like psn's home thing. Love it.

[Groxkiller585]

That is very impressive.

^ This ^

Though I think (unless the whole thing can occur In-game) this may not be as practical, but it certainly impressive in terms of coding.

[SM Sith Lord]

Hey, thanks for the replies.

Though I think (unless the whole thing can occur In-game) this may not be as practical, but it certainly impressive in terms of coding.

Well, if you mean playing the games on the virtual screens within the arcade, yes that would be very awesome. The closest that SM Arcade gets to that is running the game in a window right on top of SM Arcade. Same for videos, it can't show playing on the virtual screens (yet), but it can show them playing in a window on top of SM Arcade.

[Ark11]

Very nice work but this mod seems pointless?

[Groxkiller585]

Gmod has a few in-game video and image players. One is PlayX, so yeah it's possible, although the coding involved may be more extensive on your part becuase all they added was a few .LUA files, you'll need to code it from scratch.

[source-maps]

Very nice work but this mod seems pointless?

this

[Phott]

Very nice work but this mod seems pointless?

Aren't all mods pointless? Some people do it to entertain others, someone else might do it for the process of learning.

It sounds pretty cool though.

[source-maps]

Very nice work but this mod seems pointless?

Aren't all mods pointless? Some people do it to entertain others, someone else might do it for the process of learning.

It sounds pretty cool though.

pointless? mods are entertaining and fun, what's pointless is a 3d game to start a 3d game

but no disrespect or anything, looks really cool.. but I'm not going to be using it

[ThePain]

So you want me to run a copy of Source in the background while I launch and play another copy of source from it.

Yeah, I guess I wasn't using that 120 megs of ram and 1 of my processor cores anyway.

Also there's a very easy "Yo Dog" with this.

Aren't all mods pointless? Some people do it to entertain others, someone else might do it for the process of learning.

The point of most mods is for you to play them and enjoy them. The point of this mod is to get you to play other people's games.

So basically a remake of Zombie Panic Source.

[SM Sith Lord]

So you want me to run a copy of Source in the background while I launch and play another copy of source from it.

Yeah, I guess I wasn't using that 120 megs of ram and 1 of my processor cores anyway.

Lol. Well, you can't have two instances of the Orange Box Source engine running at the same time, but I see your point. However, it doesn't cause very much of a problem for me when playing simple games, and you can always have SM Arcade pause itself in the background for any resource intensive games you want to play, or shut down completely (as when launching Orange Box games).

Here is some info copied from another forum post regarding this:

When you launch a game, SM Arcade does 1 of 3 things, depending on the settings of the media item you are launching.

It can:
1. Launch the media in a window (or full screen) in front of SM Arcade, while leaving it fully open and running in the background (Good for things like Pictures or Videos, or any thing you want to leave open while you continue to explore the arcade).

2. Launch the media in a window (or full screen) in front of SM Arcade, but pause SM Arcade so it takes up minimal resources. In this case, it automatically unpauses SM Arcade when you close the media item that it opened.

3. Close down SM Arcade then launch your media item. (this is good for items that do not run well, for what ever reason, when SM Arcade remains open. For example, HL2, because it uses the same graphics engine which only allows 1 instance at a time)

You can set the launch options for each item on a case by case basis, OR when you are setting up auto-playlists.

Gmod has a few in-game video and image players. One is PlayX, so yeah it's possible, although the coding involved may be more extensive on your part becuase all they added was a few .LUA files, you'll need to code it from scratch.

Yes, I looked into a few of those, they are very nice. But as you said, they are .LUA files and not very helpful to me.

I did get SM Arcade to play video files on the virtual screens, but the problem was the C++ library I used to read the video data could only open a very specific encoding type of AVI file, so I figured it was not worth including in the first beta of the mod.

The point of most mods is for you to play them and enjoy them. The point of this mod is to get you to play other people's games.

Yes, I decided that enjoyment was pointless so I wanted to make my mod as unpleasant as possible.
Jokes aside, I should point out that this mod isn't only about games. You can launch anything from it, Word, Photoshop, Powerpoint.

As we can see, this mod isn't for everybody, but anybody who would rather walk down a hall way to locate a file rather than navigate through a series of windows should be able to get a lot of enjoyment out of this mod.

[ThePain]

The point of most mods is for you to play them and enjoy them. The point of this mod is to get you to play other people's games.

Yes, I decided that enjoyment was pointless so I wanted to make my mod as unpleasant as possible.
Jokes aside, I should point out that this mod isn't only about games. You can launch anything from it, Word, Photoshop, Powerpoint.

As we can see, this mod isn't for everybody, but anybody who would rather walk down a hall way to locate a file rather than navigate through a series of windows should be able to get a lot of enjoyment out of this mod.

I wasn't bashing the mod in this. I understand the point of it is to be an interactive launcher. I'm not judging it for not trying to be a replacement for Insurgency.

That was mostly just a set-up to make fun of Zombie Panic Source.

[Groxkiller585]

Well when it's out i'll give it a try. I probably won't like it much;not becuse it's poor, I just got to used to zipping through folders from custom model and texture useage.

EDIT: also how specific is the video code? Do you mean if it was not saved EXACTLY in one way it could not run, or could a standard AVI file work?

Image viewing should not be very hard, in fact in some of the vids I saw you put it on a surface. So maybe you could find a way to program it to make it behave like the movie as an animated texture...?