Easy to Use Flash on a Prim

Hey gang!

Many people are eagerly awaiting HTML on a prim. However, in the meantime, there is something we can use in world to a similar effect that I haven't seen used very much: Flash on a prim. While not fully interactive, it can be made quite easily to advance through slides on a timer or a click using SL with the Quicktime Player.

I don't know Flash, but have found a relatively easy solution for creating Flash movies.

First, you'll need the latest version of OpenOffice. You can get it here:
http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.2/index.html

Install Open Office, then open the IMPRESS application (this is a Powerpoint clone; you can also use Microsoft Powerpoint if you prefer). Then simply create a presentation. If you created using Powerpoint, save it, and open the saved presentation in Impress. The simply go to FILE ---> EXPORT. You'll see there's an option to save it as a SWF (Flash) file. Then simply put it on a server and you can use it in-world!

This allows anyone who knows Powerpoint and has web space to create pretty cool interactive multimedia presentations for use in-world. I'm planning on making some tutorials soon for various projects I'm involved with. I figured I'd share the knowledge that this is out there, and freely available.

Regards,

-Flip

Wow! thanks Flip! Great idea!

This rules, Flip. What did you have in mind for changing slides on click?

Triggering the "Play" function within LSL will cause the Flash presentation to move to the next slide in the tests I've done thus far.

Woot, will experiment with this.

I'll have to play with this later, but...

1. Thanks!

2. Is there nothing OpenOffice can't do?

So I'm assuming that if someone doesn't have Flash installed, or doesn't have the right version, they simply won't see anything? Or will it crash their client?

I've victimized myself plenty of times with bad Quicktime links, so now I'm reluctant to stream new movies to my land Would the same problem occur in Flash?

I was playing with flash "slides" a year ago when 1.6 came out. It kinda works, I could display different slides. But for some reason they were out of sync when more than one person was watching it, especially when a person joined the parcel in the middle of a "presentation".


Cindy: It IS qucktime, which has an embedded Flash5 player.

To further explain what is happening here:

The Quicktime player has some limited Actionscript* support such as playback control functions. When the Actionscript stop(); function occurs, the embedded Quicktime player stops the frame advance. Clicking the play button in your SL viewer (or via LSL script) presses the play button again in the embedded Quicktime player and thus advances to the next frame and continuing the Flash timeline until it is told to stop again or ends.

* Actionscript is the scripting language for Flash. Very similar to LSL.

Harris described it well.

Cindy, the way it works is that everyone on the land sees the same Flash presentation, but its not streamed, so everyone can interact with the Flash demo separately. This is great for things like "how to's", so everyone can can have their own instance of the demonstation, but not so good for things like slideshows being given alongside a presentation.

Quicktime 6/7 can handle Flash/ActionScript up to version 6, which is most of the Flash out there. There are very few Flash movies I've encountered which don't play smoothly within Second Life, although the stop button doesn't always work reliably.

I'd like to see a bunch of these Flash films put in somewhere like Oak Grove, so new residents could easily education themselves. Simply put a Flash movie one each plot with a view screen, one topic per land plot. Step by step instructions on things like opening a box, what to do, how to get money, and so forth would be much more useful in a rich-media form than a notecard.

Regards,

-Flip

This due to being a "client side" effect?

Exactly. In fact, all audio and video playback is done indepentantly of the SL viewer and is completely client-side. Even streaming content like radio stations aren't exactly in sync when a group listens. In a live radio stream, everyone hears the music at nearly the same time but in reality, due to each individual player and latency, each person is hearing the audio a second or more off from each other.

Quicktime movies themselves can be made to have this same limited interactivity, and I know that Keynote has the ability to export both SWF and interactive QT - for use like this, I might be inclined at this point to lean toward the interactive QT, since I've found QT's SWF support to be a bit flakey, but I haven't tried any of this in-world - neat idea though. Could also just segment up several "cues" for a show (though you have to have the audience do their own advancing).

if i remember you can name frames, like frame1, frame2

and if you cann the url like http://myflashmovie.swf#frame1 it will jump to the frame named frame1

That's true but unfortunately, the Quicktime player doesn't understand those type of URL. The URL must end with the filename itself.

oh crap it reject the params? well i guess using httprequestyou could send the data to the server then reload the flash wich would be sent differently by the server using the param send.. sound complicated

I have noodled around with this a bit today, with some success. Thanks to Flip for bringing this up in the first place, this looks like it could be a bit useful.

I couldn't bear to learn OpenOffice, so I started with KeyNote 3 on one of my Macs. which I already knew how to use.

First thing I found was that KeyNote can export .swf files, but I didn't find this worked reliably in-world, even with only a single viewer. Using an in-world play control sometimes skipped a frame, or failed to advance. Might be a Mac viewer issue, might be a KeyNote issue, no idea.

With the KeyNote .swf files, using the client's pause then play would reliably advance a single frame for that viewer, but no-one else could see the change. I guess that's to be expected.

I tried again with an interactive QuickTime movie exported from KeyNote with much better results. Not only was frame advance reliable, but it worked for a second and third viewer as long as (a) the first viewer used an in-world play control to advance the presentation and (b) the other viewers didn't mess with their client pause/play control. This was a mix of PC and Mac clients.

I was surprised to find that a real presentation of mine with lots of animated builds also worked this way... seems that KeyNote makes a 24fps H.264 movie when you ask for this and as long as you can play these back you're fine; builds are sequenced correctly and you click to move to the next one. The only problem I ran into with this is that animated presentations are much bigger (mine was about 8MB) and things don't work smoothly until everyone has a copy of the whole movie. At least, that's downloading using http://; unfortunately the streaming service I use seems to be up the pole just now so I can't test whether streaming improves this just now.

Anyway, some data points for people interested in this. I can *just about* see this working for real presentations, combined with a Skype conference or something similar from some other VoIP system.