NSPluginWrapper Happenings

Hi, here a few updates concerning nspluginwrapper.

Project commodities. Many people asked for usual project commodities like mailing-lists and a bug reporting system. I don't want to host that myself because that would require users to create yet another account elsewhere. SourceForge or Savannah-based systems don't suit me because (i) I don't like the interface and (ii) I want to keep the SVN tree hosted on my server at this time (which Savannah wouldn't allow, AFAIK). So, where can I host the project?

Standalone Player. Lately, I was working on a standalone NPAPI plugins player. The initial goal for that was to allow Flash games to be played without a complete web browser as the front-end. The syntax is actually what is used in <embed> tags. e.g. npplayer src=~/flash/bloxorz.swf width=640 height=480. The term “player” can sound crappy, this is because “viewer” is already used by the “client”, aka the program that actually executes the plugin.

OpenGL Rendering. What can you do when you have a standalone player? Well, apart from investigating some bugs, it can be used to experiment with… OpenGL rendering. I am not using texture-from-pixmap because of some other problems independent from me, so I am using an ugly hack that only works with Flash Player 9 at this time. The other benefit is that cursor changes are monitored and handled gracefully. The OpenGL back-end is using Clutter.

Now, you probably wonder: “what the hell is that useful for?”. Simple answer: initially allow Flash content to be played and interacted with in a Clutter+WebKit-based browser.

Here is the obligatory screenshot for the Clutter-based standalone NPAPI plugins player.

Movies are also available to show off: Magic Pen (reflection), Bloxorz (scaled), WebKit/Clutter (“complex” application like the Google Video player in Flash).

Roadmap. Due to recent developments, some major changes area also necessary. Here is a rough roadmap of the events. Note that I don't mention the dates because I don't know them yet… At least, I am now clear on the versioning that I promise to improve!

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