Time to start showing movie on the big screen

"gm"?

If you mean Game Manager's then that isn't their job. Game Managers resolve in game petitions. They don't have anything to do with advertising features.

If you mean Giant Monster's then that makes even less sense. Why would Lusca (A giant Octopus) be running a movie thether. (I'm guessing you mean theatre) Heck most GM's wouldn't even fit in a building like that.

Because they're only movie theaters on the outside? There's nothing in most of the buildings you see.

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

Wait . . . Does that mean there are no donuts in the donut shop in Faultline?


Nooooooooooooooooooooo!

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

Yeah same thing happened to me on more than one occasion and not only was there no sign of pastry.. NO COFFEE!!! OMG ... No donuts, no coffee? Okay so why exactly are the Police standing around outside this place anyway? LOL

I think I know what you are getting at here Ouch Grouch. If I understand this you want to know why the developers do not use a system like Playstation Home where trailers and movies are streamed live to the player.

The short version is: the engine doesn't work like that.

When the processing engine was built back in the early years of 2002 / 2003 there wasn't much thought on Redirected Rendering or Indirect rendering. Sony's Playstation Home leverages technologies derived from Indirect and Redirected rendering to stream and display movie trailers in real time.

From a development point an in-game solution isn't as simple as setting a player visible view-port and directing a video feed to that player-visible view-port. Keep in mind that when Half-Life 2 launched in 2004 the ability of the Source-Engine to display viewpoints pointing to real-time renders of other events was considered quite an achievement. That was with a game designed for a single-player experience, not an MMO experience.

Just to go over a couple of quick issues, there's the matter of video coding and decoding. What codec to the developers use? Well, the answer to anybody familiar with video-codecs today is going to be: Ogg Theora or VP8. Both are royalty-free open-sourced codecs, which means the Paragon Study developers could implement the video codecs without facing a massive financial burden to license a competing codec, such as H.264.

Of the two codecs VP8 is considered to offer a higher video quality, and at least through FFMPEG is pretty fast even on "weak x86" such as Intel Atom. Of course, then there's the problem of actually exposing the video through the game.

Just a quick experiment here: fire up something like Big Buck Bunny in 1080p on your computer.

Now, launch City of Heroes.

Is CoH playable?

Depending on the hardware under your hood, your computer might be helpless unless you offload the decoding of the video to your graphics card. Of course, if you are off-loading the video to your graphics card... well... what exactly do you THINK will happen when you try to run a graphics intensive game on that graphics card?

One of the reasons why Playstation Home can get away with streaming videos in real-time is that the Home developers only have to worry about one hardware specification. They only have to worry about one performance profile. They know, for a fact, what your system will perform like. Sony doesn't have to account for somebody that might only have a 3-SPE Cell processor or a Cell Processor at 1.2ghz.

The Paragon City Developers have to account for the players who are still running Radeon 8500's, Geforce 4's, and Intel Graphics Accelerators. Attempting to stream a movie through the game would likely wreck most of these low-end computers.

Of course the counter to this is that well only players who have the hardware can enter the theater, so player beware.

Put yourself in the developers shoes. Do you really want to tell some of your player-base that you just implemented this cool-feature in game... but they can't have it because their hardware is too old, or their performance is too low?

Speaking for myself, I just saw what happened when updates to the graphics engine under Going Rogue knocked the living daylights out of Intel Graphic Accelerator support. I think such a more open and public move against lower-end hardware would make the Intel Firestorm seem like the Care-Bears Family Reunion.

Hopefully this gives you an insight into why City of Heroes doesn't have a function to stream video through the game, and why such support likely won't ever be implemented in the current game.