Image2GVD

PS3 Image2GVD for Vista and newer

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kozarovv

kozarovv

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kozarovv submitted a new resource:

Image2GVD - It generates a GVD file used for PlayView on the PlayStation3 and possibly other devices.

Image2GVD​





Release note

  • Here is an application requested by Ada and maybe a few other on IRC. At first I didn't want to do it since I am lazy and didn't know anything about it. After...
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You should know that is old release, but very underrated. Learning is fun :) I hope that some devs here will find some use for it.
 
I read the description on wiki but still I don't know what is PlayView and when it's displaying their contents. ;p Could someone enlighten me?
 
Berion said:
I read the description on wiki but still I don't know what is PlayView and when it's displaying their contents. ;p Could someone enlighten me?
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Play view is little bit like interactive power point, not sure how exactly explain it.. For example you can make comic book that starting to move (or play movie) into selected cell when zoomed. Can be used in various situations, as a extended manual, your personal work portfolio on PS3 scene. Like book with all you did, with live examples when zoomed. I still not fully understand it, but as far as I know is even possible to make some visual novel in that format.

Actually I posted it here because I see many possibilities to use it, and seems like scene missed that piece of cake, so maybe now when we have so many good devs and researcher here, someone will get most of playview.
 
The format was not successfull in occident but in psn japanese store there is a lot of stuff made with playview, most of it are "romantic" novels, lol

One of the examples of playview i like most is the "wizard book" inside the game "ni no kuni" (when you pause the game, in the menus you have an interactive book), this is a playview fileformat running inside a PS3 game

It was other of the sony experiments, i think one of the purposes was to beat the screen resolution barriers
The pages in a playview are ordered like in a pyramid, every one has 1080x1920 pixels and you can make a huge zoom "traveling" between pages... this is the cinematic effect where the camera starts zooming in someones eye... then it enters in the eye... then in a blood vein... then inside a cell... then inside a molecule... and inside a atom, etc... you can make this effect with playview in good quality

It has lot more features, the pages can contain "links" to other pages to make a "jump" from one page to any other, to make novels of the kind you read some pages and then you have to take a decission... decission 1 takes you to page X and decission 2 takes you to page Y... so the novel has different endings or could enter in a loop until you find the solution

It also can load resources like photos, music, videos that plays automatically when you get close to them

But... only a part of all this was studyed, and from it only a few documented, so whoever is interested in this is going to need to research a bit, there is no security but there are lot of small features
 
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Playview is actually quite cool. Its primary purpose is to provide a way to make decent onscreen instruction manuals in-game.

A few months ago on irc, I remember discussing the possibility to use the format for a nice GUI leveraging webman style web commands...
Unfortunately, the lack of available documentation means having to waste much time in R&D...
 
Sounds great for me but I haven't any material to test. Not any visual novel or Ni No Kuni (fantastic game btw ;]).
Is PlayView can be open in-game XMB or as a separate item in XMB menu?
 
Berion said:
Sounds great for me but I haven't any material to test. Not any visual novel or Ni No Kuni (fantastic game btw ;]).
Is PlayView can be open in-game XMB or as a separate item in XMB menu?
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I will try to obtain TLOU comics that is mentioned on devwiki, and post it here. As I believe is legit. It was normally linked on wiki, so it must be.
 
kozarovv said:
Maybe @TizzyT (welcome on forum!) can help with some playview example? I can't find anything, even that TLOU pkg made long time ago.
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PlayView like @sandungas states works like a pyramid. First when you are most zoomed out you get the full picture at a low resolution, The image is split up into like a grid. Each section of that low resolution area has higher resolution versions of it. As you zoom into that section the higher resolution version of that section is loaded and that section is also split up into a grid and the processes continues for as how ever many levels you have. The technology is very similar to MipMaps in my opinion. As for examples, I made this program when my PS3 was broken and so @AdaLoveLace was the one who tested everything. I might still have some of the files left over from back then's work but I'd have to scour my hard drives in search of them but I'll check for you when I can.
 
I plan on continuing work on this tool as well but only after work has completed on JSXviewer. This one while pretty interesting, is underrated for a reason. It simply doesn't allow as much flexibility compared to creating custom themes for example. I think people will much more like the ability to create their own custom themes then to make a couple super high resolution images view-able. I think the first thing I will update to Image2GVD is to allow for custom sized input images instead of the current restriction to 3840x2160. Then maybe the ability to pin links and videos etc. Though that is going to require some research which I think @sandungas might be interested in lol?
 
The real problem to make this format more popular is that is very hard to make it user friendly, because the amount of options availables... in few words, it needs a tool with a fully pimped GUI

I never took a look at this file format, at that time it was ada who was doing this and editing the wiki page, all i did was to read the wiki page but i could never understand it well, otherwise i would have edited that wiki page to add some info
This doesnt means i could not help you now eventually, but you know... im completly noob with this format


Edit:
You can count with me in mantaining the info in the playview page in wiki, if someone, you (or me) discovers something new from the format i will keep adding the new info in wiki
But personally (no offense to ada) i think the actual page is confusing, at least to me, so if im going to edit it at some point also will need to take a good look at he file structures involved and to try to get how all this works... so well... i guess if you start working in this again i will be a bit involved and eventually i could find something interesting, but right now i cant tell
Rewriting that playview wiki page scares me a bit to be honest
 
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sandungas said:
The real problem to make this format more popular is that is very hard to make it user friendly, because the amount of options availables... in few words, it needs a tool with a fully pimped GUI

I never took a look at this file format, at that time it was ada who was doing this and editing the wiki page, all i did was to read the wiki page but i could never understand it well, otherwise i would have edited that wiki page to add some info
This doesnt means i could not help you now eventually, but you know... im completly noob with this format


Edit:
You can count with me in mantaining the info in the playview page in wiki, if someone, you (or me) discovers something new from the format i will keep adding the new info in wiki
But personally (no offense to ada) i think the actual page is confusing, at least to me, so if im going to edit it at some point also will need to take a good look at he file structures involved and to try to get how all this works... so well... i guess if you start working in this again i will be a bit involved and eventually i could find something interesting, but right now i cant tell
Rewriting that playview wiki page scares me a bit to be honest
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As to the structure of playviews being confusing, I know what you mean, I went in before and edited the structure a little to try and make it more sensical before, don't know if I did so at the time, but because you said its still confusing I guess I failed lol. Although I say that I also made the image2GVD program so I do understand the structure and how its supposed to be. I can try to answer anything you have questions to. As for a "pimped GUI" I'm pretty sure I can do that :) . And as for IRC I will pop in once in a while so I hope to catch you soon.
 
TizzyT said:
As to the structure of playviews being confusing, I know what you mean, I went in before and edited the structure a little to try and make it more sensical before, don't know if I did so at the time, but because you said its still confusing I guess I failed lol. Although I say that I also made the image2GVD program so I do understand the structure and how its supposed to be. I can try to answer anything you have questions to. As for a "pimped GUI" I'm pretty sure I can do that :) . And as for IRC I will pop in once in a while so I hope to catch you soon.
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Put in my boots for a second, the only two ways i have to start trying to see how this format works is by reading the playview wiki page (but i dont understand it overall) or by looking at the files (and right now i dont have any file but i guess will not be hard to get some to start from scratch)
There is a third way as you said... by asking you, this seems to be the best one XD

But still... the playview wiki page is going to be one of my first worries and the thing that is going to take me more hours to rewrite... i know myself, im that picky

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About how is redacted the playview wiki page, is normal, im not trying to critizise it in a destructive way
What happens with that kind of pages is initially are used as a worklog so it suffers lot of corrections and rewritings (and brainstormings and speculations that stays for a time but later is needed to delete them when proved wrong, i use to do this a lot in other wiki pages btw sorry for that but sometimes is the only way to progress)
Ideallistically... that kind of pages when are a bit mature someone rewrites them to become more readable folowing two approaches:
-oriented to non coders
-oriented to coders

There must be some "introduction" for non-coders in most of the sections, of course an overall explain to serve as introduction to get the basic concepts of how it works and what the firmware does with it (this can go as deep as to being useful to coders too)

Playview page lacks some of this... mostly because the format never reached mature (iirc i was told there was lot of unknowns left)
Also, is the kind of page that is needed to be readed while having the files opened in a hexeditor/notepad++ etc at the same time... to compare what you are reading with a sample of the files... otherway is almost imposible to get the overall idea, i never did that btw

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About the GUI... before suggesting anything is needed to get the overall idea of the list of features availables in playview format.... this is going to be like the "requirements" for the GUI
Every one of that features needs to be presented in some intuitive way for the user to just "click" in it, or by entering a value in a box
So i have no idea how could be that GUI... but thiking in the features we know at this point (and probably some others we ignore) is going to be a hard and long project
 
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I'm not sure if GUI is such must have. There are only few of us and I believe we like more CLI due to scripting possibility. Just my three cents. ;p

I think people will much more like the ability to create their own custom themes then to make a couple super high resolution images view-able.
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Are You mean dynamic themes? That would be fantastic as currently we can only edit existing commercial themes (?).


PS: And thanks for a sample.
 
Berion said:
I'm not sure if GUI is such must have. There are only few of us and I believe we like more CLI due to scripting possibility. Just my three cents. ;p



Are You mean dynamic themes? That would be fantastic as currently we can only edit existing commercial themes (?).


PS: And thanks for a sample.
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Well currently there are already tools available to make themes from scratch (I think corwin75 and his group made it) and this includes dynamic themes. The only problem with that (no offense) is their tool isn't exactly user friendly and I'd argue that it is incomplete. What I'm looking to do is make a software suite which is comprehensive and featured. And this proposed suite will include GVDs as well among other things. Welp this is getting kind of off topic now.

To the issue of GUI, I think a CLI interface will satisfy the "scripters" and a GUI wrapper would satisfy others. I can see it being completely possible. But because I always work in a CLI environment first before I design GUIs for my programs the CLI will definitely be worked on first.

EDIT:

Here is a better visualization of the GVD structure that I just made. Hope this clears at least something up.
 
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