For #34, I think it would be better to use Bink video, since the game already uses it, it has free official coding tools (RAD Game Tools), and it's a defined codec (whereas an AVI file can be encoded with any given format, like Cinepak, Windows Media, or MPEG-4). In fact, would it be possible to have a ui_widget_definition_os tag with the "movie" type reinstated? I'll elaborate on what I'm looking for below.
I +1 #27 as well. Sapien seems to still have stuff in it for recorded animations, but the problem is that Sapien doesn't accept player input, so all you can do is record a biped or vehicle standing there, doing nothing.
-Right, movie widgets. What crappens there is that you select it to be the movie type, define the bounds, and further down the tag, define an external (meaning not within the map cache file) BIK file and a placeholder bitmap (internal) in the event that the BIK file is missing or can't be loaded, and then a timeout in seconds before the video is loaded and played. Implementation? Level previews. Take what we have now for the level select screen, but if you keep one option selected for a few seconds, a video starts playing, like a teaser trailer. Kinda like the game select screen for the console version of the Orange Box. The defined bounds would clip the video (so if you had a 200x150px video and you set the widget to be only 150x150, it would cut off 50 px of the width), unless making it scale/squash the video to fit the bounds is less work can clipping it.
-Would it also be possible to make models animate in the UI? Right now, if you place a biped or animated scenery into a UI, it will freeze in place. I had to make scenery versions of the Chief and Spark with a fixed pose for my Library UI.
Bookmarks