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Cutscene Creator?

Name:	Mark
Date Posted:	Oct 03, 2006
Rating:	2.3 out of 5
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The idea poked into my head as I woke up this morning. I'm not even sure how to currently create cutscenes with Torque, I have seen it done with the Torque Demos and such (have bothered to find out how it's done).

My idea was it would be great if Torque had a built-in cutscene editor, which was very easy to use.

There would be a timeline at the bottom of the screen.
You click the part of the timeline you want a new scene to take place, and you make all kinds of edits on-screen. Be it dragging the camera around, setting it up so the camera pans to a location, zoom, bloom, blur and more.

Then, when your cutscene is finished, you click 'save' and it creates a script file based on what you did in the editor. Alot like Torque's terrain editor only with different data. Something like...

_camera = "camera" camcreate [0,0,0]

;=== 14:44:44
_camera camSetPos [8540.22,3302.09,2.07]
_camera camSetFOV 0.700
_camera camSetBloom 0.500
_camera camSetBlur 0.200
_camera camCommit 0
@camCommitted _camera
;=== 14:45:25
_camera camSetPos [8367.30,3679.48,5.43]
_camera camSetFOV 1.500
_camera camCommit 40
_camera camSetBloom 0.900
_camera camSetBlur 0.700
@camCommitted _camera

You could also drag and drop things into the cutscene timeline. Things like music, sounds, animation files, and more.

Basically you are editing the cutscene without even needing to script anything.

I wish I was a programmer, I'd get going on something like this rather quickly. Perhaps a programmer will see this and really like the idea. Well... it's not much of an original idea, but it's a good idea for Torque.

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Stephan (viKKing) Bondier (Oct 03, 2006 at 07:12 GMT)

Mark you can certainly achieve some of your idea with the advanced camera code and some path scripting. Get a look at codev resources in the dev. section.

hope it helps.

STef

Andy Hawkins (Oct 03, 2006 at 07:38 GMT)

I'd be very interested in this - it was something I was going to do, but no sense in recreating the wheel right? I look forward to seeing your progress on this.

Tom Spilman (Oct 03, 2006 at 08:02 GMT)

You should look at the Unreal's Matinee Tool.... it's a good model for how do design a cut scene tool.

I think someone on the GG team has a pet project working on such a thing... maybe they'll chime in. ;)

James Urquhart (Oct 03, 2006 at 09:17 GMT)

I seem to recall there was a resource for making little movies...
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5018

Anthony Rosenbaum (Oct 03, 2006 at 13:17 GMT)

Actually I am working with Ben G on some old code he had, you might have noticed the TorqueCinema section in TND, it is a very powerfull system that allows just about anything to animated, if you are interested send me an email. I'll of course want to check with Ben because it is mostly his code base.

Florian (Oct 03, 2006 at 14:07 GMT)

that really is a great idea ^^
and maybe you can add a subtilte mode on or off button
if such a things gets build in a lot more things would be possible :D

Travis Wood (Oct 03, 2006 at 17:39 GMT)

This is one of the reasons why my team switched to Unreal 2. Soon we are getting our greedy little hands on Unreal 3.

Joshua Dallman (Oct 03, 2006 at 18:16 GMT)

I had the same idea after showtool pro came out. I would love to see this.

Mark (Oct 03, 2006 at 19:59 GMT)

I would love to see some folks dedicated in making Torque more intuituve and streamlined for individuals who simply don't have programming knowledge or education. An alternative to searching this site for "how to do this and that", and then needing to flip through lines and lines of Torque's seemingly infinite quantity of code to implement a rather simple thing into his/her game.

Certainly things are being done in this respect, with Starter Kits, Constructor on the horizon, Built-In Editors, etc. But none of these things harness what people are truly trying to do here, to create games in their vision, their unique ideas, and not just another First Person Shooter, or another RTS.

I'm not saying these are bad things to have here, bless them, they are a huge help. I'm also not saying TDN and the resources here are not helpful. They truly are.

I think there should be a grand, easy access portal to everything Torque has to offer. This would take a tremendous amount of time to actually accomplish.

A program, working with Torque, can concieve every possible thing a developer may want to do with their game, without needing to even TOUCH a line of code.

If the game developer wants a 'stamina' system in his game, he checks it off in the program.
If the game developer wants an ammunition screen in his game, he checks it off.
If he wants to get his newly created weapon into his game, he introduces the weapon to the program, and the program does it all for him.
If he wants the player camera to act a specific way, the program does it for him.

It's this sort of thing I would like to see in Torque. A bunch of check boxes, selections and options, without needing to open a single script file. Yes, it would take a huge amount of time and effort to get finished.

But imagine how absolutely fast it would be to create the fundamentals for your entire game, and possibly far more, in just a single day.
Edited on Oct 03, 2006 20:01 GMT

Mathieu Marquis-Bolduc (Oct 03, 2006 at 20:40 GMT)

Well, that would only work for a very specific kind of game. Adding a new weapon is something totally different in a RPG, in a FPS, in a RTS...

Mark (Oct 04, 2006 at 07:46 GMT)

One would have to start from scratch using a vanilla copy of the tutorial base. The program would know how, and do all the hard work

Ryan Enzweiler (Oct 04, 2006 at 23:54 GMT)

I'd buy it! Definately have a look at Unreal's "Matinee" tool. It's the best and easiest to use when it comes to cut scene tools. It's closer to the animation tools most of us 3d Artists are used to using in 3ds Max and Maya.

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