Oolite Bulletins

After a little bit more tweaking (see Screenshots) a demo cutscene for trunk users is available - to make appetit for more .-)

The goal for the demo was to create a set of shaders for cutscenes. As you can see (filenames) it started as addition for the Vector.oxp, but the shaders will be moved into Cabal_Common for the next version.

Cabal_Common_Library1.6.1_r95.zip (1004.4 KB)
Svengali_Animation_Demo0.95.zip (4.1 MB)

so this basically changes the title screen? what else can do?

Svengali, you never cease to amaze me with the innovations you bring on. That's the second case where I feel obliged to say that I never expected Oolite to be able to do that.

commanderxairon: It does A LOT more than what you think. Note it's a demo though.

Strewth!!! Right on, amigo!

but what does it exactly do ?!?! i still can't understand

[dumb pilot mode]It's a demo of the possibilities now available for animated cut-scenes![/dumb pilot mode]

oh WOW!
a glimpse of the future.
thing of beauty.

another_commander wrote:

Svengali, you never cease to amaze me with the innovations you bring on.

Seconded. I thought from the stills you'd put up that it was going to be pretty impressive, but the animation is much more again.

@cim && another_commander: Thanks a lot for all that hard work, sleepless nights and energy you guys put in the game. We have already so much possibilities - let's use them.

@Thargoid: Yes, I guess you are right .-) Missions are the other piece where cutscenes are useful to create some more depth for a story.

The advantage is that the scenes are real ingame mechanisms - using the same rendering engine has a pretty nice binding to the look and feel of other game mechanisms. The next step is to make the demo v1.76.1 compatible and Corny offered help with Audio stuff. Maybe we should move on and form up a team for cutscenes?

@commanderxairon: Cutscenes require some more work than just displaying a model on a missionscreen. To make things look right you need mechanisms to move elements (subentities), to sync movements and to get effects. E.g. models on missionscreens don't have speed == no exhausts. Via shader you can simulate these effects and framecallbacks can be used to move elements. Combined with overlays (or HUDs) and some dirty tricks you can create complete animated scenes. The demo shows some possibillities with a different lighting situation.

Looks and sounds great! I love the water.

There seems to be one or two problems. The first time I ran the sequence I had avatars come up and their speech in subtitles. The second time this didn't happen, I just heard the speech. This is on the currently nightly, v1.77.0.5289.

I checked my log, but the only errors I can see are the following, but I don't know if they are relevant:

I envy those who can experience this Will someone put up a video sample of deliciousness for us pedestrians? Anyhow, congratulations on effing the ineffable, so to speak

Wow Most impressive

I´m looking forward to the next demo and even more to the finished oxp.

Best regards

C.B.

JazHaz wrote:

There seems to be one or two problems. The first time I ran the sequence I had avatars come up and their speech in subtitles. The second time this didn't happen, I just heard the speech. This is on the currently nightly, v1.77.0.5289.

Thanks Jaz - it's a bug in the script. I guess I should stop doing last minute tests .-)

Will fix and upload a new version.

Looked through this now, and I'm impressed. Can't wait to see what the impact will be on missions and the game itself when this becomes main stream. Excellent work Svengali, highly appreciated.