Torque Cutscene Maker

#1 Make a competent version of Unreal's cutscene tool.

It should be possible to easily reorder the scenes in your movie; play around with camera angles, etc.

You should be able to record straight from in-game action (for instance, roughing out a scene by using WASD-mouse to move your characters around), and then tweak it as needed to get a final product (either by important special animation sequences or by modifying the recorded data).

It should be possible to play sounds and trigger effects such as explosions. There should be a timeline editor.

It should be possible to tie behaviours to things; for instance, setting a camera to look at a point, or a character to always aim at another one.

#2 Devon,

I think some of Beffy's specs are in the PDF resource from the other thread on this. There are a couple I would say were unrealistic (at least for a first version). I would say we should build something that leverages all of Torques current capabilities (triggers, pov, etc.) and work on adding additional functionality (advanced camera movement, camera effects, etc.)

There are a couple of samples to follow. The MATINEE editor from Unreal has some nice features. There are a couple of older editors for editing Quake movies that has some nice features as well. I think modeling it after some of the movie editors would be good as they have put a lot of effort into making the UI an easy experience. The key would be to make it so non-programmers could build movies for games without having to know a lot of Torque lingo (I think the NPC editor that someone created did a pretty good job of this, don't have the resource link handy).

In any case, count me in on this as I both need something for my own project and would like to contribute to this effort.

#3 For a first pass, might I suggest having a big slider along the bottom, a list of "keyframed" objects, and little more? The functionality would consist of adding/removing objects to the list of objects, and then moving stuff about as desired. Perhaps a button to delete a keyframe from an object would be good.

#4 I agree that this would be a very cool feature. However, I have no experience with machinima, and so I can offer no advice. :-/

Just look at current movie makers for other engines, and look at the complaints that people have against those, then try to improve. Good luck, and I look forward to seeing the results! :)

#5 Devon,

Do you see this as an in-game tool (built with the GUI) or a stand-alone one? Just curious your thoughts. Probably should be done in-game so you can get immediate response and view your work (debugging as you go) but it's possible to hook the Torque library output to an OpenGL window so anything is possible.

#6 One spec that is a must.
you need to be able to give it a type mask that enable/disable's the rendering of certian object types.

#7 BadGuy - very nice idea. I agree!

#8 Woah the feed back seems quite positive I guess this is something else people really need.
@Bil: well Bil initially I thought of making it a mod type tool like the show tool but then it would kindda of a pain in the butt exiting out of torque and firing up the cutscene editor. So now I want to integrate it straight into the existing editor. How I will do that only god knows. That way you can also manipulate terrain and object as per normal and the animation stuff would just an extra feature.
I would also like to revamp the editor interfaces while there, considering what torque can do the editor should have better looking gui interface. Win95 style is a bit outdated I think.

#9 I think it's pretty doable with the currrent editor. I would see it basically as another editor built in, just like the mission, terrain, etc.

Probably one SimGroup that lives inside your level with a simple tag being the name of the cutscene to invoke (and maybe the type of trigger when someone comes near it how it gets activated).

Then the editor launches and you load the entire cutscene from a file (one cutscene per file or a series of some kind of SimCutscene objects in that file). I wouldn't see it being part of the mission file but maybe. Might just get ugly that way.

I would see two situations. For most games you'll want more than one cutscene in the game and for the most part each one of them will load their own environment then reset it back after its done. Good boy scout approach. This would be for exposition and what not, describing say events that happended in the past. The other way scenario to have the cutscene modify the existing environment so it sets things up for the flow of the game. Wizard appears, blabbers on about an ancient curse then vanishes and leaves you an item to take.

In either case I would see the cutscene sequences being a separate file which loads when you trigger it in the game (by whatever means, walking over it, pressing a button, whatever). Maybe keep it simple at first and have it so the cutscene uses and works against the current mission and everything that's going on then later extend it so it can load it's own environment. Just don't want a huge mission loading screen and several seconds to wait before the movie kicks in so not sure how that would work.

I think you can start by mocking something simple up in the current fps mod. First iteration would be to just get the editor screen comes up, create an object that does some camera movement and displays some text on the screen when the sequence is triggered through a SimObject in the main mission file. So at a minimum to start I would see:

-create initial editor environment in existing gui
-create trigger object in mission file
-create simple script to do something very basic
-activate it in the game

#10 Dont you think guys, that be much easier to make an exact animation converter for the major animation packages, like the most used for TGE max, or Lightwave, ?
Maybe the question is a bit looks naive, but i have experience with engines worked like this, and its was great and simple. Of course its need a different mentality of creating. If you wanna to make a Matenee like utility, or a new surface into the editors gui, or make a useable method to integrate the animation, and keep the important things to important.
Easier and faster to an animator to executing an easy method, to intergrate their art what is nearly 100% that originally designed in a professional animator program earlier, than learning something totally new, and reimplementing the original cameramoves, and scenes (the whole ART) with limited tools an possibilities. Think with the head of your artists.. :)

#11 I think Gabor is right. We shouldn't try to make the in-game editor do everything... it should act as a co-ordinator.

Actually, Torque already supports importing animations and such, it just isn't possible to gracefully bring in a whole scene of animation. Nor is it necessarily desirable.

I think it's better to set up a generic keyframed editor that can give "cues" to any sort of object in the sim - 3d object like an AIPlayer, effect object like precipitation, or 2d object like a GUI overlay - then we can use the existing functionality in the engine to play animations and such.

We should make it like the mission editor, which exists solely to manipulate resources created out-of-game.

#12 Just a few ideas:

- Time line editior with copy paste capatibilities
- multiple scriptable cameras
- Characters displacement/animations/movements scripts
- triggers for voice overs, sound effects and background music
- some sort of captions in different languages
- 3D sound

#13 Yeah, definitely dont stick to just max etc.. for one, you couldnt then kick off different scenes, or spawn in objects etc.

Better to have a keyframed system that can allow custom "events" to be keyed just like normal stuff like position etc.

I'm doing something similar for Gui controls..

Phil.

#14 Yeah, I think the value here is in making animations that can be overlayed into the engine while it's running... Like in an RPG where the ambient animations continue during the in-game cut-scenes.

#15 Hehe if only you guys could see what I have in my head ;)
Must get all this stuff down on paper soon.

Yep I agree with using animations my feeling is that Torque would interpolate between two positional keys and play the walk or run animation thread that is imported for that model. Or lets say a bird the bird flapping animation would be imported in Torque you would simply say I want it to go here and here at this time but also play this flapping animation.
The hard part will be matching the object's direction to the direction of the path spline's tangent.

And yes it should be used for more than just movies. Like in a space shoot em up. Where you have a flock of alien ships come at you. The editor would preset the path the ships would fly along and in game you'd set off some kind of trigger and wosh they come at you along that path.

#16 Hmm.... why would it be hard to match the object to the path direction? Leverage the game engines AI controls (I haven't purchased the latest Bravetree Environment Pack, so not sure what they use).

I'd like to see a more inteligent cutscene, not just puppets attached to invisible rails like a carnival funhouse ride.

#17 Hmmmm. I would have to voice my opinion that don't try to make this the be-all and end-all thing. It's goal is to allow users to direct scenes and let the engine carry them out. Asking it to do interpolated animation that's specific to an object seems a liitle beyond the bounds of a cutscene editor. I think the extent of interpolation that would happen would be spline pathing for a camera (lay down 3 or 4 keypoints and let the camera path interpolate the rest for a smooth ride, depending on how fast you want it to travel).

Having it perform object specific animations means it a) has to have some understanding how those animations work and b) the creator of that object needs to follow a standard of how he/she implements the animations. What if my bird flapping animation already does interpolation itself? I say let the system do what it's intended to do, direct a scene and let you do things with scene objects (cameras, lights, etc.) Game specific specialities should be left up to the game (at a minimum you could ask it to call a script which would then do something specific with a game object but that's about as far as I would go). Be wary of trying to make a pig sing. You might not like the results you get.

Just my 2 nickles.

#18 I don't know if my vision here meshes with Devon's or anyone elses, but I think that the cut scene editor should be a generic tool that can:

1. Set the values of fields on objects, either discretely or continuously varying the values assigned. ("tweens")

2. Call methods at specific times, passing user specified values. ("cues")

3. Capture tween values from user manipulation of objects.

This meets all the design goals. You can animate cut scenes by clicking and dragging. You can animate GUI by clicking and dragging. The same tool lets you manipulate GUI and the world, so you can readily do tutorials or advanced effects (like manipulating precipitation). It's flexible enough to let you animate virtually anything in Torque.

You have a scrub bar at the bottom for preview, some dialogs to let you see/edit the values being interpolated, and a list of the objects being animated. Easy to make it export script code to replicate the animation on command.

What do you think?

#19 I think I will have to look myself in my room this week end and write all this stuff down

#20 Devon,

Maybe we should have a scheduled session on irc to just get a collaborative discussion going about what's in, what's out and how do we make this a reality? Or do you want to come out with something written up first? Your call as you're driving this.