Welcome to another development blog post. First I wanted to say thank you to everybody who voted for us in the MotY 2009. There is a present in form of a 1080p HD ingame video when you're brave and read until the end of this post. Lets get started:
I have been working on various stuff since my last update, a quick overview:
- X-Wing Alliance inspired flight model (max turning at 0.3 velocity and some other tweaks)
- New cruise behaviour (locked flight controls allowing you only to go in straight lines) and cargo affecting ship mass (-> affects ship handling)
- Wing folding animations (also with triggers and synced in Multiplayer)
I don't really want to go in detail here, so lets skip to the eye-candy feature instead and save the boring stuff for later.
Freelancer has pretty much no built-in functionality for taking hud-less screenshots or shooting videos. This always bugged me so one day I decided to dig into the code and see what I can find. The result has been pretty elaborate and time-consuming, but its definately worth it.
Video Mode is what the feature is called and it basically allows you to see awesome fly-bys of your favourite ships. Also, there is built-in functionality for completely disabling the HUD on-the-fly and you can spectate other ships, something completely new in regards to the Freelancer engine.
It has been quite a task smoothing out camera movement: It's one of those things where you start with 100 lines of code but eventually end up with 30 lines of code that work just like you wanted it. In comparison it has been pretty easy to program the actual fly-bys, switching in front of the ship once the camera is too far away. Videomode has a "shake" effect applied when the ship flys by, which was also quite challenging, but not as annoying as camera rotation smoothing.
Enough of the technical talk, here comes the eye-candy. Its a 1080p ingame video.
You'll also see a wing animation on the X-Wing, triggered by entering cruise. Yes, animations are in and also synced in Multiplayer (but was too boring actually filming it).
Also, please excuse me for using yet-again our super-ugly combat prototype system, I'm just that lazy.
I'm sure the testers and other Devs will make use of VideoMode in future videos, so stay tuned :)
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Wow its looking excellent Guys. This is my new Favourite upcoming release. :) I Cant WAIT!!! You have no Idea!!
A-W-E-S-O-M-E (I think more words are useless and pointless)
Thanks guys!
abit like the moviecam in Empire At War, nice stuff, but you really need more angles when in videocam.
This is an entirely new prototype feature within FL. It wasn't even designed for the game, so it's still a WIP :)
A nice feature, to be sure. Great work! And best of luck with MotY!
Haha Why485 is going to completely flip when he sees this. :P
Nice work!