[Retsof]

I know it is possible to script a Capship battle, but is it possible to controll a dogfight?  This would be to get dramatic shots of fighters fighting or of a bomb hitting just-so.

[Blue Lion]

probably better off getting a mutliplayer game up and getting pilots to do it

[colecampbell666]

Or rendering it with Blender etc.

[blowfish]

I bet this is possible, just don't expect anything fancy.  You can use waypoints/invisible targets to get the ships to go where you want (set-object-speed sexps might work too with more recent builds), and play around with weapon-create sexps for the gunz/missiles.

[Skullar]

well... IP Andrews did something similar in the TBP RAIDERWARS campaign, however, the camera does not move on its own, so you can't be in the middle of things....

[terran_emperor]

It would take some fancy Event editing  with an AI controled Alpha1 following some rather unusual waypoint paths and use of the glide function...whether that last one can be done in FRED i dont know

[Aardwolf]

Just make a 3D scene of it in a modeling program and do a bunch of sweeping camera motions.

also, neither mocromanaging nor cutcene are words.

[Polpolion]

I've clarified that ambiguity for you, Aardwolf.

[WMCoolmon]

I know it is possible to script a Capship battle, but is it possible to controll a dogfight?  This would be to get dramatic shots of fighters fighting or of a bomb hitting just-so.

You can do it with scripting :hmm:

For instance, if you wanted to have a dramatic shot of a bomb hitting, you could figure out which side of the bomb was on compared to the ship and put the camera in a random position on that side, and have it face the bomb.

The problem is that FS2 does not have the kind of spline modeling that's needed for that kind of thing. The new camera system is a step in that direction but it's not as good as a 3D modeling program for designing that kind of thing, and it doesn't allow for manual control of ships. However, you could concoct something with the manual object and camera position set functions, you'd just have to do the mathing yourself.

So I think if you just want to get 'dramatic shots', you've got that capability already. It was done for a long time and Star Wars is a good example of a film that you can do a lot of the shots in with just what's in their already. But if you want some kind of helix crane shot, advanced camera shake, or plan scene kind of deal, that's a little beyond the camera system at this point.

(eg you can park the camera at a low angle and pan as a group of ships jumps in, flies past the label, and get a closeup of their marking as they fly by; but a zoom-and-shake that's traditional of BSG is more complex than what you can usually do with the camera system. Yes, you can zoom with the new code, but it's the smooth shake that creates issues.)

[JGZinv]

I've been thinking about how I'd go about making several complicated
promo clips lately... and came to a question.

Would it be possible to fill a large portion of 3D space (in FRED) with stationary
cameras, set them all to record, and then later pick which camera's footage you want
(by simply understanding which cameras would sit along the path of an arc - so you pick those
in sequence)?

It's a bit similar to what was done in the Matrix if anyone saw the multi-camera setups they had.

[WMCoolmon]

Not really. There's no way that FS2Open (or any game, for that matter) could handle streaming several cameras to the hard drive at once. There is a recording system in FS2Open, that was never completed, that's similar to the Starcraft recording system. You could do it with something like that - since you could review the cameras by going back into the game and having it actively generate them for you - but that system is a long ways off and nobody has any plans to work on it right now. So if you happen to know any good coders...

However there's nothing stopping you from having multiple cameras in the game, and you can switch between them at any time you like. So you could switch between ten different cameras, all moving at once, to get whatever effect you like. You'd just have to play the sequence through ten times and record using FRAPs to be able to review the footage from all ten to decide where to make the edits.

[Retsof]

There is a recording system in FS2Open, that was never completed, that's similar to the Starcraft recording system

You mean you could play a battle then later watch it?  from a different view?  Whoever was working on it should start agian.

[Titan]

How would you do it in multiplayer?

[Solatar]

If you wanted multiple shots, you could always replay the same 'mission' over again from a different angle and hope nobody notices small discrepencies.