[Admiral MS]

A long time ago I made a mission that shows a battle using cutscenes including a moving camera which didn't really work as it should ... Now I found a build that includes the possibility to move a camera ( http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,54045.0.html ) but I can't figure out how to use this in a cutscene sexp and how these were changed with this build (new options?). The demo mission released with it didn't help me


Second thing is that I want an Orion to fire a beam using the big multipart turret in the front area (cause there is one in the standart table). When I first made this mission over a year ago it worked fine but now the turret just points at the targets direction when the fire beam sexp gets called and does nothing else. Another fire beam sexp used for a different turret and target some seconds before is doing what it should.

[WMCoolmon]

For (1), I'm not sure what to say. You use set-camera-position and set-camera-rotation to move the camera. You use reset-camera when you want the camera to return to what it was doing. They work just like other SEXPs. You shouldn't ever have to do anything different than the example mission unless you're doing something with scripting involving cameras (and you would know if you were).

[Admiral MS]

That's strange... I tried nearly everything I could think of but the camera keeps doing the same thing: it starts moving at the coordinates 0/0/0 to the specified coordinates.  I don't know what's wrong with it, but it refuses to start it's movement somewhere else, even if the camera had another position before.

[WMCoolmon]

I've got a bad feeling about this...sounds like a bug.

[blowfish]

Having looked at the code, the camera movement over time was never added to SEXPs.  So you can set the camera position, but you can't move it over time.  Its a simple fix (I fixed in my local copy of the source).  What's strange is that it should complain, or just set the camera at the point instantaneously, rather than working incorrectly.

[WMCoolmon]

That is pretty strange since I never actually committed the code for that build to SVN. It's also pretty strange since the test mission wouldn't be able to work like it does if the camera can't translate.

The SEXP timing stuff isn't implemented because it was broken with the old system. I loathe a situation like you're stuck in with music.tbl - you're damned to coming up with bogus values through trial and error, spending an hour to get the effect that you want, rather than coming up with reasonable values, plugging them in, and having the game actually do what you told it to in the first five minutes or less. It's also condemning every single generation of modders that follows to an equally wasteful process, since nobody can ever fix it without breaking everyone else's work.

So I disabled the timing stuff, so people couldn't use it, rather than leaving it in and ruining the new camera system as well.

[Admiral MS]

Which means that the new camera code doesn't work? Don't really understand what you're writing about 

Cause it can move like described, just the coordinates are wrong 

[WMCoolmon]

That seems like the obvious conclusion. I'm a little surprised, though, since I did have a SEXP in there (it's not used in the demo as-is, you have to edit it with FRED) that set the camera to a different position. But it's entirely possible that for all the testing I did, I did miss actually moving it after I changed the position. I'm a little surprised that I missed something that obvious, but I was skeptical of how easy it was to get it working in the first place. "If it seems to good to be true..."

Anyway, I'll mantis this and check it out.

EDIT: Except it is in mantis already. So, yes, this is definitely an issue with the code itself and not how you're using it.

[Droid803]

Urr, about the fire-beam SEXP, I'm getting the same problem (albiet with different turrets on different ships).
I'm assuming fire-beam ignores firing arc restrictions on the turret, if not, that would be the problem.

[blowfish]

No.  Even with fire-beam, the target has to be within the turret's FOV.

The SEXP timing stuff isn't implemented because it was broken with the old system.

Err ... yeah.  Noticed that when testing today

[Droid803]

No.  Even with fire-beam, the target has to be within the turret's FOV.

Gah. That's it.