Spring RTS Engine

Adding into an Introduction Video to the Campaign once we established a storyline to follow is a good idea?

I'm all for voice, and voice alone.

Edit: It seems there is another thread. Still you should mention CA in this one.

I'll make a full detailed thread later, however I have college to attend to. Later

Still images, made to look like old paintings, with voiceover. Like world in conflict, or like the pictures from the end of OTA missions.

BlackLiger wrote:Still images, made to look like old paintings, with voiceover. Like world in conflict, or like the pictures from the end of OTA missions.

Good Idea, probably just before Ianmac/Neddie's Naration of the intro.

Someone rip and give Licho that video.

i started a general spring begginers guide vid a while ago, i even had a script! but it was too much effort to make and i got bored

This will take many sleepless nights to make. Will have to thank me for putting time into creating this.

BlackLiger wrote:Still images, made to look like old paintings, with voiceover. Like world in conflict, or like the pictures from the end of OTA missions.

Very good idea cause :

- easier to make
- can be beautiful
- lets the player imagine the scene move

This is gold-plating on your project. Do the essential stuff first, and leave this for the end.

This is the work for Licho considering he's doing the Launcher for the Campaign. Dividing parts of the project ammoung the enlisted posts will shorten development time, better the skills and quality.

AFLobby will eventually support non-ingame campaign guis as a stepping stone to intergalactic warfare.

If you move to an ingame scripted sequence you're locking yourself out of a wider range of options.

I'd seggest a mission intro/breefing whith 3D in game pics in that painted stile that some one said before and then a quick plot mover whith one or two stills at the end of a mission

Yeah I was going to suggest still images with a voice over also. Nobody even hast to draw them like paintings. You could just take in-game screens, add Photoshop flare or even use filters to make them look like paintings.

I think it would be great if you were to make them really high-res and script some zooming in and out and panning on different sections. Then fade to the next one. Rinse repeat.

Also, to do the voice over bit with zooming, panning, and fading as I described you could use Flash. Standalone executables can be made with embedded audio and images. Also ActionScript could be used on a "Begin Mission" button to close the movie and call a bat file or custom executable that would run Spring with the desired mission script.

This would all be incredibly easy. I could probably do the Photoshop, Flash, and bat files for you if you decided to go this route.

You could even do cool things like embed a video overview of the map (or a spinning planet like Cavedog used to do) into a spruced up OTA like interface used for mission briefing.

This may be out of the scope of this post as this sounds like something done at the beginning of each mission, and I don't know if you are wanting to put that much work in this campaign. I'm not sure if your "introduction video" is limited to just when the user runs the campaign or the intro would be at the beginning of each mission. Are you planning on doing voice-overs for the briefing at the beginning of each mission? If so, I think something like I described would compliment the voice-overs well.

I think you should draw every frame by hand and videotape yourself flipping through them really fast.

Sounds good, except for at the end of the 'video' I'd make an actual video generated by spring of a huge army marching to destruction. Complete with post production photo shop style effects for dust and haze and ground rumbling.

My two cents... use a blank black screen and a voice over maybe with some text following the speaker. Then move to a large/cool object moving slow and maybe after a bit have something enter the screen thats got a lot of something going on (shooting or lots of objects) which is pretty small. Make it take up progressively more of the screen... maybe no speech there... until it ends up ridiculously filled with movement and then make the screen abruptly switch to the black screen from before with speech again and maybe larger text.

I was thinking the kinda the intro to Star Wars One... it's pretty epic and makes ya go 'whoa, I want to be part of this.' Or just draw up a storyboard and follow it.

edit: er and you could probably use in game video for the action parts, Spring definitely looks good enough and the camera is really flexible.

If you ask me you are getting ahead of yourselves. I think it would be wise to wait until CA is at a good, stable/final release stage (not being updated every day) before worrying about making a campaign for it.

Orakio wrote:If you ask me you are getting ahead of yourselves. I think it would be wise to wait until CA is at a good, stable/final release stage (not being updated every day) before worrying about making a campaign for it.

you read some of the recent change logs ??