Concept: The Movie Mod

posted on July 20th, 2011, 12:24 am

I've had an idea to make a Movie mod, but I don't know very much about how to accomplish it.  Would any of you guys be willing to pitch in with information and/or help create it?  The specifications are as follows:

-Every ship would have its construction cost removed and its construction time set to 3 minutes.
-Every ship would have its shield and hull hitpoints set to 100 and all weapons would be set to 1 damage.
-All ranks would be removed.
-The visual effect from having shields down would be removed.

I'm pretty sure that these would be all the changes needed to make cinematic cutscenes.  Players could enter the editor and set ships to whatever health they need to have them explode after a certain amount of fire.

Actually, two more advanced features would be nice if they can be done:

-The ability to order ships to attack allies and have them keep attacking when they move.
-An invisible camera ship with specials that allow you to modify its speed.

Actually, it would be great if we had that camera ship in the regular game.  It would allow observers to move their camera around freely without focusing on any one (visible) ship.

posted on July 20th, 2011, 2:26 am

Item 1,2,3,4,5 are all doable via simple editing of the ODFs. Item 6 can most likely be done with MMM (which would be better for doing cinematics anyway). I don't understand item 7, but using replaceWeapons to modify the speed are certainly achievable.

posted on July 20th, 2011, 6:32 am

you can already move around your camera by using keyboard scroll

posted on July 20th, 2011, 4:11 pm

yeah, but I want to be able to move more smoothly.  With a camera ship you could set a series of waypoints to follow, then use your mouse to change the direction the camera faces.  Keyboard scroll won't allow you to move and turn the camera at the same time very easily, and you can't do things like curving paths or smooth acceleration/deceleration.

At least not at my level of skill 

One more thing to add to the list, is to make all specials cost no energy and remove all shield/armor regen.