Animation

It's occurred to me that the engine in EVN could actually be used for some basic level cinematic. Such as a huge ship coming out of hyperspace, maybe. When the cinematic needs to be activated, preferably after takeoff, then you have an invisible spöb become angry at you, possibly by modifying its friendliness value (I don't know, that sort of thing is not my forte), and fire a weapon that has extremely high recharge time. It has a speed of zero, and spins once. The animation is the ship coming out of hyperspace through some sort of warpgate. This seems to be possible, at least to me. I'll start trying to make at least an animation that could be put in, but I'll put this up before I lose my train of thought.

EDIT:
Okay, I've made it. You can get a very quickly assembled animation here. This isn't put into the game, it's just in rLëd format, but it's proof that it will work, even though I wasn't very careful with the assembly process, as evidenced by the jumps and stuff. However, I can put it together again more carefully. What do you people think?

This post has been edited by 101181920 : 20 December 2008 - 01:25 AM

I love the idea, and the hyperspace animation.
However, there's no way to make a real ship appear right there at the end of the animation, so you'd have to have some kind of mission text saying "bla bla bla - and the ship leaves the system".

To see what cinematics look like in Nova, the Hogun planet explosion in ARPIA2 is an example (though that took a long time to implement perfectly).

This post has been edited by Pace : 20 December 2008 - 02:44 AM

How about spawning a 0-armour ship on the planet at the start, using ship explosions as the animation, then have an escape-ship pop out at the end?

@pace, on Dec 19 2008, 11:42 PM, said in Running a Theory:

there's no way

Unless you use ships with timed death-delays... If it is a numbered spob, or at the center of the system, you can choose where to put the ship.

That was the thought. You put two spöbs, both invisible. The first one fires the weapon, and then at the end a ship is spawned at the other one, right where it appears in the animation.

The problem with invisible spöbs is that they appear on the radar.
Also, with placing ships, you can't determine the direction they'll be facing, so there's only a small chance that, at the end of the animation, the ship will be facing the same direction.

I like the idea of the escape pod, however, because escape pods fly in random directions and aren't supposed to be facing the same direction as the animation.

The Argosy from EVN has wings that unfold in hyperspace. Now all you have to do is use a similar animation technique but use a flare or a rip instead of wings unfolding.