FreeOrion

Hello everyone.

First of all I want to say how amazed I am that there is a Game-Project re-creating one of my all time favourite Games. I downloaded the actual Version and I really enjoy playing it. One thing I really missed while playing were the tiny Animations when Colonizing a Planet e.g.

As I read in Guidelines you havent included any kind of codec for animations yet, so this might be a little bit too early. But I would be glad to contribute some Cut-Scenes to your Project. Of course, nothing too fancy as I would try to do this in my spare time - but I think some Cut-Scenes could help to make the game more immersive. I would like to open up this thread for the general discussion about this Subject.

Questions could be:

What kind of Cut-Scenes?
Style?
Length?
Design (Ship Classes)?

Looking forward to hear some ideas.
Cheers

Every SitRep event can be a candidate for a cut scene. The problem is, small video cut scenes are going to be repetitive and instead of increasing immersion, they'll annoy the player after a while. A potential alternative is, if desired, having cut scenes rendered in real time. This has the advantage of altering them dynamically to some degree to fit the individual events. In any case it's a bit early to talk about things like these - it's a polishing issue, since all the other content has to be finished and the efforts will have to be justified.

Good Point.
I was checking a little bit more on the Ogre3D Engine and it seems to be quite powerful, so this might be a good choice to create some interactive in-game cutscenes. Although, one other idea that I had is an Intro-Cinematic.

This is the idea I had:

A gigantic zoom. We start at a Planet that lights up (evolves) more and more and zoom out until we see an Astronaut working on a small Space Station. We zoom out further and see a small Scout Planet pass by the camera. The camera goes alot faster and even further we see a small group of Ships surrounding a Colony Ship approaching another Planet. The next thing we see is a gigantic Space Station next to this Planet where some ships take off to space... then we make another giant leap passing by a gigantic Fleet of Battleships approaching an alien Race... and as a last big move we see the whole galaxy which forms into the "o" of Free Orion.

Sounds like a big thing... but I think it could work. I thought since you guys are working on tons of Ship-Models most of the work is already done. Besides the camera and compositing work I would need to apply some shaders and make the planets and galaxy work in 3D. It wouldnt look like the effects from star-wars... but it might be cool I guess.

You have a long way to go, but I think this project could need some time, too.

Let me know what you think.

Sounds ok, but it's simply not possible to decide any of this yet. We are just starting out creating actual game content, creating the freeOrion universe. The backstory will have to be worked out in detail and elements of it will probably be part of a cinematic, if we decide to have one. Feel free to brainstorm about those things as much as you want of course, but it should be clear that the topic won't get too much "official attention" very soon.

The Contact-style big zoom sounds interesting, but since you mentioned Ogre3D, it might be more helpful to have animations for explosions or thruster plumes. I'm not sure how animations are set up in this context, but anything we'd actually use to show what's going on in the battle would probably be good to have.