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Beginner Questions - Cutscenes/Animation/Menu/Etc


Gloomshroud
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Well met, everyone! I am a new Leadwerker, only having purchased the engine about three days ago. I went running with guns up, opting directly for the Standard Edition on Steam. I am currently a 30 year old college student who is studying in the last semester of computer science. I am currently enrolled in a Unity course. My grades are fine, but I played with Leadwerks for about an hour and was already able to do more and have better productivity with absolutely no instruction than I am half a semester into Unity. Please note, I do not even know either LUA or C++. C# is as close as I get. So yes, I was immediately converted into a Leadwerker based on sheer usability alone.

 

Now that introductions are out of the way, onto the meat and potatoes: I have made those Google goblins earn their keep the past day and half burning up their engine with queries regarding cutscenes, animation methods and techniques, main menu design, UI development, etc. I have ran across some useful information but I am here because I am seeking further clarification (read: I am not trolling).

 

UI/UX/Main Menu: I ran into Aggror's FlowGUI after watching a few of his excellent tutorials on YouTube and nabbed that as fast as I could. It is awesome, easy to set up, and easy to use. So that settled an issue I was having altogether. However, I am also eager to flex my artistic muscles and was wondering if there were a way (hack, file, script, or anything) which would allow me to make a really "artsy" UI system and/or main menu (I am seeing animated smoke, menus popping in and out, and the like). This has been treated, but I am using LE3.4 and most of what I ran into was LE2.x. Keep in mind that Aggror's awesome tool provides a really solid backbone to my efforts.

 

Cutscenes:After furiously Googling for the better part of a couple hours, I ran across suggestions such as LETheora(which is apparently deprecated now). That solution is fine (especially since I really love using opensource tools) but, as stated, seems to be non-functional. I am not well-versed enough in either LUA or C++ to give it CPR, I have additionally encountered posts from this thread and this one which solves the problem programmatically and via toolkit (respectively) in a roundabout fashion. However, they too are old and out of date.I have run into Rick's posts all over these forums, so if you see this Rick, any further advice/suggestion would be MOST welcome!

 

So I wonder if anyone either a.) currently implements cutscenes or b.) has a way to implement cutscenes or c.) would be willing to work with me to find a way to GET cutscenes.

 

Animation: This topic is related to the above. I was going to get the new FaceRig app (a toy, I know) and it caused me to wonder if importing animations into LE was doable in reasonable fashion and if so how it is done most commonly in LE3.4.

 

 

Apologies for the lengthy post, but I feel that this will provide the most information needful to get the answers I can't seem to discover on my own. Thank you all for your time.

 

Happy Leadwerking!

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Ok, yes the FlowGUI will be very much a backbone to a lot of stuff for my self,

 

cutscenes: well eh, it depends on what is needed to happen , if it involves a character walking to a certain point, and then doing an action, ai implementation like gotopoint and follow are usable for this. and a bunch of other stuff, so cutscenes shouldn't be that hard to do, although I never tried to make cut scenes in my game as it doesn't need cutscenes.

 

#2: Animation's are fairly easy to use in leadwerks 3.4/ beta if you have a single track animation, you are able to cut one point of the frame to another point of a frame of a animation and you can extract it, allowing you to use sequences/use multitrack . which is fairly easy. Leadwerks support's both single/multi track animation, you just have to make sure your animated model has one of the animated diffuse shader, and a animated shadow shader, or else the animation's wont play, most of the time leadwerks convert your .fbx model's right, or you can use the leadwerks blender plugin to export your model's. some times it doesn't from time to time.

 

also learning to use lua is not that hard it was one of the easiest for me to learn.

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Thank you for your reply!

 

For this particular cutscene, it doesn't actually have to be that fancy. I was thinking more of a scrolling block of text with a slightly animated background (burning town) giving some backstory. There would be no need for "actors" per se (hence why I felt the programmatic approach to be less than ideal for my needs).

 

Yea, I saw that both single and multitrack are supported, but I'm not the best animator. Do you have any suggestions as to which toolset is best integrated with LE?

 

And I agree. I found LUA easy to read right from the get-go. I was able to simply peruse the code and I had a basic understanding of what was happening. For the odd thing that I didn't, the reference has proven exceedingly helpful (tables are unique and uknown to me, but it's a good feature).

 

Again, thank you for your reply and suggestions!

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oh

Thank you for your reply!

 

For this particular cutscene, it doesn't actually have to be that fancy. I was thinking more of a scrolling block of text with a slightly animated background (burning town) giving some backstory. There would be no need for "actors" per se (hence why I felt the programmatic approach to be less than ideal for my needs).

 

Yea, I saw that both single and multitrack are supported, but I'm not the best animator. Do you have any suggestions as to which toolset is best integrated with LE?

 

And I agree. I found LUA easy to read right from the get-go. I was able to simply peruse the code and I had a basic understanding of what was happening. For the odd thing that I didn't, the reference has proven exceedingly helpful (tables are unique and uknown to me, but it's a good feature).

 

Again, thank you for your reply and suggestions!

 

oh that kind of cutscene is quite doable, and easy to do in leadwerks.(although the animated background will be a table of the pictures being drawn rapidly on the screen to be a animated texture) also the scrolling text I am not sure about never done that, here http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/8436-leadwerks-animated-textures/page__hl__animated+texture shadmar does talk about uv scrolling for texture's but not for actual text. so I guess it could be just a transparent texture drawn to the screen and animate like the animated background texture is my only guess.

 

tools, well .fbx from autodesk software is supported, the blender leadwerk export plugin (does model and materials). and .obj, not sure about anything else, although i heard that LE2.X did support lightwave, but I don't think lightwave model's work in leadwerks/convert with 3.4 (I may be wrong as I don't know) also I heard PBR wont be implemented into leadwerks till next year, can't wait for that, that would be awesome.

 

also MacOS is suppose to be supported this year. (i've seen josh has some MacOS stuff in the C++ code so he has worked on it some.)

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oh

 

 

oh that kind of cutscene is quite doable, and easy to do in leadwerks.(although the animated background will be a table of the pictures being drawn rapidly on the screen to be a animated texture) also the scrolling text I am not sure about never done that, here http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/8436-leadwerks-animated-textures/page__hl__animated+texture shadmar does talk about uv scrolling for texture's but not for actual text. so I guess it could be just a transparent texture drawn to the screen and animate like the animated background texture is my only guess.

 

tools, well .fbx from autodesk software is supported, the blender leadwerk export plugin (does model and materials). and .obj, not sure about anything else, although i heard that LE2.X did support lightwave, but I don't think lightwave model's work in leadwerks/convert with 3.4 (I may be wrong as I don't know) also I heard PBR wont be implemented into leadwerks till next year, can't wait for that, that would be awesome.

 

also MacOS is suppose to be supported this year. (i've seen josh has some MacOS stuff in the C++ code so he has worked on it some.)

 

Great! That link is perfect! Thank you! And yea, features seem to keep rolling out like mad. It's definetely on the move in this dev shop. Haha.

 

 

You can do scrolling text with this:

http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/documentation/_/command-reference/context/contextdrawtext-r731

 

You can just update the position each frame. If you only have a little text though, then AnthonyPython's suggestion is probably best (saving an image of text).

 

I may have to do a mix and match as there may be a bit of text (haven't actually written it yet). Thank you all for the guidance! This gives me a direction in which to move!

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Depends how you want to display the cutscene graphically but I think you could just create your burning town in leadwerks as a map and then position a camera in good position and then add the scrolling text. You could also add some post effect shaders for for extra effects. Then once the text has finished scrolling or the player skips it load the actual level map after it.

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Depends how you want to display the cutscene graphically but I think you could just create your burning town in leadwerks as a map and then position a camera in good position and then add the scrolling text. You could also add some post effect shaders for for extra effects. Then once the text has finished scrolling or the player skips it load the actual level map after it.

 

that would be a better, cooler cut scene than a animated back ground.

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Depends how you want to display the cutscene graphically but I think you could just create your burning town in leadwerks as a map and then position a camera in good position and then add the scrolling text. You could also add some post effect shaders for for extra effects. Then once the text has finished scrolling or the player skips it load the actual level map after it.

 

I agree. Going with this instead. I'm not a designer, by any means, but I see the worth in this from a development standpoint. It's artful AND easier than my original notion. Thank you for the advice! Now I'm off to learn about post-process effects and shaders and whatnot. I know nothing of them.

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I agree. Going with this instead. I'm not a designer, by any means, but I see the worth in this from a development standpoint. It's artful AND easier than my original notion. Thank you for the advice! Now I'm off to learn about post-process effects and shaders and whatnot. I know nothing of them.

 

sometimes you have to think out-side the box to try and have not only appealing gameplay but also the design aspect of what makes your game different from others in your games genre, to try and make it stand out. what is done often in this genre, what isn't done often.

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Well the problem I'm running into is that I'm running my splash from the main App.lua script. I suppose I could plunk down a pivot, attach my SplashScreen.lua to it, and import it, but I was trying to get a more permanent solution. The point being, of course, that I am not sure how I would apply a post-process to App:Update(). :/

 

sometimes you have to think out-side the box to try and have not only appealing gameplay but also the design aspect of what makes your game different from others in your games genre, to try and make it stand out. what is done often in this genre, what isn't done often.

 

Agreed! However, that's a bit beyond where I'm at now. Before I start thinking outside the box...I need to learn what a box is first. :D

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Agreed! However, that's a bit beyond where I'm at now. Before I start thinking outside the box...I need to learn what a box is first. biggrin.png

 

agree with that as well, but still never to early to think of idea's out-side the box to just have them when you may need them later on as well.

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Processor: AMD A6-3420M APU integrated Radeon HD Graphics 1.50 GHz

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