Matinee Tutorial
From RoboBlitz Editor Wiki
Contents |
Adding An Object and Linking It
Add camera to the world, the camera is an Actor so look CameraActor in Actor Classes Browser. Select it and then add it to your map (by right clicking and selecting Add Camera Actor Here). After you have done that go to this Kismet script. You should notice your Matinee has a variable attachment at the bottom with the same name as the group you added. If you have your camera selected you should be able to add it as an object variable. Add it and link it to the group name, the Kismet tutorial covers doing this if you've forgotten how. There should be three things linking to the matinee at the moment. Your variable, the matinee data and the event that kicks it into life. That's all we are going to need for the moment. A future bit of the tutorial might cover things like the matinee being aborted or further action to take when the matinee is completed. For now we'll keep it simple.
Adding Object Movement
Go back into the matinee (double click it from Kismet) and highlight the camera group (whatever you called it) and right click it select Add Movement Track. This track controls movement of the camera compared to the world, Elevator uses an object instead.
Make sure you have the Movement track highlighted. Click the keyframe button (
) on the top left. This adds a keyframe (for a description of these see Interping To Keyframes) to the event. Add a second keyframe at a later point in time by dragging the time bar to the point you want then adding keyframe. Go back to the editor with this keyframe selected and drag the camera. This is where your camera will get to for the second frame. The speed of the camera depends on how much distance you want to cover in a given time. If you want to give it more or less time you can Ctrl click the keypoint and move it. Add some more until you are happy (you might need to drag the end time to increase the time given).
Finally we need to link this to the director track (if you click on play in the Matinee Editor now you'll see your camera move in the world but not actually show you the world from that camera). Left click to highlight director track and click to add a key frame, a dropdown box appears, pick your camera group name and it should display on the director track now. If you preview it should now show you the view from the camera.
Multiple Cameras
Want to flick between cameras (possibly focused on the same object but maybe in totally different locations)? Create a second camera in your level and create a variable for it in Kismet. Go into the Matinee and create a new group (lets call this FlyBy2 in this example). Like the first group you added add a movement track and and some movement to it. You can have cameras move while you aren't focused on them so, for example, a camera following another object in game can continue tracking that while you flick to a different camera, when you flick back you'll still be following the object.
This movement track, like the first one, connects to the camera object. Finally you tell the director track when to switch to the camera. Select the directors track and (the one with the clipboard); select the time you want to pick and add a new keyframe (), it should give you a dialog with Cut To Group and pick the group you want to cut to at this stage (FlyBy2 in this case) and that's you done. You can cut back to the first group again (or a new group) by adding new keypoints.
Disabling Actors
So you are trying to show your player something important and they are jumping around the scene like no business until they finally fall off the edge? No problem lets get rid of that. You can use ToggleCinematic or ToggleInput (both in Action->Toggle menu in Kismet) before and after the event occurs (so turn input off or cinematic on before the Matinee and turn input on and cinematics off after the Matinee). Hook a Player variable up to the Toggle. Make sure you do hand control back to the player otherwise they can't move; also make sure if you allow the scene to be skipped you make sure you set up the Aborted output as well on the matinee. Finally don't Toggle specifically use on or off as, otherwise, you might end up doing the wrong behaviour at the start and finish.
Stuff TODO
There are a few things that I still want to cover which I haven't had time to yet (but I will get around to):
- Show you how to skip the matinee, which you might want to provide (it's a flag but I'm not convinced that a key is bound for it).
- It plays every time the level is loaded, which might work in some cases but in others you don't want to see the level again every time you've been forced to restart it (though unless you rewind it it won't actually play.
- Also I'd like to show adding fade
You can do all these with the matinee so have a play round and I hope to get around to updating this soon.
--killingtime 10:53, 7 March 2007 (PST)
