I have a simplistic, arcade style jet game thats near completion. the jet moves left/right rotating on the z axis and up/down on the y axis. the game really wants to be a jet combat sim, but its too goofy to call it that.
After watching many of these videos,
i am convinced the plane movement can be approximated with blender maybe using fcurves or summat. I dunno. the jet moves freely around and the camera sort of follows but not strictly like a parented camera. My game utilizes camera follow so its better than parented, but still it looks wacky and boring (compared to these experts job)
could they be simply using something similar to the timeline in blender? how would one get closer to movement of a real jet in blender?
A lot of that is not about jet movement but just camera tricks: FOV, DOF/motion blur, slow parent.
Indeed BF3 is “experts job” and you will fall short of it no matter what, but it’s a good to set goals
How’s your camera currently set up? For dynamic approach you should have your camera location target (ie. where it should be) different from the actual camera location. You can have the target location using 3rd person camera for which you can search around forums. You can then get a descent “slow parent” /dynamic effect by doing something like move 1/n of the difference between target and camera per frame.
Access FOV through python camera.fov or I believe animating camera fov with action also works.
haha hi again kheetor, yes I do admire the battlefield series, mucho fun.
I dont so much aspire to copy or emulate bf as i do to make my game “un suck” when it comes to the jets movement.
the demo is complete which means everything i wanted to add is added, now its time to copy and paste a new file and start the fun part of adding levels.
this post is sort of a last ditch attempt to rectify the one thing that has plagued me since the beginning of this project. my jet moves like its on a slow merry go round haha I wont say its bad, but it definitely lacks “pep”
i already looked at depth of field and feld of view, unfortunately whatever i change (as usual nothing is ever straight forward in blender) nothing changes. but your points surprised and pleased me. camera tricks eh? I am going to “try” to learn more about this stuff. thanks for your time
btw, about three months ago i was so pleased with myself wen i decided to try the camera follow actuator instead of my parented camera. what an epithany! it was like night and day, sooo much better. but now i realize me, my game and my skills in blender still suck
any chance you or anybody else for that matter, could throw together an appropriate 3rd person camera set up blend file that would work well for a fast moving aircraft?
It looks to me as though the camera is always tracked precisely to the very point of the nose of the jet and always oriented so the Z axis is up/down with respect to the ground.
But then as Kheetor suggests, the camera position has a ‘slow parent’ constraint above and behind the plane.
So what happens is the plane changes orientation, the camera immediately tracks to the new point of the nose, but the camera only slowly positions itself back to the default position above and behind, thereby showing the plane in profile for a little time.
i already looked at depth of field and feld of view, unfortunately whatever i change (as usual nothing is ever straight forward in blender) nothing changes.
That’s probably if you try to access the Blender parts (bpy.) instead of the BGE parts (bge.) or animate input fields without using actions. Some of those don’t work in BGE at all though.
I am going to “try” to learn more about this stuff. thanks for your time
No problem, if there’s any particular part about what I describe you want to learn more just ask more specifically.
If you want to you can also post your game in Works in Progress and Game Demos and people can test it and suggest how to improve certain parts. Also if you want to ask about something you can just link to your current demo there.
Such things are not just “camera tricks” they are “presentation”.
It makes a huge different if a character walks along a boring path like a machine,
or if it happily jumps around, making some sounds interacting with interesting environment. Similar to movies … show something new as the game progresses.
I’ve got a flying game and while I’m still working on the movement, I’m pretty happy with the results I have. For the camera I use slow parenting, FOV animations, a little motion blur, and character animations. I’m going to add particles (“wind trails”) to the wings and some depth of field stuff later.
To animate the FOV, just keyframe the focal length property of the camera lens. (Pretty much everything in Blender can be animated and used in the game engine.)
