OpenArena Machinima

[catfish]

I almost hate to mention this, as announcing one of my projects is the best way to insure that said project will never get off the ground, but I was thinking of creating some kind of machinima video using OpenArena as a source.  Just wanted to make sure that nobody thought this was a particularly bad idea for some reason.

Also, I could use a little help.  I'm using spectator mode to "film" the action and I want a clear view.  I figured out how to get the game engine to stop identifying everyone I look at, and I also figured out how to get rid of the HUD at the bottom.  What I can't seem to stop are the message scrolls at the top of the screen.  Is there a command or setting to do that?  Or am I just going to have to letterbox/widescreen the thing like I considered doing in the first place?  (Not that I'm against letterbox/widescreen, mind you.  I'd just like it to be a choice. I hate having to do it.)

[fromhell]

cg_draw2d 0?

[catfish]

Thanks for the reply.  cg_draw2d 0 gets rid of all the distractions except the messages at the top of the screen.  In fact, after playing with settings some more, I see that cg_draw2d 0 takes care of some of the other things that I had been using separate commands for.  Oh, well.  There are only about a thousand more commands and variables left to play with.

Does OpenArena use a particular font for said messages?  Maybe I can clear that out...

Edit:  Well, said fonts are in gfx/bigchars.tga it seems.  Tried painting over the letters in black.  It printed black squares instead of letters in the messages, and deleting the file entirely printed messages using the "I can't find the texture" texture.

[Blaenk]

What are the messages?

[catfish]

What are the messages?

Oh, I mean the status messages and chat messages that are displayed at the top of the screen as you play.  For example:

• Major has entered the game.
• Grism did a backflip into the lava.
• Couldn't find sound file haste.wav
• Catfish almost dodged Sarge's rocket.
• Gargoyle:  Catfish is a camping whore.

I couldn't sleep tonight, so I generated a list of all possible commands and tried everything that looked promising.  I discovered that "/con_notifytime" controls how long said messages are displayed before they scroll up off the screen.  Default is 3.  Changing it to 0 caused the messages to barely flicker into existance before they disappear.  But "/con_notifytime -1" stopped them from appearing altogether.

Bwuhuhahahaha!  Ahem.  I mean, I am very pleased with myself.

Of course, now that I've gotten rid of all the distracting crap on the screen, I've go no excuse not to start doing the screen captures.

[catfish]

I played around with some of the techniques I intend to use to create the machinima.  Nothing fancy as I'm working by myself at present.  Example available for view at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxtUPWsKjcw.  I threw in a couple of mentions of openarena.ws to perhaps send some new gamers this way.

I'm trying to think of a good name for it.  Current working title is "OpenArena Machinima."

[Jeric Hikari]

The only complaint I really have at this point is the actual teleport effect seems to take too long, and that the narrowest part of it is a bit off in relation to where the feet are.

[catfish]

Yeah, I'm going to have to pull up an old episode of Star Trek or something and work out a timeline for the teleporter sequence.  Positioning of the effect is hard because the Gargoyle model has those huge wings.  I wasn't planning to teleport said Gargoyle, but I didn't have a good picture of Psycod the Magnificent:  Slayer of the 19 Cats of Doom.

Well, everything I've done so far has been one man on one computer.  Next step is to clean off the workbench (a task I have been putting off for years) and network together some of these old computers into a puppet control center.

[Jeric Hikari]

Well it looks pretty good so far save for the teleport issue, at least to me it does. The biggest problem I could see you having is when it comes time to show that these guys are speaking. Would be nice if you could find someone to add extra animations to the models for posing and such(thank goodness that all of this is GPLed, hence you have the scource files to work with).