connect wrote in Tue Apr 10, 2012 4:50 am:Snipey; I know about the click tower script, but what I propose is different. Where you can actually walk around, etc.
This is certainly possible, we already have a "walker" that allows you to walk around in the scenery, entirely driven by Nasal scripting.
Just take a look at the "bluebird" aircraft:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/BluebirdThis can be reused, even without understanding all the scripting involved.
So you could turn that walker into a "camera man".
For example, see:
http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear- ... 21309.htmlDetlef Faber wrote:I'm a simple content contributor with very little background in programming. When I made my first Aircraft (the bf109) I was confronted with the need to deploy slats automatically at a given speed. I din't want to embed C++ code or had such a complex script that the error messages in FG wouldn't help me and I previously only used a bit of python. I looked at some Nasal scripts and within a few hours it worked. I was impressed how easy it is to write even complex Nasal scripts. Later I started developing the walker feature that made it possible to walk around in the scenery, all with nasal. Stuart kindly enhanced the walker and added an animation system to it (see bluebird), again with nasal.
The "walk view" itself is even documented on the wiki:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Walk_viewNow, if you are really afraid of all the scripting and integrating it properly, you could just as well base all your work on the bluebird, where the walker is already fully integrated and available.
You could simply copy the bluebird to a new folder "bluebird-cameraman" and apply your changes there.
2- To incorporate effects into the replay system. Such as a realistic camera shake effect, and that would shake, in search of a better term, more violently on/after touchdown.
This is actually just a matter of adjusting the view during replay, either by switching between a handful of "offset views", or by using a Nasal snippet to apply an offset dynamically.
ThorstenB is the "de facto" maintainer of the replay system currently. And I talked to him about a number of related ideas a while ago, some of them related to video effects and better recording/replay control.
Straight from the core developer's mouth: ThorstenB wrote:I'd also like to be able and connect views to certain points. Maybe even camera movements - to allow the camera to move smoothly from one point to another. And for recording videos, it would also be nice if one could automatically skip from one marker to another - or enter something like a simple "movie script" as a list of commands. Such as: if time reaches marker X, then move camera to position ..., or skip replay to time/marker Y, or change replay speed to slow-motion etc.
However, I think such things should go to a separate GUI, the original replay dialog should be kept as simple as possible - as most people won't need such advanced features. So, something like a separate "video assistant dialog" would be nice. Maybe you're interested, if you're recording videos often.
I already provided a patch to assign symbolic names to time stamps in the replay buffer - the same technique could be used to link replay "events" (i.e. timestamps again) to camera adjustments or other effects. Basically, all you need to do is watch the current replay time stamp and then set a property to "fire" an event - you could then use a conventional Nasal listener to call a code routine to do something, such as adjusting the current view, taking a screen shot - and so on.