Do you know the background of the main menu of Half-Life 2? It always shows a cutscene from the chapter you are currently playing. It would be so nice to have it in Empires aswell, but for this we need the cinematics first. We could cut out some scenes out of the trailer, but I would rather make complete new ones, which don't actually show the gameplay. And for this, we need some ppl and a server. So first, who wants something like that too? And who wants to be one of those who will be doing it if we are going to do it?
You could POSSIBLY do it with a combine vs rebel fight where the combine show up as brenodi and the rebels show up as NF, and just let them duke it out.
replaces the gman model with a NF soldier, and i could do one of my faceposer music videos as the background for empires :D
i will work on one with my friend who messes around with source alot: i will get something in about a month.
There is no AI in empires, you can't stage fights between npc's, which are also not in Empires. You'd have to try to pose each seperate soldier model in hammer, and script the whole battle, which can prove quite impossible. The best thing you can do is a tank battle, but you wouldn't be able to do some of the effects related to tank battles. I think you'd have to ask the coders to add entities to stage fights between the two sides if you want that kind of a background map.
You'll get sick and tired of staring at the 3D backgrounds just as quickly as you do staring at the plain ones. Plus, loading such a background would take a while, just like it did in TF2 when they had them. And if you think it takes a while to get into the game now, just imagine having to load another map before you have to load the actual one. If it's eye candy you want, better add it in-game where it'll serve more purpose than just annoyance. There are plenty of things that could use sprucing up, such as various explosion and particle effects (OB), smoke trails, etc.
It doesn't have to have people in it, I could probably knock together a nice particle effect and some mobile scenery/other effects, put some empires vehicles and buildings in, and just have the camera looking at it. It also only has to be a tiny bit of map, so it won't take long to load, and a lot of the stuff loaded (materials etc) will be cut off the load time of subsequent maps.
Why cant the main screen be like HL2 and show a pre-directed player battles that looks cool. Like the HL2 backrounds :D
If you had read the thread, you would've already known the answer, but i'll spell it out for you again: there is no Ai in Empires, thus making prescripted battles impossible, there are no entities to allow for the creation of battles in any way, except standard entities, which are very hard to use even in background maps.
You could put together something that has an ambient battleground feel to it, using env_gunfires, soundscapes, and point_spotlights, but no actual fighting.
like what you'd imagine for a ww1 battlefield? Have a random night map, with the occasional ligh as a distant explosion, and the trampling on feet in the mud, or gun shots ringing out, or rain starting to come down and the puddles in the mud rippling?
And if u had read my post properly then u would of rearlised that i wasnt talking about doing pre-scripted battes. I was saying that you would record a game of a few to add variaty like you do for the trailers and you have them playing in the backround
Well, that got answered aswell (I actually suggested this). The bad thing is that these cinematic backgrounds are actually maps.
