Well, there are three features I’d like to see in theatre mode.
-Object follower
-Player Action Bars
-Camera line up
First, the object follower.
The player should be able to lock onto any object that can move, kind of like how any player is automatically followed when in third person, but the objects instead are followed.
If you get a nice across the map, just lock on to the grenade and the camera would automatically follow the grenade
Second, the Player Action Bar.
This would be most useful to the Object Follower. Either way, the player action bar would be a representation of player actions in a ten second future. If you throw a grenade, then if you look at the player action bar five seconds before the throw, you’ll see a grenade icon in the bar closing in on the “present time” tab.
Perhaps it’s stretching it a little, but I’d even wish for small chain reactions to also appear. Say that a player is killed by a small flying object. The killer threw a grenade which sent the small object flying.
The game could check for “major” event, such as getting killed, what caused the kill, and the point of origin, if it’s not a player generated object like a grenade or rocket. Then it’d put the killing object’s start of motion on the Player Action Bar as an “event”.
Player A throws a grenade, which shows up on the “PAB”, the grenade detonates which causes a cone to fly away. The cone hits and kills player B. The game detects that Player B was killed by a non-player generated object. The game goes back until it finds the object’s starting position and maps it on the PAB.
Each player would have their own PAB, so to not have one bar full of actions from different players. The recorder should also be able to line up different objects from different players, or players, to follow during one recording, kind of like how we switch which player to view from currently. So I could take Player A’s model first, then that player’s grenade, quickly switch to an action Player B does, and then to something else.
With different camera transition systems of course. Fade to black, quick camera travel and so forth.
Third, Camera line up.
Something I like about animation programs is that you can set a cameras start position and end position, and it’ll move between those points. Something like this is what I’d like for a future theatre mode.
You set the start position of the camera, then the end position, and then you could set inbetween positions that the camera goes to, with rotation and everything. Just fly to the position, press a button to lock the position in the frame you’re in, then forward your clip, lock the next key position and so forth until you’ve strung together a rail for the camera to follow.
How would these interact with each other?
Well, the Action Bar could be used to automatically lock on to objects that the player will “generate”, like grenades, rockets and other projectiles when that action happens. So there would be no need to get the exact frame when the object appears, and there’d be no choppy video of something suddenly starting. You could have locked on to the player, and then when he/she throw a grenade, the camera automatically follows the grenade instead. With the camera line up system, you choose from where the camera starts to record, which rail it follows and where it stops.
When you’ve set up objects to follow and the camera rail in a sort of pre-record mode, you hit a preview button to see what it’ll look like, then adjust things you want adjusted, preview again, adjust until you’re happy and then record.
Then again, perhaps it’s too complicated both from a developer point of view as well as from a user point of view.
