https://www.patreon.com/posts/will-cs-system-156723827
"Hello. I was hoping to be able to show the CS system to you at its finest, but it's still in a state where I don't know if it will really turn out. So instead, I'm going to show you the CS System at its worst!

Massive progress has been made since last time I made a post, when he could barely do anything. Now I have at least one clip of him working surprisingly well, and it can be fun to watch. This is an ambitious idea, and if he truly becomes a master, he will impress you with what he can do. But let's go back to the start.

You may wonder who "he" is. Well you see, I am training a simple, prehistoric caveman named Grugga in the art of cinematography. I've watched every episode of Every Frame A Painting, so I'm basically an auteur and I can teach him. In my last post, Grugga was shaking the camera around like a maniac. He wasn't ready yet, he didn't know what a camera was, and being thrust into the director's seat frightened him. So he acted out.

https://reddit.com/link/1tc055p/video/kcz128sorw0h1/player

Grugga's Journey

The Cinematic Spectate system--or Cinespec as I call it--or Grugga--is based off of different types of shots, each with their own rulesets to gauge the quality of the current shot, all of which I teach through code. This was the very beginning; once I had gotten Grugga to hold a camera properly, all he really seemed to care about was the Rule Of Thirds. And all he knew was the static shot.

https://preview.redd.it/n32gzg0gsw0h1.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=942b702e70266ac0f8730d67d8b256a1b71403e7

Grugga at this point was like an amateur art-house film director. Somehow he slavishly followed all the basic principles I taught him while still going for the craziest angles whenever he possibly could. He also wasn't able to take into account any other subjects other than the player he was watching. I did eventually make it better by emphasizing that he should try to look where the player is looking or moving towards, and that's about where he was at when we recorded this playtest:

https://reddit.com/link/1tc055p/video/qqjxlqvrrw0h1/player

Action follow cam

In this video you also see another shot type, the following action shot. It's inspired by The Shining.

https://i.redd.it/2jnnubhhsw0h1.gif

At least until recently, it's been much less steady. But it was so funny that I just ran with that for a while, considering it like a shaky cam.

This is not a new moon, it's a test area.

I made this specific type of shot so early because I was really focused on trying to make it look good when the subject is running around a series of tight, winding tunnels. Following a subject like that is harder to film than I expected, especially when it's happening live and you don't know where the subject will turn next.

https://i.redd.it/qw750r9jsw0h1.gif

Recent Developments

Then I refined Grugga's abilities for about the next week, teaching him new shot types. The most significant of these was what I call the Scenic Shot, which uses a low field of view and distances the camera as far as it can from the subject, panning to follow the subject. This panning element made the scenic shot so versatile that I'm able to use it indoors as well as outdoors, and it really helps where Grugga is still too dumb to use the static shot correctly.

Now, sometimes, rarely, I would actually prefer this over the current spectate system. (But Grugga still has a heart of gold, and if there is a Manticoil or some flying bugs in his range of awareness, he will include them in the shot at all times no matter where they are. He can't help it.)

https://reddit.com/link/1tc055p/video/l6ud9vvvrw0h1/player

Besides that, I've been putting loads of work into a "Shot Reverse Shot" shot for the camera, which reacts to players who are talking and looking at each other. It reacts to voice chat by cutting to each player's face like in a movie. I haven't seen it work well yet, and I think it will be somewhat niche. But it will be worth it when it works, because you'll really feel as if you're watching a Lethal Company machinima on Youtube. And after that, I'll probably work on a dramatic zoom or dolly-zoom camera which reacts to dramatic moments by zooming in on the subject... but this requires adding in some new variables which can be used universally and give Grugga more intelligence on what's happening in the game.

Will It Work?

Part of why I still don't know if this will work is because it requires so much touching up for small, specific situations. The way I've set it up, it's quite easy to make changes (and adding new shot types is kind of addicting), but it still requires a lot of testing and work, and I don't know how much more work it will take. I know that it will always be far from perfect, and I have some very, very good ideas for new creatures which I'm about ready to get to modelling. So my goal right now is to get Cinespec to the point where it's not completely distracting and annoying at least 50% of the time. Part of what makes me think this is not a total pipe dream is that it has some fundamental things going for it: 1. It intuits which player is the most interesting to watch at any given time and automatically switches to them so you don't miss anything (unless, potentially, it would be more cinematic if you didn't see something). And 2. It will display the exact same for all players, so all spectating players are watching the same thing together like a movie. (And of course if it gets annoying, you can simply click to swap to the old spectate system.)

The next post might be delayed by a week. But by then, I ought to be able to tell you if Grugga is actually going to make it, or if we are going to shoot him...and not with a camera."

https://www.patreon.com/posts/working-on-c-s-155584424
"Hello! In an earlier post I think I might have said I was really excited to experiment with a feature once V80 was done. Well I have dived into it. This week I started by created a coding architecture for this feature which allows me to add lots of nuance to it, which is basically required if it's actually going to work at all. This has been working well I think--especially once I created the debugging system, which... has been put to use. Yes, this is another wacky, zany, out-there feature with an acronym starting with the letter C. But it's not the CC--it's the CS System. (Is that too easy to guess? Maybe.)

Almost immediately I hit the feeling of "This is going to be harder than I thought", even though I had known it was going to be harder than I thought. It's also requiring an extra amount of math skills, which I am not too great at. I still don't know if it's actually going to work out or be scrapped, but it requires about another week to really tell. If it doesn't start looking a lot better by then, I'm going to scrap the idea, and you might never know what this was about. The reason I'm so ready to scrap it is because it doesn't really affect gameplay, so it's not really a super essential addition. (Unless, of course, if it works well--then it'll be essential.)

Besides this, I got a great idea for an ultra-aggressive creature, and I won't explain it further than that.

Ending Breakthrough

I also woke up this morning with an idea for the ending of the game. It came to me as I was waking up and felt like a dream; it was somewhere between an idea suddenly popping into my head out of nowhere and me watching it take place like a movie--a very short, choppy movie that finished in like 5 seconds, showing a key moment of the ending during gameplay.

This idea took place within the larger premise which I had been tentatively moving towards, which means I'm almost certainly going to go with that now. So I basically know what the ending of the game is going to look like now, in a broad sense. This dream was pretty exciting for me, because it mainly answered the question of what the players will do to ultimately bring about the end credits. That has been one of the main unanswered questions that has never really gone anywhere and has always been totally blank. So I'm really happy about that. There's still a lot to think about though.

I think the dream came to me because I had recently watched another couple videos analyzing one my favorite classic horror movies I've never actually watched (yet which I continue to watch long videos about; its plot just fascinates me.) And now if I said what movie it is, it would reveal too much!

Left-over V80 Stuff

Here's a document I forgot to share, which is from when I was trying to figure out where to put the utility slot on the HUD, which was a difficult problem. I was not going to add the utility slot until I figured out a place for it on the HUD. The final place I chose for it is still unfortunately easy to miss (which is why there is a special animation for equipping items into it to draw your eye up to the slot.) But the utility slot being on the top left feels like the most logical place to me, and I was really happy when I got that idea.

https://preview.redd.it/lxj5mivtbzxg1.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=a13838f2ce361a388c20d1b097ae5ad6808e8a55

This climbing animation for the Feiopar was the hardest, most painful animation to make, and its back left knee rig specifically has some ugly twitching problems that I couldn't fix. But it's gladly not really easy to notice from the side angle!

The Feiopar is an example of how just a little procedural animation can go such a long way. Because its tail waving around really "sells" a lot of its movement as real while in-game, and otherwise it would probably look quite robotic."

https://i.redd.it/i0jxatbwbzxg1.gif