H5 editor capabilities

[Neckie]

Hey people,

I've been searching and exploring the editor for quite a long time now and its nice to see how many things you can do with it. Lately, I've looked at the dialog scenes again and found out that the editor has even more hidden features than I thought.

When you open a Dialog scene in the editor, you can actually PLAY it as you build it. You can easily take camera positions within a second.

I was looking in the menu to find some options and stuff for the scenes but I found out that I wasn't looking at the right place when I hit a key on my keyboard.

Here are some interesting keybind with the dialogs :

F1 = P = Play
F2 = Save All (like in the menu)
F4 = S = Stop
F5 = T = transition between cameras (camera set)
E = 5 (numpad) = Camera (open an existing camera view or create a new one with the exact position your screen is)
F8 = W = Wide screen view
Space = Dialog window, where you can add sentences (see picture).



When you play a dialog scene, the camera moves, the lips move, you can see the beginning of the sentences at the top and the sound actually play!

This means that just move the camera to the right angle, then click on E and check "New Camera"; give it a name and you got yourself a new camera position.

What I haven't figured out is where else are the effects stored. I mean, they are in the properties of the dialog scene in the selection property window in : sentences-> (number) -> Custom animations -> (number)

Then you link it to a hero or a monster and you write the right AnimName like move, spneutral, idle00,happy,attack00,hit and others. Those are probably references to intern names of the animations of monsters and heroes which I don't know.

This is very interesting to explore and I'll try to make my own dialog scene , without sound hehehe, in a few moments when i'll have the time.

In the standard maps you have 2 keybinds :
L = add sound for MiniDialogScene
K = camera for MiniDialogScene
I haven't tried to add sounds, but cameras crash the editor as soon as you click on Save Or Load.

I guess there are a lot more to find out about the editor. They are there, just waiting for us to find them until nival or ubi change the map editor so that you can't access those features again since it enables us to create tons of new things like campaigns or dialog scenes.

If you have other things about the editor that you'd like to share, I would like to hear from you!

[myythryyn]

that sounds really intresting Neckie, making cut scenes is definetly been something i would be interested in doing.
they would add some personality to maps.

but i dont think id want to add my voice to a cut scene:)
so if you could instead have a bottom section of the screen a message box with written dialogue, that would be good.

let us all know how it goes. I hope its not too complicated to use

[Mozared]

but i dont think id want to add my voice to a cut scene:)

Voice actors would? We had em in warcraft, why not here?

[Neckie]

Hi again!

I've worked a bit on the editor and here is the result : I changed the A1SM1 dialog scene a little bit and here is the result :

1. download the file : http://www.wikiupload.com/download_page.php?id=182383

2. install : put that file in your maps folder

3. play : with the console or in the script of your map :

Code: Select all

StartDialogScene( "/DialogScenes/A1Single/SM1/S1/DialogScene.xdb#xpointer(/DialogScene)" )

4. Enjoy ! lol

It's not very good, and very short (like 1 minute) but it's a start.

As you will see the camera sets aren't very good but well someone with talent should be able to make nice camera angles. Some scenes are missing transitions but I think that its not very important for now. There are some graphic glitch also, must have something to do with the animations but I didn't take time to correct these since they were not the point of my project.

The cameras are simple to use but the transitions can be weird sometimes.
The timing is VERY important here, for the armageddon part, for example, I had to approximate the animation time so that the zombie die at the right time.

The big downside from this is the usually non-cooperation of the editor when you add monsters to the map. You can't see them when you press the [...] button to add a monster link to an animation. SO you have to do it by yourself with the good old notepad by taking the id in the object list (which fortunately update automatically), then copy from an existing animation the right syntax and finally replace the monster link id with the one from the object list.

This means that modders will be at ease with this, but this isn't for everybody.

One of the good thing is that you can see the result immediately in the editor when you add a sound or an effect. If you are able to use the [...] (I could select the hero link with it, but can't see any monster link) the animations are working instantly also.

The animation names are the names you can find in the _(AnimSet) folder of your data.pak. For example :
attack00 -> the default melee attack animation
death -> the death animation
happy -> victory animation
and so on. Modders that have worked with animations should know those.

The editor isn't and will never be user friendly so I guess we have to deal with it. Making dialog scenes is frustrating because of the fact that the editor doesn't remember what monsters are on the map and if you go in the object list and copy the link, when you paste it, it disappear.

I think the only way to understand everything I'm saying is to open a dialog scene in the editor and to change some things in the dialog properties and to add monsters and heroes to see that you can't use their link to use them in animations unless you do it yourself with the notepad.
(This is the same technique that can be used to link your maps when you create a campaign.)

Gonna continue working on those when I'll have time! Cya around everyone! I'd glad to have your feedbacks on the subject!

[Pitsu]

Long time ago, when I was still actually interested in H5 I had a look at the cutscenes too. viewtopic.php?t=4303&start=15

I did not bother with the editor really. Nor worked with animations (IMO the needed research was not worth the gain, since only in-game animations can be used.) So I ended up doing some modifications that allow showing any stationary image (the camera of course can move along the image) as a (part of a) cutscene. A low quality sample is in the link above. Later I did a cutscene out of 2 images and it should be easy to have four 1024x1024 images. Mayhaps even more. How it exactly was done is a bit hard to explain in a simple way. For those who know a bit about the cutscene structure, I can tell that the original skydome of the cutscene map was replaced with cubic geometry and the images were displayed in the sides of the skydome.