A list of can-do's and can't-do's for BC (Bridges and External)

[Dante Leonhart]

I'm trying to get some things narrowed down for a video-project, so I made a list of things that (from my experience) I know to be either possible or impossible in Bridge Commander. I just wanted to share that list with you guys so that you could tell me if I'm wrong on any points. Some of the things I listed as can't-do's may very-well be can do's, but I can't be sure, since I'm no modder.

Bridge:::

CAN cause characters to talk at will and for whatever length required by simply issuing the 'report' order.

CAN cause characters to turn toward the Captain's chair. This can animation can be rocked backwards during editing if you want them to turn without speaking. The catch here is, that if you want a character to turn back toward the viewscreen, the command to do so will cause ALL characters to turn toward the viewscreen. Some of it might be able to be worked around with some editing tricks. Also, some of the other bridge animations of characters turning around (such as the Nebula bridge) look a little funny.

CANNOT order characters to move from their stations. The animations for some of the modded bridges for them to leave simply weren't put back after the bridge was modded. As a result, I think it would be impossible to get someone to actually get up out of the seat and move somewhere.

CAN change the station that a few characters sit/stand at. You can have Felix stand at the canon tactical position, have Kiska sit at the canon helm position and ect... with various mods. However, once they have started there, they cannot be moved.

CANNOT cause anyone to appear on the viewscreen at will - except Major Kira thanks to DS9fx. (Cmdr. Graff to a limited extent) I've been told this would not be difficult to script into the game but I'm looking into it as I write this.

CAN cause the characters and bridge to heave as if the ship has taken a heavy hit. This can range from a slight jolt, to a severe rocking of the ship, complete with sparking consoles and smoke thanks to JediFX. Characters heaving at their stations however seem to be limited to the Galaxy bridge.

CANNOT smooth-pan the camera. The FPS cam on the bridge is VERY, VERY, VERY twitchy. Having the camera move slowly is very difficult to accomplish and it can only be moved either straight forward or straight backward (depending on which way the camera is pointed, of course.) I am currently working with a scripter on a way to get the camera to strafe left or right and it looks like its possible, but it will be just as rough as before. Also, if the ship is under attack the camera will 'stumble' if the ship takes a hard hit while you are moving it forward. This can make it difficult to get the EXACT shot you want if you're moving the camera forward while under attack. This happens whether you are in 'free float' or 'god mode.'

CAN cause the camera to animate as if the 'Captain' character is sitting down, however standing up is straight forward. Once the cam is moved forward from the center seat, the character is suddenly at attention in the next frame.



External:::

CAN create an invisible 'camera ship' to create the illusion of a third person camera.

CANNOT control more than one ship at a time. If you want control of the 'camera' you must give up control of the ship you want to film. If you want to move the ship you are filming, you must give up control of the camera. There are a few ways around this, but they're very limiting. For example, during Episode II, I had the Galaxy moving out of space dock while panning the camera. What I really did was disable the Galaxy's engines as it moved forward so that it would 'float' through the space dock then quickly moved the 'camera ship' so that I could film it as it moved through. This would be very difficult to work around in a battle sequence. You would only be able to have a tactical to-from view if you want the camera to 'track' the moving ship. I have a trick or two for that to add energy for a scene like that if needed, such as disabling the 'camera ships' engines like I did to the Galaxy so that it would float foward as the target ship flew by it.

CANNOT have ANY targets selected for the 'frozen cam' (where the camera just sits and points in one direction no matter what moves in front of it.) The only way to get this camera view is to make sure no targets are selected. With a few tricks, you could still fire torpedoes straight ahead or directly aft, but the only way to fire phasers from this view would be to have them fire in random directions... such as in Nemesis when the Enterprise is trying to find the Scimtar. (This is possible with a mod.)

CAN have a free 'camera ship' watch as a ship goes to warp. No need to watch the 'stock camera angle' for warp. You can have ALMOST any angle you want for warp fly-bys.

CANNOT get rid of the text that shows up when a ship comes out of warp. (I *may* have a way around this, but I have yet to test it. It doesn't look promising, however.)

CAN get rid of the text that shows up DURING warp travel AND can have warp travel last as long as needed.

CAN freely move the ship/camera ship during warp.

CAN move the camera as close as you want to the ship without worrying about model clipping. Thanks to a few scripter's discoveries, the model of the ship can be expanded to enormous sizes. The only problem with getting close is that the textures will suffer. (I have not tested this myself, but have seem some excellent test footage.)

[cordanilus]

"CANNOT control more than one ship at a time"

You (sort of) can with this one.  I installed bc cleanly, added the 1.1 patch then installed km and ds9fx plus a few other mods.  From the NanoFX mod, you can target a ship then click "fly foward" or "cloak".  I think the extended fleet orders overwrites something which is why I haven't been able to use these features before.  Trouble is, AI controlled ships do collide (with each other) even if collisions is turned off.  Also, these AI ships try to avoid each other and you (the player) so this doesn't always work.

Yup, the textures do suffer at close range.  I have tested that one, only the hi-res models do ok, not the best mind you but good enough for me anyway.  Although, the weapons don't fire in their proper place (at least in my install that I know of).

All the rest look ok to me.

[Rob Archer]

CANNOT cause anyone to appear on the viewscreen at will - except Major Kira thanks to DS9fx. (Cmdr. Graff to a limited extent) I've been told this would not be difficult to script into the game but I'm looking into it as I write this.

You Can get anyone to appear on the viewscreen and on any bridge you can even build your own bridge crew and have them appear on the bridge on the viewscreen I know because i wrote a mod way back when where the enterprise hails the player and you get Picard, Riker, Troi, Data, Worf and la forge all on the main veiwscreen...

It requires a specific code to do though

[Dante Leonhart]

Whoa... whoa... whoa....

Are you serious? I didn't even know such a thing existed??

[Rob Archer]

Whoa... whoa... whoa....

Are you serious? I didn't even know such a thing existed??

Yup

You would need to alter the script for each bridge but it is possible, I suppose it could be modified to opperate on a time delay so you would hit a button then in 20 seconds the viewscreen would activate this would allow you to get into the position you want on the bridge.

[Billz]

Is it worthy or possible to release it as a mod?

Would solve alot of problems, for more then one person  8)

[Dante Leonhart]

Is it worthy or possible to release it as a mod?

Would solve alot of problems, for more then one person  8)

*agrees*

^_____^

[Mark]

CAN cause characters to talk at will and for whatever length required by simply issuing the 'report' order.

Would need scripting as a new button but there is no reason why not.

CAN cause characters to turn toward the Captain's chair. This can animation can be rocked backwards during editing if you want them to turn without speaking. The catch here is, that if you want a character to turn back toward the viewscreen, the command to do so will cause ALL characters to turn toward the viewscreen. Some of it might be able to be worked around with some editing tricks. Also, some of the other bridge animations of characters turning around (such as the Nebula bridge) look a little funny.

Turning animations do not touch the jaw, the speach is layered on top of them... so yes you could have them turn whichever way you wanted without speaking... this is do-able using BPCore.

CANNOT order characters to move from their stations. The animations for some of the modded bridges for them to leave simply weren't put back after the bridge was modded. As a result, I think it would be impossible to get someone to actually get up out of the seat and move somewhere.

The stock ones werent completed either, BC has many unfinished features like this.. immersion aside you would need to make custom animations for this.

CAN change the station that a few characters sit/stand at. You can have Felix stand at the canon tactical position, have Kiska sit at the canon helm position and ect... with various mods. However, once they have started there, they cannot be moved.

You can move characters with scripts, while in game, but they dont walk they just move. I cant remember the specific commands so you would have to ask someone like LJ

CANNOT cause anyone to appear on the viewscreen at will - except Major Kira thanks to DS9fx. (Cmdr. Graff to a limited extent) I've been told this would not be difficult to script into the game but I'm looking into it as I write this.

this is a game feature already, its just not handled in QB yet.. ATP:D had it so when you hailed a ship it showed their bridge on the viewscreen, we even got it using custom bridges.

CAN cause the characters and bridge to heave as if the ship has taken a heavy hit. This can range from a slight jolt, to a severe rocking of the ship, complete with sparking consoles and smoke thanks to JediFX. Characters heaving at their stations however seem to be limited to the Galaxy bridge.

character "hit" animations are limited by nanofx which disables them for some reason, same as the stock plasma jets.

CANNOT smooth-pan the camera. The FPS cam on the bridge is VERY, VERY, VERY twitchy. Having the camera move slowly is very difficult to accomplish and it can only be moved either straight forward or straight backward (depending on which way the camera is pointed, of course.) I am currently working with a scripter on a way to get the camera to strafe left or right and it looks like its possible, but it will be just as rough as before. Also, if the ship is under attack the camera will 'stumble' if the ship takes a hard hit while you are moving it forward. This can make it difficult to get the EXACT shot you want if you're moving the camera forward while under attack. This happens whether you are in 'free float' or 'god mode.'

Might be possible to do this using a camera animation in NIF form, but we havent sussed how to export these yet.

CAN cause the camera to animate as if the 'Captain' character is sitting down, however standing up is straight forward. Once the cam is moved forward from the center seat, the character is suddenly at attention in the next frame.

Again this could be done with nif cameras, we just dont know how to export them.

External:::

CAN create an invisible 'camera ship' to create the illusion of a third person camera.

Indeed

CANNOT control more than one ship at a time. If you want control of the 'camera' you must give up control of the ship you want to film. If you want to move the ship you are filming, you must give up control of the camera. There are a few ways around this, but they're very limiting. For example, during Episode II, I had the Galaxy moving out of space dock while panning the camera. What I really did was disable the Galaxy's engines as it moved forward so that it would 'float' through the space dock then quickly moved the 'camera ship' so that I could film it as it moved through. This would be very difficult to work around in a battle sequence. You would only be able to have a tactical to-from view if you want the camera to 'track' the moving ship. I have a trick or two for that to add energy for a scene like that if needed, such as disabling the 'camera ships' engines like I did to the Galaxy so that it would float foward as the target ship flew by it.

other then using MP or "order" function, you can only control 1 ship at a time.

CANNOT have ANY targets selected for the 'frozen cam' (where the camera just sits and points in one direction no matter what moves in front of it.) The only way to get this camera view is to make sure no targets are selected. With a few tricks, you could still fire torpedoes straight ahead or directly aft, but the only way to fire phasers from this view would be to have them fire in random directions... such as in Nemesis when the Enterprise is trying to find the Scimtar. (This is possible with a mod.)

You could try fiddling with the stock scripts for this...

CAN have a free 'camera ship' watch as a ship goes to warp. No need to watch the 'stock camera angle' for warp. You can have ALMOST any angle you want for warp fly-bys.

Sounds good, how do you do this?

CANNOT get rid of the text that shows up when a ship comes out of warp. (I *may* have a way around this, but I have yet to test it. It doesn't look promising, however.)

CAN get rid of the text that shows up DURING warp travel AND can have warp travel last as long as needed.

Mleo has answered all this here, dont know if it answers the first part of the Q though.

CAN freely move the ship/camera ship during warp.

Yes, and in KM1.0 the stars will follow your ship

CAN move the camera as close as you want to the ship without worrying about model clipping. Thanks to a few scripter's discoveries, the model of the ship can be expanded to enormous sizes. The only problem with getting close is that the textures will suffer. (I have not tested this myself, but have seem some excellent test footage.)

Sounds good, although wouldnt you need to make planets massive too?

[cordanilus]

"Sounds good, although wouldnt you need to make planets massive too?"

Hasn't been a problem yet.  The planets are so massive anyway that when the model is supersized 4x, it's still a lot smaller then the planet so it looks ok on screen.

Unless everything else (drydock, other ships, spacedock) is supersized, you'll see the size difference easily.  ex. the sovvie (at 4x) won't fit through the starbase doors.

[Nighthawk]

CANNOT order characters to move from their stations. The animations for some of the modded bridges for them to leave simply weren't put back after the bridge was modded. As a result, I think it would be impossible to get someone to actually get up out of the seat and move somewhere.

huh, dunno.
let me do some researches and I'll tell you what I found. however, I'm 75% percent sure it can be attempted. it will all depend on the crappy exporters we have >.<

[Rob Archer]

this is a game feature already, its just not handled in QB yet.. ATP:D had it so when you hailed a ship it showed their bridge on the viewscreen, we even got it using custom bridges.

New Frontier Had It too But i never completed it, I prorably could release it "Unoffically" as a Mod but the problem is while you could have the differenct bridges you would have the same crew on every bridge. I had a solution for this with New Frontier but never got around to it, i was going to do it for New Frontiers New Navigation/Communication System but again Never Got around to it. 

[Dante Leonhart]

Turning animations do not touch the jaw, the speach is layered on top of them... so yes you could have them turn whichever way you wanted without speaking... this is do-able using BPCore.

Would this be something difficult or easy? IE - would someone like me be able to pull it off? (no modding skill)

The stock ones werent completed either, BC has many unfinished features like this.. immersion aside you would need to make custom animations for this.

Yeah, and as I understand it, creating the animations would still mean building the bridge almost from scratch?

this is a game feature already, its just not handled in QB yet.. ATP:D had it so when you hailed a ship it showed their bridge on the viewscreen, we even got it using custom bridges.

THAT is awesome news. That means this project I'm working on will have a lot more lee-way. We could REALLY use something like that.

character "hit" animations are limited by nanofx which disables them for some reason, same as the stock plasma jets.

But say like, on the Galaxy bridge where the animations are still there for some reason, even with NanoFX? - well, one person doesn't get 'hit'. Miguel won't budge if the 'Canon character fix' is being used. Is there any way to fix that?

Again this could be done with nif cameras, we just dont know how to export them.

That would be cool. I know in the stock game there was definately a 'stand up' camera move for when Saffi and Picard walk in from the turbolift.

You could try fiddling with the stock scripts for this...

I know I have no modding skill, but just IN CASE there was something I could alter, which script would I look at?

Sounds good, how do you do this?

It's the MP order. I create an enemy in QB that doesn't have warp drive (a base or the borg or even disable its warp if it has it) and then warp to another system. From there I spawn whatever ship I want to see warp off and then give it the order to attack. It'll warp away and I can get a good shot of it.

Mleo has answered all this here, dont know if it answers the first part of the Q though.

Yeah, I've defiantly already gotten rid of the in-warp text and I think I've come up with an editing way to get rid of the out-of-warp text.

Yes, and in KM1.0 the stars will follow your ship

That would be REALLY handy in some cases.

Sounds good, although wouldnt you need to make planets massive too?

Yeah, if there's one in the shot I'd make sure it was big enough so that it did look weird. Otherwise, I'd probably only use it for beauty passes or things like that.

[LJ]

The stock ones werent completed either, BC has many unfinished features like this.. immersion aside you would need to make custom animations for this.

Yeah, and as I understand it, creating the animations would still mean building the bridge almost from scratch?

Immersion lets you do all this with near enough full bot path support, so no worries.

[Mark]

Would this be something difficult or easy? IE - would someone like me be able to pull it off? (no modding skill)

If you can find the function that calls the character turn (and im guessing it shouldnt be too hard to find) you just need to bind that function to a character, and then to a button.

It could take a while but its nothing too crazy, maybe one of the friendly guys at BCS could knock something together for you?

Yeah, and as I understand it, creating the animations would still mean building the bridge almost from scratch?

Not with nifskope now importing the stock nifs, I have the meshes in 3dsmax which means in theory I could make new anims... however its alot of work. I cant really go into it too much but im hoping this wont be a limitation in excalibur.

But say like, on the Galaxy bridge where the animations are still there for some reason, even with NanoFX? - well, one person doesn't get 'hit'. Miguel won't budge if the 'Canon character fix' is being used. Is there any way to fix that?

CCF doesnt affect it as far as I am aware, but the sensible money would be on not using CCF if you think that is causing the problem.. you could swap the anim files manually if you wanted to - just dont expect SP to like it

That would be cool. I know in the stock game there was definately a 'stand up' camera move for when Saffi and Picard walk in from the turbolift.

Indeed, so we have one for the galaxy bridge, I will look into exporting camera animations again and see if I can make a generic one.

I know I have no modding skill, but just IN CASE there was something I could alter, which script would I look at?

Anything with "cinematic" or "camera" in the filename..  again maybe ask BCS.

[Rob Archer]

Indeed, so we have one for the galaxy bridge, I will look into exporting camera animations again and see if I can make a generic one.

Does that mean i might be able to get the Sovereign Camera stand up animation which I mentioned a while back?

[Mark]

you could try just using the ebridge stand up anim, myself and LJ are working with exporting cameras, hopefully we will have something to show soon

[Rob Archer]

sorry mark i shouldn't have asked i keep forgetting that the camera animations and model animations are two different things.

[Mark]

Well we may have cracked the problem tonight, but I need to do some more tests to find out.