Cinematic, Blurry/Shifting Time Acceleration

[NikolaiLev]

I'm afraid I don't have an example on hand, but I'm sure you can think of one. In movies, when characters are walking great distances, it may pan out to watch them from the side. They walk at normal speed, then they slowly fade out and fade back in some ways ahead as the camera remains still, the sun fading in position in turn. This is an awesome cinematic technique, and I feel it would be perfect for Kenshi.

If possible, this would make it so when you use time acceleration, it doesn't make characters move about in fast forward. Instead, they move at the same speed, but they "fade" to different positions every few seconds. GUI elements would work the same as they do now; this would merely be for 3D graphics.

It's also possible this could be restricted to when characters are walking without any combat occuring. This would likely only apply to your characters, so if your party is passing by a fight you're not involved with, this would still apply.

And at the end of the day, this could just be a toggleable option you can turn off.

If anyone understands me and can get a YouTube video showing this technique, then please post it!

P.S. This suggestion was most certainly inspired by this video. It occured to me that the mood would be kind of ruined seeing characters move about at high speed, with footstep sounds playing at a ridiculous pace. But time acceleration is important given the great distances and relative lack of things to do when traveling. At the very least, sounds shouldn't play at a similarily high speed if it can be helped.

[Clawdius Talonious]

While the small pack of wanderers might benefit from a cinematic camera view, it would really be a lot of work for very little enhancement of the overall game. If this was a larger project I'd be all for it, having a cinematic camera style in large scale sieges could be quite interesting and give you several ways to monitor your armies. However, this game is more about the siege warfare and a bit less about the lone wanderer or small squad of allies persevering against all odds in the desert. For one thing, there will be new biomes, and for another even if you choose to start your game as a lone wanderer and join up for a stint as a merchants bodyguard, ferrying your own goods and doing randomly generated quests once the game is properly released, eventually everyone is going to want to acquire additional squad members and build a settlement when they have accumulated a fortune. After that you'll likely hate some specific faction, always wandering around acting smarmy and hardly spending anything in your taverns. At that point, warfare will break out.

I can't say how much work it would take to add in some sort of automatic cinematic camera, but if the answer was very little I could see it being interesting later on, but there are a lot more interesting features on the horizon that I personally would prefer to see first.

Also welcome to the Kenshi forums! And don't be disappointed because one person doesn't find your idea amazing, I'm just a moderator and by no means anyone who has any say so in what Chris wants to work on. More ideas are always welcome.

[NikolaiLev]

It would seem you have my idea confused for something else. This doesn't have anything to do with camera panning. This would merely be a visual change to how time acceleration affects rendering. I've made a very sloppy edit (the audio shouldn't be affected here, just the visuals) to illustrate my point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi0EMQCKc_w

Compare to http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... fXI#t=135s

It's what I believe is known as a "dissolve" transition, in cinematography. In this case it's used for nice looking time compression. Notice how at 0:04 and 0:14 time skips ahead smoothly.

Mind you, this would very much be an end-of-development, aesthetic detail. But I feel it would go a long way for immersion if it wasn't too much work.