Friday Facts #273 - Cutscene controller & Localisation plan

[moonlord]

Consider smoothly letterboxing the screen when entering the cinematic (in addition to hiding the UI). This effect is used in many other games so there is kind of a subconscious recognition and understanding among players.

And definitely zoom more and pan less.

[Ringkeeper]

The result of the questionnaire will be skewed towards people who is reading English and the FFF.

Well, i hope so.
Localisation in a game like Factorio (so small company) should be kept to a minimum. German, english, french , maybe spanish. Russian/polish could also be valid later.

Localisation takes a lot of time. Factorio has not a high word count compared to a MMO f.e. but still a lot. Loca is also not cheap, specially if you use 3rd party.
Waiting to release a patch because loca is not done yet (last thing before QA normal) gets frustrating.

And which language do you take as the primary from where you localise to other languages ? Czech , as its their main language ? Not easy . English most people can understand and finding a translator from english -->> other language is the easiest.

Maybe allow language pack mods would help for smaller languages.

[5thHorseman]

I'm not prone to motion sickness but that video did trigger something. :/

Maybe have an alternative where instead of moving the camera, the game puts an big annoying arrow on the screen pointing in the direction it wants the player to pan the camera, and that arrow stays until the player has panned the camera to show what you were going to pan to automatically.

[Nightinggale]

The result of the questionnaire will be skewed towards people who is reading English and the FFF.

Yeah they might as well ask questions like "Do you know how to read English?" (yes) and "Would you buy Factorio if it's available in your native language?" (already bought it).

The only real question is the one about knowing people not playing due to a missing translation. The problem with that one is it is totally skewed regarding social status. Say we have a country where 10% understands English enough to play. However Factorio is only discovered by engineering students and a requirement in the studies is to be able to read books in English. The survey would then get the result that 100% are able to play in English and those who answered states the same for their friends because their friends happen to be students too and it tells nothing about the general population.

Those problems can be fixed by.... I don't know. I have no idea how to make a survey which provides answers from the people who should answer to make the results really interesting.

[Jap2.0]

executable

factorio.exe

Hmm...

But yeah, I'm guessing there is some weird windows api stuff you need to do (although this is just from vague recollections of example projects from Visual Basic 6, so don't trust me on that).

[FasterJump]

Zoom out to a height where both origin and destination are visible and then zooming in again would give a sense of overview, which is great when the player wants to figure out where the camera is moved to. This can be combined with slow movements for scrolling, which will allow the scroll movement without feeling like a scroll. Besides if the scroll is done primarily while zoomed out, the scroll has less of an on screen distance to travel, making it much less of a scroll.

Still it would be nice to have all speeds for this user configurable, as in speed and acceleration for both scroll and zoom. Maybe configurable to not allow movement in more than one direction at once, meaning zoom out, scroll, zoom in.

This reminds me this old Supreme Commander Trailer where the "zoom out, zoom in" is used for everything. You can also see this cast that every time the caster needs to move the camera to the action, he naturally does a zoom out - zoom in. I'd be curious to know if those videos gives motion sickness.

[fur_and_whiskers]

In Multiplayer cutscene would be brilliant for a player who wants to see what another player is doing via the map view.
I'm new to the game so may have missed something, but at the moment theres a bit of where's waldo when trying to find a fellow player.
It'd be so much easier if there was a way to open map and quickly press a key and/or click something to select between players and have your map view pan over to them.
Of course have an option between just instantly viewing them or panning. Panning would give you a much better sense of where they are, but then having the option to instant view if you already know where or it isn't important to know or if motion sickness is an issue

[bobucles]

he naturally does a zoom out - zoom in. I'd be curious to know if those videos gives motion sickness.

That would definitely minimize the amount of horizontal movement on the screen.

[Nightinggale]

This reminds me this old Supreme Commander Trailer where the "zoom out, zoom in" is used for everything. You can also see this cast that every time the caster needs to move the camera to the action, he naturally does a zoom out - zoom in. I'd be curious to know if those videos gives motion sickness.

Interesting, but it's not a good example. The first video has a rapid moving camera, which turns around a spot and stuff like that even before the map zoom. Also it has quick scrolling right next to the zooming, making it impossible to tell reactions for each type of movement apart.
The second video is kind of the same. A lot of rapid zooming and scrolling, both jerked. This too makes it impossible to tell reactions for each type of movement apart.

What's needed to avoid sideeffects with motion sickness is the same as with car sickness: no sudden moves. Imagine you have a glass full of water in a car. You do not floor the pedals or pull the steering wheel hard. Instead you gently start moving and gently change speed. The same is true for stopping. You don't want that "bump" when stopping completely, meaning you gently and gradually let go of the brake to effectively stop braking at all at the point the car stops.

Likewise as I wrote you should be able to control both top speed of camera movement as well as acceleration as in how much the camera movement speed is allowed to change each tick. The removal of sudden changes is the key to reduce the risk of motion sickness. Making sure the top speed is below some threshold is the other key.

To make a proper test of the effects of the zoom and scroll solution, we need a zoom and scroll solution taking those factors into consideration and the video shouldn't have any other things going on, which would "pollute" the outcome.

[otobot1]

The cutscene controller video made me a little motion sick as well. I think it's moving too fast maybe? And maybe also panning and zooming simultaneously makes it worse? It's definitely accelerating the camera too quickly. The change from stationary camera to moving camera should be much more gradual.

[Drury]

I think the main problem is that your curve is upside-down to what it should be. You end up panning very quickly close to the ground as a result.

Here's your current camera trajectory badly drawn by hand in red, a preferred version of it in blue.

panning.png (33.98 KiB) Viewed 7749 times

[Dev-iL]

I agree with those who talked about the need to zoom out before panning.

I also agree that the questionnaire answers will be heavily skewed, since it asks irrelevant things. I think it should ask about the age of the answerer, how common are livestreams/youtube of factorio in their language, how many acquaintances they have who play factorio, etc. More importantly, the questionnaire itself should probably have been localized.

And of course, I cannot possibly pass on the opportunity of a FFF that discusses localization w/o asking developers about the progress of GUI mirroring for RTL languages - so how is that going?

BTW, how is hiring proofreading companies going to work when you publish updates that change/add strings? Will you re-hire the company for O(10) strings at a time?

Also I'd advise that you inform the proofreading company you choose that they have to you play the game and not just go over the strings, since some translations are not always literal (due to lack of equivalent words in the target language; or when the equivalents would be ambiguous or not make sense; or if the original English string is too confusing or has TMI), but do make sense in context. Current translations were made "by gamers, for gamers" and I'd like to believe it counts for something.

[peternlewis]

Suggestion regarding the cut scenes:
If planning to zoom in, pan first, then zoom once on-scene
If planning to zoom out, zoom out first, then pan to the scene

I think this should make it smoother, but the only way to know is test

I came here to say exactly this, but @mtreis86 said it perfectly. If in any doubt, a look at the video posted to the blog shows how clearly this is needed, the zoom in and then pan at the end is very disorienting.

[abregado]

Sadly asking players to look where you tell them does not work, otherwise we wouldn't need the cutscenes at all.
What you have seen in the FFF is still very work in progress, and the cutscene shown was not one that is actually used. In most of the cutscenes I have added to the tutorial so far I always zoom out, then pan and then zoom back in if necessary.

The motion sickness is caused by a number of factors:

• The viewer not linking the movement with something they did.
• The viewer focusing on the centrepoint (player character) subconsciously and trying to keep it in focus while the camera steals the view.
• The viewer having no indication that such a movement is coming.
• The speed of panning.
• The combination of panning and zooming.

Making a system that takes care of all these perfectly in all cases is probably not likely to happen, so the individual cutscenes will need to be scripted very well. There will always be cases where a scripted sequence can cause sickness. I look forward to players giving us feedback on each individual cutscene.

Some things we are looking at currently to help with this:

• Scene cut using a fade to black transition.
• Indicating that a cutscene is playing (vignette,letterboxing or using the cctv filter from map view).
• Making the player trigger the cutscene by moving to and standing still in a trigger area.
• Panning as little as possible.
• Zooming or panning, but not both (most of the cutscenes are already like this)
• Locking the camera to another entity so the viewer has something to focus on.

The suggestions so far are really great. Keep em coming!

[abregado]

Also I'd advise that you inform the proofreading company you choose that they have to you play the game and not just go over the strings, since some translations are not always literal (due to lack of equivalent words in the target language; or when the equivalents would be ambiguous or not make sense; or if the original English string is too confusing or has TMI), but do make sense in context. Current translations were made "by gamers, for gamers" and I'd like to believe it counts for something.

Current plan is to build up a proper glossary of terms and then use the current complete community translations as a guide for the translator to use. A big part of the search for a translation company was finding ones that specialize in games, and those that have the translators actually play the game are at the top of the list. Biggest hurdle here is that most of them have the translators play the game for 1 hour, which in the case of Factorio is clearly not enough. The quality mindset around here means you can be sure that we wont just pick any old translation company to work with us.

[MMCPrO132]

Fonts in russian localization is terrible but the words translation is good

[abregado]

Fonts in russian localization is terrible but the words translation is good

Font suggestions would be appreciated! Could you perhaps list some fonts and other games that use them.

[Ayamari]

I would like to second the opinions to make cutscenes optional and/or skippable. The presented clip does make me feel uncomfortable.

All required information (objectives/requirements/target location) should have already been presented in other means anyway (text, markers on map, arrow on edge of the screen, etc), since the player (me ) is very likely to forget or not pay attention. In that case the cutscene becomes just a fancy option for those who enjoy it and should not be forced on everyone, at least in my opinion.

[Nightinggale]

• Locking the camera to another entity so the viewer has something to focus on.

Brainstorming a bit on that idea, I wonder if it would make sense to make some sort of "tutorial bot" as in whenever a cutscene is needed, the player will spawn something bot like. This will freeze the game, it says something where the player has to press tab (like the tutorial) and once pressed, the camera is locked to the bot. This means the camera movements can be controlled by (existing?) code, which moves a vehicle and not some custom camera code. On arrival, it can then talk again and can be coded to go player-A-B-C-player if the player needs to be made aware of 3 locations.

This approach would take care of the issue of avoiding unannounced camera movements. Vehicles can have an acceleration and top speed, meaning it won't jerk the screen. Being a bot the movement will be steady because it will move in a strait line regardless of what is on the map.

It would still be nice if the player could have some sort of control over top speed and acceleration like speed change for each tick. Remember to use acceleration again to stop or stopping could be too sudden for comfort. If we aim for max smoothness, then we go one step further. Acceleration is change of speed per tick. For a perfect movement, the change of acceleration per tick should be capped as well. You can actually easily test yourself the effect of changing acceleration per second. Get in a car, drive and stop. The passenger will be thrown forward. Do it again, but gradually let go of the brake and try to let go of the brake at the moment the car stops. The passenger won't feel a thing. The issue is the sudden drop in acceleration (or in this case going suddenly from negative to 0). Sure it requires practice to get this right, particularly getting it right consistently and training this in traffic isn't a good idea, but it tells the effect of changing acceleration/time and the sideeffect of sudden changes.

I'm not entirely sure how it would work with ticks considering it would (should) freeze the game while moving. Being stuck with cutscenes during a biter attack could be deadly if the biters can move and attack while the camera is stolen.

I would like to second the opinions to make cutscenes optional and/or skippable.

Being able to skip and/or jump to destination without movement animation would be nice. Given the player freedom and possibly even randomness of the map, it could be hard to completely avoid the camera having to move long distances. With capped speed, it might take a while, which would quickly become boring.

Also it helps with replayability. If you know where it's going, you might not want to look at the movements. Depending on how this is implemented, replayability might mean some players could see the same event multiple times and it's likely less interesting the 8th time than it is the first time you see a certain event, hence certain movements.

All required information (objectives/requirements/target location) should have already been presented in other means anyway (text, markers on map, arrow on edge of the screen, etc), since the player (me ) is very likely to forget or not pay attention.

Make the tutorial bot stop at the destination, wait a second and then drop a marker entity. This marker should contain the text the bot told you at the location (or summary) and ideally it should act as a player in the sense that it shows up on the map with a name. This approach will however require some thinking into when to remove the marker entity again. Maybe dropping a marker should be optional as not all the bot tells you would require refinding the location with this accuracy.

The easy way from a coding perspective is to script the marker independently from the bot/camera movements. Sure it would increase the work for scripting the tutorial/scenario, but at the same time it adds scripting freedom and it simplifies the engine. Scripting freedom should be a goal in itself whenever something is made into an API for modders.

[Oktokolo]

I don't care about cutscenes. But would it be possible, to use the new controller for the transition from one location to another in a "fast travel" or "teleport" mod?
The technical difference to an actual cutscene would be, that (after the "cutscene") the view should return to the original zoom level without returning to the original location. And in multiplayer it would have to affect one player only (probably already possible).