falke 0.4.0

Hey everyone, source here, with an update to the falke camera tool.

Introduction

First of all, thank you, everyone for using the tool. I do enjoy watching a lot of the videos using it, and I hope it made even a small impact on some of the videos. For those who aren’t familiar, “falke” (the german word for “hawk”) is a camera tool inspired by the moviemaking tools found in other games like Counter-Strike and Call of Duty. While it’s not nearly as feature-complete, it’s a starting point. The goal has always been to enrich the movie making scene within the THPS community.

The changes

This update brings a user interface for controlling the camera tool and abandons the hotkey workflow. There aren’t a lot of new ground-breaking changes; this version is more about rewriting it in a way to, first of all, lay some groundwork for better maintainability of the tool and also open it up to receiving more possible changes in the future.

What’s next?

There are a couple of things I played around with and would like to see integrated.

Supporting more games

I’d like to at least support THAW(/ReThawed) and THUG2 vanilla. More games aren’t planned yet.

Replay

I’ve had a working prototype where I would record the skater’s movement and be able to replay it. You might have seen that here:

The idea would be to record .flk Replays and replaying them. The new user interface and timeline help a lot as I don’t have to do any QB Scripting anymore.

3D Capabilities

Basically exporting the camera path and even the skater’s movement to Blender. As that required a lot of manual steps (importing the map, setting up the skeleton, importing the cas piece by piece, etc.), I never released this. With newer tools and not depending on older Blender versions anymore, maybe I could revisit this at some point.

What do you think?

The last two points are probably a bigger undertaking. If there are any changes you’d like to see or bugs to report, feel free to either post in the channel I released the tool in or shoot me a DM. When reporting bugs, please include the “falke.log” file next to your game’s executable.

When?

Probably not too soon. It’s a fun side project for me that I visit from time to time, but I can’t guarantee when I will release something new, as you can probably see with the inconsistent releases. I’m not even sure how much demand there is, so it kind of depends on me having some fun playing around with THPS modding. I felt this update was worth sharing as that hotkey workflow wasn’t the greatest user experience.

Also a shameless plug, if you haven’t seen “LEVELS PT 2”, maybe you would want to give it a watch.

It showcases some of the features I would like to see integrated at some point.

See ya!