- Yes
- No
We all know War Thunder can be an absolutely stunning game graphically. A somewhat small niche I have found myself enjoying lately is creating cinematic content using the in-game replay system. One issue that myself and I’m sure others have run into is, currently if you want to film a specific scene with multiple vehicles, you’d better have friends that can play with you in a custom battle and that have unlocked the vehicles you want to film.
You know how in racing games, when you set a lap record, you can have a ghost of that lap display on screen and race against it? I think something similar could be added to War Thunder to solve this problem. My suggestion is to create a single player custom game mode where you can take out a vehicle and fly/drive whatever path you want, and the game will save that data, and then allow you to load that flight path as essentially a bot plane/tank in a new game instance. Each data capture would have it’s own little file that you could add into the custom mission like you would add a new audio/video track in a video editing software. Then each time you load this custom mission you’re working on, any previous data captures you’ve added will appear in the new session as AI planes. Before you know it, you could film something like a super tight formation flight scene of F-16s all by yourself!
A very basic implementation of this would simply have the previously saved flight data appear as visual models but you would not be able to interact with the “replay ghost” vehicles. For a more advanced feature, I’m not a programmer, but I feel like it would be fairly straightforward to implement the recorded flight data vehicles as bot planes just like the attackers that fly around in regular Air RB matches. Now instead of their normal pre-determined flight path, they follow YOUR custom pre-determined flight path. This way, if you recorded a flight and then loaded it up as an AI in a new instance, you could interact with it and shoot it down. Once the plane is shot down obviously it will need to create a new flight data file showing it getting shot down, and then you can choose to replace the original with it being shot down for future “takes”.
Once the player has finished adding all the data capture files they want and flying with them, each instance of the mission is also creating normal replay files so you can go in after the fact and do the usual stuff.
Hopefully I’ve done a decent job communicating what exactly I’m envisioning, let me know if something doesn’t make sense!