CREATING A SIMPLE RTC

When an animation on a plane is running and has reached a given point, an RTC (Real Time Cinematic) can be set to run. It's typically to show some "wow" cinematics when the player does something on the plane (e.g: turn on the lights...), and as such this is called a "Wow Effect". This basic tutorial takes you through the steps required to create such an RTC event.

 

 

How To Set Things Up

There are three steps required to set up an RTC:

• Retrieve the animation information from the model <aircraft>.xml (where <aircraft> is the name of the aircraft to target)
• Edit the <aircraft>.xml
• Edit (or create) the RTC_<aircraft>.xml (where <aircraft> is the name of the aircraft to trigger the RTC). This should be in a dedicated "rtc" folder beside the main aircraft XML file.

 

For example, if you wanted to add an RTC event to the SimpleAircraft when an animation on the exterior of the plane occurred, you need to first find the animation you want the event on. In this case use the following from the <aircraft>.xml:

<Animation name="r_aileron_percent_key" guid="77db62be-36d4-4c03-bea7-c4cc2a224d9d" length="100" type="Sim" typeParam2="r_aileron_percent_key" typeParam="AutoPlay" />

 

Now - still in <aircraft>.xml - we need to link an event to the animation that we got the details of above. For example:

<AnimationEvent EventName="r_aileron" AnimationName="r_aileron_percent_key">
    <Time>100</Time>
</AnimationEvent>

 

That's the animation and the model linked using the AnimationName field to get the animation to link to, and then naming the linked event using the EventName field. Next we need to add a trigger into the mission file RTC_<aircraft>.xml, using what is called a SimMission.AnimationEventTrigger:

<SimMission.AnimationEventTrigger InstanceId="{1B183DED-66DE-49B5-87F8-7128DAFE9CF7}">
    <EventReference>r_aileron</EventReference>
    <OneShot>False</OneShot>
    <Actions>
        <ObjectReference id="RTC-r_aileron" InstanceId="{76C395DE-773F-4B11-85CE-AD4AD744A68A}"/>
    </Actions>
</SimMission.AnimationEventTrigger>

 

The RTCSequencer is linked to the animation using the EventReference field, which tells the sequencer which EventName fom the animation event is being referred to (in this case it's the " r_aileron" event). There is no need to link this element to anything else, just write it and it will be automatically created and executed when the event is triggered.

 

For a full overview of the XML used for RTCs, please see the following page:

• RTC Definition Properties

 

For a full description of how RTCs work, please see this page:

• Using RTCs