To begin with, the Replay Mod is a brilliant tool and I understand that, as far as I know, CrushedPixel isn't really paid for it and I have no right to expect more from such a hardworking developer, however, I do have some ideas that could be worth implementing in the near future to increase the creative possibilities of the mod.
Keyframe types
The main keyframeable values in Replay Mod are position, time and spectator. I think the following would be a great addition. As I am not really a software developer nor fully understand Minecraft and Replay Mod, I will remain somewhat vague in the implementation
- Tracking players. The ability to generate keyframes which are relative to the player's position and orientation, with adjustable values such as distance, x y and z angles etc to the player and the ability to interpolate between such values. These in combination could open up the possibility to easily create a huge number of new creative shots.
- FOV. The ability to interpolate and keyframe FOV to create effects such as parallax zoom.
- Focus/adjustable depth of field. Not too sure in which way it is possible but any implementation would be very welcome. Could be used to keyframe which objects are in focus and the blurriness of things out of focus etc.
- Time and weather. Ability to manipulate these values in the mod. Could be possible using third party mods but none exist that support it with Replay Mod, and I think a direct implementation into Replay Mod would be most powerful as you can change it with keyframes.
- Local lighting control. Not sure if this really is possible, but the ability to control lighting in certain areas. For example, if you have a dark room with a mysterious object, but the lighting reveals too much, if you were able to adjust the lighting so it slowly becomes visible, that would really help creators adjust the mood and atmosphere.
- Player visibility keyframes. A simple, on-off per player keyframe, would open up a lot of opportunities, but an opacity value element for the player and their IGN on top of that could also be quite cool.
- Camera zoom keyframes.
Other suggested changes
-Ability to directly edit camera path, possibly by dragging markers along the path to allow precise movements around objects and avoid going through blocks.
- Another thing is the speed of the movement, it is hard to create a constant speed throughout multiple position keyframes, some sort of sync feature where you have a position keyframe you want to add, and it tells you what point in time to place the keyframe to maintain a constant speed.
- Ability to set shaders in the menu to avoid lag. Once you set shaders in video settings and you get a massive performance hit (incredibly noticeable on low-end graphics chips) while entering in your render settings. An option where it saves your entered values instead of resetting (there could be a separate reset button) when you enter your values could mean that once you have entered your values, you can turn on shaders and immediately hit render.
- Ability to export/copy relative keyframes across different replays. This could be used with tracking keyframes so in an editing program you could do a 360 continuous circle around the player with switching maps/conditions etc.
- Increased stability (I know you've heard this millions of times) and the ability to properly cut replays, since currently you still have to wait through the replay skipping through trimmed-out items.
- Ability to save timeline + replay into some sort of render file, that you can render out later or send to a render machine/farm which can import the file or multiple render files and queue them to render them all at once.
- Ability to customise skins and possibly capes.
- Ability to customise IGNs of players in Replay Mod for singleplayer (not sure if this is possible in the limitations of a mod).
- Above 120 fps for rendering. I know you've said it is unnecessary, but there is a use case, for example, ultra-slow mos and general time-remapping in post-production. Not sure if it's overly complicated to add, but if it's not *too* difficult it would be very useful.
- Graph editor (probably extremely difficult and unlikely but it would allow the Replay Mod to become hugely more versatile and be useful for quick workflow e.g. from Replay Mod to Premiere Pro, skipping After Effects). However, it could be possible to add Ease in or Ease out keyframes?
Thanks for reading. There's a lot in there, some has been said before but a lot of them I thought were worth mentioning here again. I know the Replay Mod is absolutely incredible and has brought another dimension to content creation in the game, for anyone and everyone. That's not to say we can't make it even better, and many of these suggestions would vastly improve the user experience and the quality of content able to be produced. Thanks again.
