Are you the next Spielberg? The next Scorsese? Or, dare we suggest it, the next Matt Harding? Well now you'll have the chance to show off your cinematic genius in the new DR2 Cinerative Movie Contest. Using the tools already available in the Dark Reign 2 Editor on your DR2 disk and the information offered in the newly released Dark Reign 2 Construction Kit Manual, create your masterpiece of cinema and then submit it to our crack team of evaluators. They'll spend the next month reviewing the submissions and ultimately selecting a winner. You'll have plenty of time - the contest runs to Friday, August 25th. Use that time to learn to create lush worlds, script unit movement, make dramatic cuts, and create camera curves. Submitted movies will be judged for originality, technical quality, and dramatic/humorous flavor. The best movies will be posted on the Pandemic Dark Reign 2 website, and the contest winner will receive a DR2 'hotkey' mousepad, an official DR2 poster signed by the whole DR2 team, and one of the snazzy, chick-magnetized Pandemic T-shirts.

All submissions should be sent as zipped mission folders to contest@pandemicstudios.com. Unfortunately, the evaluators will not be able to troubleshoot cineractives that won't load or run properly, so please check your work before submitting. Pandemic Studios is also unable to provide technical support or assistance in the creation of cineractives, and the DR2 Construction Kit it not officially supported by Pandemic Studios or Activision Customer Support.

So what can you do to create a winning DR2 cineractive? Check out the following tips from DR2 designer and cineractive guru Matt Harding:

Complicated camera movements are difficult to create and can often be distracting to the player. Use them sparingly. Concentrate instead on scripting exciting interactions between units on-screen during the cineractive. For some parts of your creation, just a static camera point and focal point may be best.

You can play with the CD music tracks on the DR2 disk to make them fit the action. Look at the J06_intro mission cineractive for an example of the commands for playing CD tracks.You can also dump in your own music in mp3 format and trigger it in the cineractive. Just include the file in your mission folder and call it properly in "types_game_messages.cfg".

If you really want to jazz up a cineractive, you can trigger animations and effects for some units. Each of the humanoid units in Dark Reign 2 have 2 idle animations that can be played using the "Animate" command. The animations are always titled "IDLE" and "IDLE2". You can also trigger weapon effects, explosion effects and so forth on units using the "TriggerFX" command. For examples of both of these, look at the S01_intro mission cineractive.

If the units in the game don't do exactly what you want them to do, you can drop custom versions of the units into your mission files using the existing names. If it is in your mission file, it will overwrite the version of the unit in the packs directory, allowing you to do whatever you want with it. You can speed them up or slow them down, make them not claim cells so they can stand anywhere, you can raise or lower the altitude of flying units, make them invulnerable to weapon damage, and so on. If the cineractive is a stand-alone mission that never gives control to the player (like S01_intro and J06_intro), you can just go nuts.

If you're trying to match the camera path movement up with units running on the map and you can't get the speed right, dump a custom config in for that unit and set its running speed to 28.8. That number will make them move at exactly 1 cell per second, allowing you to know exactly where they will be at what time. This is, of course, only for the insanely fanatical cineractive-maker.