cutscenes

  • Thread starter gibberingmouther
  • Start date
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gibberingmouther

Guest
i basically have taken off an entire semester to work on and hopefully finish my game. so i'm trying to make the most of that time ....

i'm not to where i have to program cutscenes yet. there are a few in my game. i have quite a bit of coding left to do before i get to that point. for my a.i. i plan to use state machines but i still have to program in all the game logic before i can do that.

my mind turned to cutscenes because that's one of the things i'm going to have to do, and i'm waiting on something else atm. does anybody have any idea of what a coded cutscene might look like? is it just waypoints and regular a.i. or is there more to it, generally speaking?
 

RangerX

Member
This can be approached in many different ways. Could be pre-made images and text, like on most NES and SNES games.
Could be a timeline in which to control a series of events, moving object, triggering sounds, etc in an organised manner.
Could be a controller object taking care of it all too.
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
I usually use a sort of script interpreter that reads one line of a big multiline text string at a time, looks at the first part, and decides what to do with the second part. It lets you do precise things repeatedly, like having a 'move' command you can use to move characters around using shader AI, display text, and stuff like that. It's a bit of work to set up, but a lot easier to extend. In Daemon Detective Gaiden, I used mnemonics to basically be able to use my cutscenes straight off the paper I planned them on without changes, like having a syntax of <name><operator><values>, where the 'dialogue box' command was a colon; the left-hand-side would be used to figure out which sprite to animate the mouth on and also be used as the caption of the dialogue box. The command for someone turning in a specific direction was <->, the command for moving ->, and so on, and there also were special commands for bringing up the shop menu (since Keith says things before and after you shop with him each time). Sure, parsing the string might take time, but since the speed of the cutscene is based on player perception, and humans can take several seconds to read a text box, it's not really a concern.
 
First you got to decide if your cutscene is going to be like a little movie (no player interaction at all) or like an RPG text sequence (the player presses a button to advance the text)

In the first case, you can just program keyframes in your sequence and fine-tune the speed and position of each object and text element apparition depending on those key sequences (for instance have a global.timer variable, and have all other objects act upon this variable)

In the seocnd case, you can use sequencial phases, and advance one phase every time the player presses something.
Each phase can make a popup dialog appear, and set objective coordinates to eahc object. the objects will then decide on their own in real time how to reach these coordinates.
 
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