Cutscene tutorials

I’m trying to find a good cutscene tutorial, but the only one that I found was
Category - Cut-scenes (palmergames.com)

and it simply doesn’t work. The sample scripts don’t do anything. Now I know I could go on line by line and figure out myself why the scripts don’t work, but I’d really rather just follow a tutorial that works and for once be able to just start scripting without having to do hours worth of detective troubleshooting with every single damnable like of script.

So are there any good, up-to-date cutscene tutorials available anywhere?

Take a look to this post.

It’s a new made system for cutscenes, the rar contains an example module and a very well explained tutorial about how to use it. The rar also contains another module for more advanced cutscenes.

https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/script/fausts-cutscene-system

Simplify (slightly) your mod making and grab the Gestalt Cutscene Scripting System, then grab @jimdad55’s Gestalt Cutscene System - updated pdf. One thing though, make sure to always use a dedicated pdf reader and not a web browser to view them otherwise you don’t have access to the bookmarks that a very large amount of pdf documents on here have. If you don’t have a pdf reading program there’s -

Foxit Free pdf reader
Free Adobe Acrobat Reader

Just chose one of them and make sure to uncheck any boxes that offer additional software that you don’t need.

TR

These all seem awfully advanced; all I really want is to spice up my conversations with people walking in and doing stuff. All the dialogue in these examples are just spoken strings instead of full on conversations. Am I looking in the wrong place for what I want or should I just proceed with either faust or gestalt?

An example scenario: The hero has just rescued a trapped dwarf and returns to the inn where the dwarf has already returned beforehand. The hero initiates conversation with the innkeeper and the dwarf, and in the middle of the conversation a third npc comes through the door and joins in.

Another example scenario: the hero is in conversation with a wizard, there’s a door that doesn’t open. After a certain line in the dialogue the wizard casts a spell at the door, failing again at opening it and the conversation continues.

You can do that without cutscene mode.

ActionPauseConversation() and ActionResumeConversation() in your conversation scripts will suffice - see Lexicon.

You can also change the camera view as those events occur.

Downside - relies on the player not to abort the conversation or tweak the camera at the wrong time. Most players seem to understand that intuitively - why would you do that, rather than watch the action? If it worries you, there are countermeasures, such as trapping aborts or the CutsceneDominated effect.

However, as the action becomes more complicated, cutscene mode gives you far more control.

Be careful, though. If you take away player control of the camera, they may not see the action if camera commands fail. The engine sometimes overrides the camera if it detects that the view is obscured by walls etc. In edge cases, that doesn’t happen every time, so cutscenes need a lot if testing. Also, with EE, it’s hard to test all the screen size and device options, though others may have better insight on that.

On balance, though, I tend to use cutscenes these days.

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That was really helpful, precisely what I was looking for. Thank you. All the advanced cutscene stuff seems interesting, I can already imagine all the things one can do with it, but I’ve barely gotten my feet wet with the aurora toolset, so this simpler stuff will more than suffice for now until I can properly swim.

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