Introducing a story

Neverwinter Nights 1 Toolset, Scripting, NWNX
1

Just mucking about with cutscenes just now as part of thinking about the various ways a story can be carried forward and it occurred to me that in the modules I’ve played ( which isn’t a large number) I can’t remember the opening screens being used to give the history or backstory through text ( I know I can do this with floating dialogue above PC head etc. )

I’m thinking more of the Star Wars slow crawl idea but, less than that, even the ability to display text like in the description contained within a book or maybe an old scroll with suitably old looking text on it telling of the hundreds of years leading up to this moment . . . doesn’t have to be moving - static would be fine.

So, are there any standard ways of doing this or, failing that, any modules I could have a look at that employ their own method of doing it ? Or is it just impossible?

2

Have a look at World Map & Custom GUI.

You can display any full-screen image. It comes with a Done button, but it would be trivial to add a Next button for a series of text captions.

3

Also, some simple intro movie is a good idea. You can have all with that - text, animation, background, musics. Definitely doable in Blender, although conversion to appropriate (for NWN) format would be required.

4

Thanks, Proleric. Will do.

Yeah, thanks for the suggestion, Dr A, I did think about that as I use a Mac and iMovie is so easy to put trailers together. The drawback is I’m not sure how NWN ish it would look. The only one I’ve used was a Star Wars type slow crawl - maybe a book theme on a NWN background pic with some old looking font would do the trick. I’ll have a look.

5

There is also the Neverworld font, versions of which are on the Vault and reputable free font sites.

It depends whether you want a specific NWN look or generic medieval.

6

Isn’t it also possible to add your own “movies” to a module? I seem to recall, years ago, trying to get a short PP presentation with basically three slides of epilogue text to work, and while it didn’t, I distinctly remember this being an option.

7

Thanks for responding, @QuenGalad.

It’d be great if it did but where would the movie even go? I can see where a starting movie goes but are you talking about calling a movie by script from say a trigger?

@Proleric, I tried iMovie and it was a breeze, fading the map, handling Star Wars slow crawl titles in the Neverwinter font, but all largely thanks to Tarot’s recommendation of the open source program “Shotcut” to handle video/audio adjustments as well as file format. Looked good. Went on and created animated journey on a map for which I used Keynote, the Mac presentation program.

Thanks again. Going on soon to look at your world map suggestion. Downloaded it along with then JFK carriage system to see how it could all fit together for journeys.

8

Unfortunately, NWN can’t run a movie during gameplay, only at start and end.

You can link two modules with a movie, and transfer data from one to the other, but the effort involved in making that seamless would be prohibitive, unless the new module is genuinely a point of no return.

9

Yes, I meant the option for intro and outro movie. I guess I got hypnotised with the words “introducing a story” and didn’t think of playing movies at any other times. Sorry about that.