Cutscenes

Okay.

I currently have 0 ideas of how Cutscenes could be done in Construct.

How would I create the cutscenes? Is there any way to do this stuff in Construct right now? I could take the hard route and rebuild scenes in After Effects and load them in as AVI, but that's kinda bogus.

What if I want to take away the control of the character? So, I'd stop the player input and let the character do something pre-defined and afterwards the character would be able to take control of the character again. But how to pre-define anything? Can I somehow record and save what I've been doing?

How would you guys approach this?

Let's brainstorm on how cutscene creation could be handled in Construct!

Tons of questions, would be cool if you guys could lead me into the right direction.

I make cutscenes by having a global variable that controls everything else and base events with everything running in sub events. So, if the variable equals "action" then the play controls work, etc, as they're run as sub events, and if the mode is cinema, then it automatically deactivates everything and all the subevents under the action base event run.

Then I use a second variable for which scene to play. So it looks like:

If global value is "action"

• controls, etc

If global value is "cinema"

• If scene is "intro"
• - cinema code

Forgot to mention, I also use another variable to determine what step of the cinema it is. So if step = 1, move sprite to sprite.x+(500*timedelta). If step =1 and sprite.x is greater than 500, add 1 to step.

Doing it this way makes cutscenes very easy to make because you don't have to worry about any of your gameplay code interfering with the cinema code.

Use the timeline object to schedule a series of events?

What if I want to take away the control of the character? So, I'd stop the player input and let the character do something pre-defined and afterwards the character would be able to take control of the character again. But how to pre-define anything? Can I somehow record and save what I've been doing?

well if your character controls the character why not ask him nicely to do it ? Ive found asking my characters to do want I want helpful.

but Seriously timeline works well. If your having characters talk you can play animations according to the text that is displayed(Text =" Whatever"-> play animation "Dont go there"). using animation frames(Animation frame is = to 8->Write text"Girlfriend" ) or checking if your text is equal to the target text can trigger the next step by incrementing a variable (Globalvariable=10 -> player stop ignoring input).

i use variables to intitiate when certain things happen, like a rock falls, wait 30 ticks, change cutscene to 2, make ground rumble, pillar falls 3 ticks later, set cuscene to 3, make guys eyes open or wtv.

think about it, its not at all difficult.

i use variables to intitiate when certain things happen, like a rock falls, wait 30 ticks, change cutscene to 2, make ground rumble, pillar falls 3 ticks later, set cuscene to 3, make guys eyes open or wtv.

That's pretty much how I made the cutscenes for TCR, but the Timeline object would have made it a lot easier I imagine.

Thanks guys, all that advice really helped. I think I have a good idea now how I can get all of this to work.

One thing I'm wondering is: Is there a way to just temporarily switch to another layout to tell the story further? Say, I'm on layout 2 and a certain event happens - Now I want to put in a cutscene and only temporarily switch to layout 11.

Layout 11 has a 'Start of Layout - Play Timeline' event assigned to it, so it'd automatically start playing as I temporarily switch to it. And when the timeline is over, I'd want to switch back to the exact same position I've been before - isn't that somehow possible?

Switching temporarily to another scene is vital in terms of cinematography to give the player more background in terms of story or tell him something about a character - This would be my Nr. 1 feature request if there's not any workaround in there to achieve this.

Most of the other framework is already done - creating detailed cutscenes is one of the last big things I still have to tackle.

Deadeye: I loved the TCR Intro / Cutscenes. I know it's a bit much to ask, but would you share the cap with us? Even if the timeline object would make things a little easier now, I'd love to see how you tackled the problem and how convoluted it got.

You could try quicksave, jump to layout, play the cinematic sequence, then quickload. You should come right back to where you left off.

There might be a few bugs with quicksaving and quickloading. Might need to submit a tracker item if things dont come back exactly as they were.

Don't forget to use the 'No serialize' attribute for objects like XAudio2 which don't need to restore state.