Help with Cinematic Intro?

[Racingcreed]

I was wondering if someone out there might be able to help me. I'm not sure how complex this is to do, but it would really be appreciated if someone could help me with my problem.

So, what I'm looking to do is create an opening cinematic sequence for my story, what I'm looking for is really how to do cinematic introductions. What I'm trying to do is:

Cinematic introduction, opening credits, title of story, chapter etc which then fades to black, and back into game, with the character looking about, panicing before the control is handed back to the player..

I realized this is probably a broad request, but if anyone could either create this or give me some sense of how to do this it would be so helpful!

P.S - I'm new to scripting so dumbing down as many answers as possible would be a big help, thanks!!!!!!

[Adrianis]

Your right, that is a broad request
Too broad, in fact. For the actual display of credits, titles & chapter names etc, there are several different ways of doing it, and that would very much change how you go about doing it.

One of the simpler (to implement) and more effective ways IMO is how White Night did it (if you haven't played it, go check it out), where text is displayed in an in-game environment, albeit with player control removed.
To do that, you'd use FadeIn/FadeOut funcs, TeleportPlayer to move the player around the different scenes, create entities on which to display the text(s). Then it's a case of mapping out interesting / relevant areas to display them in.

If you don't want to do it like that, and you still want advice, then you should specify how you want it to play out. Also, if you haven't already, bring up the engine script's wiki page and read through everything on there, particularly in the Player section - you don't have to know how they all work or how to implement them, but if you know whats possible from the descriptions then you'll know where to start when planning/scripting something like this

[Racingcreed]

I suppose a more specific planning or explanation would be something like the below:

>Fades to black instantly. (Done).
>Text appears, introducing the date, and location. (Done).
>Player wakes up, coughing, looks around and passes out. (Not controllable, actions are scripted). (Need to do).
>Players wakes up again, looks around to window where the camera focuses on and goes towards, out the window showing the landscape where the title of the level and chapter will be shown. (Need to do).
>Sharp fade to black, any music thats currently playing fades and the player once again awakens to the screams and panics in the cells nearby) (Need to do).

Now being no expert by any means with scripting, this is a real challenge for me to say the least so any and all help is appreciated.

[Adrianis]

What you need to do is, for yourself, break the problem right down into the little tasks, just write & test each mini-event within the script one by one, so that you can see how each of the different function works.

Player wakes up, coughing, looks around and passes out. (Not controllable, actions are scripted)

Initially you need to have a timer that is going to set off this particular event (only after the credit sequence is over)

If you logically break down a sequence from that quoted line, the first thing that needs to happen is removing control (SetPlayerActive), because at any point interaction from the player will stop it from working right.

Next up is actually waking up - initially just use FadeIn, you can come back to add other things like screen effects to spice it up once you've got the structure sorted.

For the coughing, if you already have the sound file ready then use PlaySoundAtEntity.
If you want the coughing to happen before the player looks around, then take note of how long the sound file plays for, because you'll need to use another timer to separate the events in the script

For the looking, you'll need to set up a couple of Script Areas in the map itself, and place them at the points you want the character to look at, then use StartPlayerLookAt to make them look at each point (once the player look at is complete, it calls another function - use that to set up the second Player Look At). Make sure to use StopPlayerLookAt at some point later in the script so that the player can look away from that area again.


Honestly, if you are quite early on with developing your mod I would
recommend you leave this whole intro sequence till towards the end -
it's probably one of the more complicated sequences that you'll need to do and you would
benefit from having knowledge gained doing simpler events first.

Additionally, there are sh*t loads of previous times when people have asked for help doing wake up scripts, various tutorials on the wiki & threads are available if you would like to search for them