How is Source when it comes to creating Ingame Cutscenes?

[HalfBob42]

I've seen some games where doing this was relatively easy and painless (War Craft III is an example of this), othertimes it's so frustratingly difficult that cutscenes hardly ever make it into Singleplayer maps.

Can anyone say how easy or hard they are to do with Source?

 

[Faulk_Wulf]

I'm hardly an expert, but I'm guessing it mustn't be too hard. (I mean just check the intro and outro of Half-Life 2 with the Gman and all that.) And also almost the entire "Dark Energies" chapter. I know these are strings of scripted sequences, but that's basically all ingame cutscenes are. Freeze the player, throw up a "wide screen letter box" sprite and then do whatever. Like I said, no expert- just my observation.

 

[RabidJester]

Source is 100% custom-supercharged for this.

It's like the biggest gun in the arsenal.

 

[NB.]

Has anyone here played Vampire:Bloodlines? The cut scenes in that were pretty awefull, they all seemed very clunky and rough. It might just be that Troika were no ggod at making them but they certainly looked a bit crap.

 

[Yuri]

...have you played HL2? The "cutscenes" were wonderful, with great use of the face poser and model animations.

And yes, it is quite a great engine for cutscenes, if you are an experienced modeller and animator.

 

[polypod]

you can get an idea of what's possible by checking out the demo editor..
check out Dark Elf's post stickied on this forum for the commands.. it allows cameras to be moved around after the demo is made, using splines.
Another note, you can record the demo with video options down for a smooth recording, edit as desired, then crank everything up when making the actual movie, which produces high-quality TGA files smooth as when you made the demo!

 

[HalfBob42]

Nice! Here are few of questions:

1) How do you remove the hud and weapon when recording?

2) How do you make it so that demos are run as cutscenes as part of the map? For example, where you have an intro.dem, then the actual game.bsp and then an outro.dem for a small singleplayer mod.

3) If I record a demo with the lowest or highest settings, that doesn't have any effect on what kind of settings are used on another person's PC, correct?

Also, why is it that sometimes the demo seems to shake a bit - like it's going ahead a bit and then back again.

 

[polypod]

1) cl_drawhud 0 (but this leaves the weapon visible)

2) i don't yet know.. (although you can turn it into a movie and then bink it as well) although it might involve a trigger using the playdemo command..

3) i think you are right, whatever settings half life is set up for is what the demo file will play, i guess it's like a stream of code which makes filling in different texture quality and even changing a camera's position much simpler then changing an actual render..

not sure what you mean about the shaking.. i've had some st, stu, stuttering problems which seem related to the game rendering itself..