Cutscenes

[Gez]

I very much prefer cutscenes done with the engine, because they don't take me out of the game. FMVs where the world and characters look nothing like they do in-game have a way to violently break the consistency of experience.

[Rip and Tear]

I know I am not the only one with this sentiment, but I realize I still may be a vocal minority about this:

My biggest concern about this feature is it introduces the possibility of a more "modern" styled mod that resembles recent games. Sounds great, right? Not really. In my opinion, many of those games are nothing more than glorified, semi-interactive, playable movies.

I don't want that in GZDoom. Little short 3-5 second cutscenes I don't mind, and those can be done easily in ACS. But this feature is a true pandora's box - if you put it in, you will definitely reap what you sew. Maybe it might not be that bad, but I rather like GZDoom the way it is without that. It IS an engine limitation, but it's one that forces you to be more creative about how you tell a story. And I see nothing wrong with that.

I don't like in-game cinematics, I never did, and it's not something I want GZDoom to have.

But why not have the option available? I don’t see how making the engine more flexible would be a bad thing. If someone wants to make a playable movie in the GZDoom engine, why shouldn’t they be able to?

[Graf Zahl]

Do you have any idea what is necessary to play videos? These libraries are far too bulky and saddled with patent minefields, making them quite unappealing to a project like GZDoom.

[Caligari87]

I feel like Max Payne style cutscenes or even Darkest Dungeon style cutscenes can be trivially done already with ACS + HUDMessages or some ZScript + RenderOverlay stuff without resorting to an in-map "theater" hack or FMV support.

All these "cutscene" requests I've been seeing lately basically boil down to "I want to use the tools I already know without learning something new," not "this would meaningfully enhance the featureset of the engine."

[Rachael]

But why not have the option available? I don’t see how making the engine more flexible would be a bad thing. If someone wants to make a playable movie in the GZDoom engine, why shouldn’t they be able to?

I don't WANT the option. Period.

Plus, Graf answered the question from a technical standpoint quite well:

Do you have any idea what is necessary to play videos? These libraries are far too bulky and saddled with patent minefields, making them quite unappealing to a project like GZDoom.

Plus, I agree with Caligari87, as well:

I feel like Max Payne style cutscenes or even Darkest Dungeon style cutscenes can be trivially done already with ACS + HUDMessages or some ZScript + RenderOverlay stuff without resorting to an in-map "theater" hack or FMV support.

All these "cutscene" requests I've been seeing lately basically boil down to "I want to use the tools I already know without learning something new," not "this would meaningfully enhance the featureset of the engine."

[Enjay]

I'm not saying that I want this feature (I don't particularly), and I'm certainly not agitating for it's inclusion but in some games, a rare few, I really like the cutscene videos. For me, it's what made the second Dark Forces game worth playing - I found the various videos a real reward at the end of a section/map/whatever. The fact that they were (reasonably) well acted by people who actually look like people instead of the blocky polygons of the in-game characters made it more engaging for me. The next game, Jedi Outcast, used game models and, even though they were a generation on, it was painful (to me) to watch blocky hands passing through scenerey, characters not touching in realistic ways and so on. That even holds true (for me) with far more modern games too - though less egregiously so. There were a few points in The Witcher III (an amazing game, don't get me wrong) where it was just so obvious that what was on screen was just one polygonal mesh not quite interacting properly with another polygonal mesh. Like when one character walked away with his arm "around" another's shoulders, it was very obvious that they were just two separate entities moving slightly out of sync and therefore not exerting realistic forces on each other because they were actually separate actors with no interdependent collision.

Anyway, Strife has an intro AVI. (Albeit played by a command line DOS utility run via a batch file. )

Back on topic(ish), I suppose if anyone really wanted to include a video with their game, they could still do so. An intro/outro would be least problematic (i.e. watch the intro then start the game (like reading a text beforehand) or finish the game, quit and then reward yourself by watching the outro video). Even cutscenes could be done - ACS tells the player OK, quit, watch video number 27 then restart from your save. Yes, clumsy - like I said, someone would really have to want to do it - but it would actually be more reliable and less problematic than the actual system that used to be in ZDoom.

[Gez]

Anyway, Strife has an intro AVI.

And so does Chex Quest.

[Enjay]

Indeed it does - quite a bit longer than the Strife one too as I recall.

[Arctangent]

I feel like Max Payne style cutscenes or even Darkest Dungeon style cutscenes can be trivially done already with ACS + HUDMessages or some ZScript + RenderOverlay stuff without resorting to an in-map "theater" hack or FMV support.

These'd probably also look the best with idtech 1's general style, anyway, since it's not like fluid animation works well for anything besides weapons and explosions in the state and sprite system it uses. You'd have a far easier time working with an aesthetic of dynamically posed stills with maybe some shaking and panning to sell impacts and motion more. The way Elite Beat Agents did pre-level cutscenes comes to mind.

[Enjay]

I don't know Elite Beat Agents but the videos Thief were, for the most part, scrolling and panning images with a voiceover and some music. They were used to set the scene before a mission. Sometimes there were videos with a little more going on but they too used relatively simple animation techniques that could be replicated in ACS. The ones in Thief were actual video files but any competent game engine should be able to do something quite close to it using its built-in abilities. GZDoom certainly could.



[edit] Damn, watching that made me remember how much I loved those games. I might have to play some... [/edit]

[Kinsie]

What I was imagining is something more like max payne, I think a short cutscene in the beginning of a level is a great way to improve the atmosphere of it and it would be great if I could use real life footage for it, right now the only way to do anything similar is to create a small cinema inside the map and it's limited to pictures only.

75% of the story in Max Payne 1 & 2 was handled by still-frame "graphic novel" sequences that can easily be done using HUDMessage or some other image-printing solution, and the other 25% were janky (wasn't the audio in the final cutscene of MP1 not even in sync with the animation?) in-engine cutscenes of the kind you decried earlier in the thread.

But why not have the option available? I don’t see how making the engine more flexible would be a bad thing. If someone wants to make a playable movie in the GZDoom engine, why shouldn’t they be able to?

In short: GZDoom would need to support some video codec of some kind internally. Video codecs and decoder systems are typically massive, complex creatures that would teeter precariously upon GZDoom's jenga tower of code, and they may well have licenses that conflict with the GPL, or be wrapped up in software patents that make using them in GPL software dicey.

In short, while it's a common request for one reason or another, it's probably not going to happen unless someone else does all the legwork and makes a good case to Graf, Rachael et. al. that including it won't increase their workload. Not impossible, but certainly not an easy task!

[Graf Zahl]

I'm moving this to "General" because the discussion has gone far beyond a feature suggestion.

[wildweasel]

I'm gonna be honest: as much as I, personally, have really thought I'd get some benefit out of support for some kind of video or animation format beyond what's already in GZDoom, I really think that if you're relying on video files to convey your story and nothing else will work, you may look into other options. Some of the best storytelling I've seen in video games was made in spite of limitations. Radical Dreamers and Zero Escape: 999 were almost entirely text-based. Final Fantasy IV had not a single rendered cutscene to be found, and conveyed intense emotions with sprites barely the size of the average OS icon. The System Shock games, beyond short opening videos, never once take the controls away from the player, and all their storytelling is done by letting the player explore and find things.

If you're trying to tell a story and the engine limitations are just too tight for you to tell it, maybe you're just not thinking outside the box enough.

[Dr_Cosmobyte]

I would love to have the feature, but i know how broken it would be so i don't struggle.

However, the only kind of mod that would REALLY benefit from this were TCs or mods of console specific games which had to run openings, logo intros and in-game cutscenes.

Like the Stones used to say: you can't always get what you want.

[Rachael]

In short, while it's a common request for one reason or another, it's probably not going to happen unless someone else does all the legwork and makes a good case to Graf, Rachael et. al. that including it won't increase their workload. Not impossible, but certainly not an easy task!

Much as I do not want this feature, there is a lot of truth to this. If someone provides a submission that has a well-tested encoding library that doesn't literally explode the executable size by 4500%, and by itself compiles in less than 4 seconds (you're lucky - I compile to a RAM disk so it's super fast), I will make a break with my pride and defer to Graf on the decision for its inclusion if he decides he wants it.

Another caveat: The code must not violate patents. That means only open formats will be allowed.

Yet another caveat: The code must be reasonably isolated. Use CMakeLists.txt - it will allow you to create a new .cpp file for this purpose.