General questions on good practices when building cutscenes

markfrancombe

At first I thought that having lots of cutscenes was a mess, "all you need is one" I thought... but I get now that breaking up a cutscene into separate bits is much more sensible and easier to trouble shoot. There are some things Im wondering however:

How many cutscenes ca run at once?

As my scene is basically linear, I haven't really tested this, but I am assuming that if an event in a scene actually triggers 2 things to happen, I can basically set both to new cutscenes and run both, and they will run concurrently.

For example, character presses a switch on a slide up door. then while we wait for teh door they turn and talk to us, Instead of listing all the door opening stuff in that same scene (playing a sound, animating the door, playing animations of people who appear from the other side) its better to put all that in a new cutscene, trigger it from the main "timeline" and deal with the NPC turning to camera and talking. Much like a "Movie Clip" in Flash" or a "Comp" in After Effects?

There was something else but I forgot right now... Oh just that (re some other trouble in another thread) is it possible (OR WISE???) to completely disable, as in REMOVE the player during a cutscene? And put him back afterwards, assuming he doesnt have to actually APPEAR in the scene... Im gaving some trouble keeping track of cameras, and using a brand new set of specially created camera seems easier than to use, back to gameplay actions... untill that is... its time to go back to gameplay...

ChrisIceBox

AC's gotten a lot better at handling multiple ActionLists running at once - you shouldn't have any trouble running as many as you like in parallel.  If all of them block gameplay, then gameplay will only be resumed once they are all finished.

You can also have multiple "chains" of Actions within the same list - the "ActionList: Run in parallel" Action lets you do this, though it's advised to use the ActionList Editor window for it, as it can get difficult to visualise, otherwise.

So long as your player isn't referenced during your Cutscene for anything else, you should be able to remove them during it.  Don't delete the object, mind - just move them out of view, or make invisible.