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Feature request: skip cutscene

Something that I would find immensely useful at some point is being able to skip an entire actionlist at once. While it's running I mean, not beforehand with a variable check. Something that skips to the last action when the player presses escape (or whatever). For testing purposes too it would be nice, to 'speedrun' through some sections.

I remember AGS did something impossibly complex where it did still execute every command when you hit the skip key but just stripped away all the waiting time and visual feedback somehow (when I used a timer GUI it even skipped forward by the appropriate amount, which is bonkers to me), but something like that would be a very wonderful feature to have.

Comments

  • That's actually a feature I wanted to implement before AC was even released.  An early experiment involved ramping up the timescale to something "close to infinity" for a moment, but failed spectacularly.

    The AGS solution you mention does sound like it's along the right lines - it would indeed need to run (almost) every Action.  Assuming there's more detail to be found, any chance you could find the link to where you heard about AGS's method?
  • edited April 2014
    Most of my knowledge of the AGS method comes from observing it over many years ha, but I've looked into the manual to see if there is any technical info available. I couldn't find anything super relevant, but on the forums Khris had this to say about it:

    "Afaik, internally, skipping a cutscene is achieved my processing each command differently. Character.Say commands for instance should be basically skipped entirely (as opposed to say a blocking move, where the character is "warped" to the target coordinates instead of walking there so skipping doesn't screw up the game state)."

    Instead of super fast forwarding it looks like every action has a special state for when it gets skipped that strips some of the functionality away. I imagine you can pretty much throw out most commands except for teleports to coordinates and the setting of variables, navmeshes etc (which are usually instant anyway).

    Now that AGS is opensource you could probably post a thread there asking someone how it works exactly if you wanted to know in more detail.
  • Thanks - this should be enough.  I was thinking along the lines of a separate "Skip" function - the tricky one will be the Animation actions, but everything else should be fairly straightforward.
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