Importing... cutscenes and books - e-ucm/ead GitHub Wiki

###Introduction In eAdventure 1.X, cutscenes were a sort of special type of scenes that were not interactive. As opposed to scenes, cutscenes could not have interactive elements at all: exits, active areas, references to items, set items and characters, were all left for scenes only.

So to speak, cutscenes were meant to provide a reduced version of something like 'PowerPoint'. They were a feature to put some expositive, non-interactive content into the games. There were two types:

  • slidescenes: A set of slides (full screen images) that the player navigates one after the other.
  • videoscenes: A full-screen video.

All cutscenes had some common properties:

  • ID: The internal ID of the cutscene, used internally by the eAdventure game engine and editor to add cross-references to the cutscene across the game.
  • Documentation: This field was used only as a way to take notes for the game author. It had actually no effect at all in the game.
  • Name: An internal name for the cutscene for documentation purposes. It had also no use in the game.
  • Configuration for the start of the cutscene: Only one parameter that tells the game engine if it must start the game with this cutscene. In the old eAdventure model, there were no central point to specify what was the first scene in the game; instead, all scenes and cutscenes had a parameter "start" that could be set to "yes" or "no".
  • Configuration for the end of the cutscene: Told the eAdventure game engine what to do once the cutscene was done. There were three options:
    • go-back: Launches the immediately previous scene run in the game. It is important to note that for this purpose only scenes, and not previous cutscenes, were considered. If when a cutscene with the "go-back" option is launched no scene was previously run in the game, the eAdventure 1.X game engine provided an error and the execution of the game finished abruptly.
    • end-chapter: Ends the current chapter and makes the game move on to the next one.
    • new-scene: Launches any other scene or cutscene (including itself).

For the purpose of configuring the end of the cutscene, these additional parameters were provided (any of these are processed if "new-scene" is not chosen):

  • idTarget: Id of the scene or cutscene to be launched next. _This parameter is only processed by the eAdventure 1.X game engine if the "new-scene" option is chosen.
  • destinyX and destinyY : Position of the player in the new scene that is going to be loaded. The game engine will try to place the player's avatar as close to this location as it can, according to the movement system configured in the target scene (Aquí tengo que mirar cómo funciona cuando llegas a una escena en modo movimiento lineal y cómo es cuando llegas a una escena con movimiento tipo trayectoria). These parameters are only processed by the game engine if the next three conditions are met:
    • The "new-scene" option is selected
    • The game is in third person mode
    • idTarget points to a scene (and not to a cutscene). If any of these conditions is not met, idTarget may not be present in the data model or take -Inf values.
  • transitionType: The type of transition to use. Processed by the game engine only if the "new-scene" option was selected. May take the next valid numeric values:
    • 0: No transition
    • 1: Top to bottom
    • 2: Bottom to top
    • 3: Left to right
    • 4: Right to top
    • 5: Fade in
  • transitionTime: Duration of the transition, in milliseconds. Processed only if "new-scene" chosen.

###How it was (the old eAdventure model)

<!ENTITY % cutscene "videoscene | slidescene">

<!ELEMENT videoscene (documentation?, effect?,resources+, name, ( end-game? | next-scene* ))>

<!ATTLIST videoscene
	id ID #REQUIRED
	start (yes | no) "no"
	next (end-chapter | go-back | new-scene) "go-back"
	idTarget IDREF #IMPLIED
	destinyX NMTOKEN "400"
	destinyY NMTOKEN "300"
	transitionTime CDATA "0"
	transitionType CDATA "0"
	canSkip (yes | no) "yes"
>

<!ELEMENT slidescene (documentation?, effect?,resources+, name, ( end-game? | next-scene* ))>
<!ATTLIST slidescene
	id ID #REQUIRED
	start (yes | no) "no"
	next (end-chapter | go-back | new-scene) "go-back"
	idTarget IDREF #IMPLIED
	destinyX NMTOKEN "400"
	destinyY NMTOKEN "300"
	transitionTime CDATA "0"
	transitionType CDATA "0"
>

###How it is imported (to the new eAdventure game scheme)