[hotcoffeeburns]

Cut-scenes! Is there a tutorial out there on how to do cut-scenes and such? I'd find that incredibly helpful since the tutorials that I have gone through don't really cover them much. Any hints, tips, and/or links would be appreciated.

[karajorma]

Cutscenes as in in-game (using the games own engine) or as in rendered 3D ones like the original game has?

[hotcoffeeburns]

In-game cut-scenes. I know that rendered scenes would simply (well, not simply) be created using a 3D software package such as maya or max.

[karajorma]

I don't think anyone has ever made a tutorial on how to use them but it should be reasonably straightforwards to grasp.

The only tip I can remember of the top of my head is to remember that the times given are often in milliseconds (for instance for the fade-in and fade-out SEXPs.

Apart from that the only other suggestion is to make sure you don't get into a Starlanceresque situation of forcing the player to watch the cutscene over and over again each time they die.

[jr2]

In the Launcher, under the "Features" tab, under the category "Dev Tool", on the bottom of the list there is a checkbox labeled "Outputs SEXPs to sexps.html"
Check the box, hit run, and then open <your freespace dir>\sexps.html
Click "Cutscenes"
You should have a listing of SEXPs relating to cutscenes and what they do.

Hope these help!
PS don't forget to uncheck "Outputs SEXPs to sexps.html" so you can load FS again.

[Trivial Psychic]

The most successful instance of mission-rendered cutscenes, would be those in "Shrouding the Light", done by Blaise Russel.  He's your best bet for learning any complexe tricks, but so many new features have been included since STL came out, that it could put to shame the cutscenes for STL.