[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Wow, what do you know, another request for you coders 

As most modders propably know, at the moment the only place cutscene videos can be played is between missions. This was fine in FS2, and still works in many cases, but it's also quite limiting on what could be done.

Take BtRL for example. You go through the usual command and mission briefing, selecting the ship armament and hitting the play-button. But what if, instead of being thrown into the mission, you'd see a juicy pre-rendered video playing, showing the launch of the Vipers from their tubes and zooming off to engage the approaching Raiders? Or when the mission is complete and you do a successful landing on the Galactica, a video would play showing the dramatic landings of your wingmates, just in time before the whole fleet jumps of to safety, before going to the debriefing?

So, how hard would it be to implement more flexible system for pre-rendered cutscenes?

[Snail]

It can be done easily enough in-mission (it would achieve the same effect). Ask Mobius about it.

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Not that I mean to say that ingame cutscenes can't look good, but good pre-rendered cutscenes are in completely different ballpark.

[Shade]

I looked into this at one point actually. The in-game process of playing a movie doesn't seem difficult, it basically looks to be a simple matter of checking if one should be played and calling a function (movie_play) with the filename. The trickier parts are finding the right places to add in such checks (probably less so for someone who understands the briefing/debriefing parts of the code better than I do. I assume those are the places where you'd want it), updating the mission parser to deal with the new information, and adding support for it in FRED.

I guess it's worth another look since you're actually asking for it now, though I can't make any guarentees or give any ETA for anything since I'm too busy working to do much (if any, in fact) coding. But I'll try to squeeze in some time for this.

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Big thanks for looking into it.