[Petrarch of the VBB]

I don't know if this has been brought up before, but is there any plan to allow in-enginge cutscenes, like the ones in Starlancer or HomeWorld? It would be very useful for links between missions, I think.

[IceFire]

I had the same thoughts too.  Not sure how its exactly doable...but it would be a more useable and extensive version of the system they use for jump outs.

[Anaz]

could have a sexp like "set-camera-path" with the speed and the waypoint path for it to follow, and potentially a ship for it to face. That would work well enough IMHO...

[Galemp]

There's a sexp in the works to give control of the player ship to the AI, so we could have it follow set waypoints and point in different directions.

[EdrickV]

Part of the problem in using in-game cutscenes (say cutscenes in the middle of a mission) is that any ship/object that is not explicitly scripted to do something might do something to screw up the cutscene. Imagine a cutscene where the player is supposed to watch a bunch of waves of fighters launching from an enemy carrier, but in the actual mission the player manages to disable the enemy carrier first so it never gets to it's assigned location. And what happens to enemy fighters in a mission if Alpha 1 is suddenly taken over by the AI and set to follow waypoints. Will they swarm Alpha 1 and destroy it while the player watches helplessly? What happens if Alpha 1 is really really far away from where a cutscene waypoint path starts when the cutscene starts? There are a lot of things you have to think about for cutscenes, and in FS2 making things happen in a predictable way can be very tough. Now, missions that are just cutscenes (or mission cutscenes that don't look like a mission) might be doable with the unfinished demo recording/playback system, which I've yet to see anyone test.

[Sesquipedalian]

1) Someone is actually working on a player-to-ai sexp?  Who?

2) There's a demo record/playback system?!  Where? How? Me want!

[vyper]

You could shift all objects to thier needed positions instantaneously when the movie bit starts (if there is a slight delay, but if you have a scenario like a ship being disabled then the mission would have to take an alternate path! Damn this'll make fredding more complex). During the scenario of Alpha 1 being swarmed, you could make Alpha 1 "protect-ship".

[Stunaep]

Pre-mission and post-mission cuts can be done in seperate mission files, while between-missions cuts can all other ships be assigned to play dead. And possibly invisibled.

[EdrickV]

Originally posted by Sesquipedalian

2) There's a demo record/playback system?!  Where? How? Me want!

In the source code. (Didn't you read the guided tour?)

[Petrarch of the VBB]

I thought it said that the demo recorder had been removed, along with the launcher, cutscene viewer and so on.

[EdrickV]

Originally posted by Petrarch of th VBB
I thought it said that the demo recorder had been removed, along with the launcher, cutscene viewer and so on.

This isn't a movie thing, this is code that records mission events to a file and can re-play the mission from that file. I'm not sure how much of the mission data is recorded. The main files for it are in the Demo folder. Whether the demo system is operational in current fs2_open builds or not I can't say. And I'm not sure how to access it if it is operational.

- There was a demo recording/playback system I half-heartedly was playing with at
  one point. Its still in there, in very incomplete form.