Originally posted by Pilot Of The US
Im getting confused! All i wanted was a way to use the existing camera and have sexps to move it from ship to ship, without the player interfering (exept for the ESC key and the skipcutscene key which would be a combination eg. ALT+F9).
First: break the player ship's engines and weapons. This will stop them moving and firing.
Second: figure out how many different 'camera positions' you want to have - that is, positions which the player will be moved to, in sequence, to view the action.
Third: you need to find out the xyz co-ordinates of the various camera positions - a good way to do this is to make a fighter for each position and use the view -> camera current ship dealie to take control of the fighters and move them manually into position. Voila! Their co-ords will now be the co-ords of the camera positions and the co-ords that you will move the player to for the in-game cinema. Also, make a waypoint that is in the middle of the field of view of each of the fighters - this will allow you to set the way the player faces each time you move them, so they don't face the wrong way.
Fourth: create an event for each camera movement. You will need a sexp to move the player to the new camera position co-ordinates and a sexp to change the way they face - those will require the fighter and waypoint co-ords respectively.
Fifth: get rid of the fighters once the co-ords are in the events.
Sixth: If you don't have dialogue, you can use toggle-hud to get rid of the HUD and let the player have a nice view of the action. If you do, you'll have to keep the HUD around. If you don't want the player distracted by the sensors, stealth all the ships - I think setting sensors to 0 will result in fuzzy blips on the radar screen.
Easiest way to do a cutscene is as a special no-briefing no-debriefing mission - cutting to a cutscene mid-mission will, at the very least, result in the 'subsystem blowout' noise what Sid mentioned, which will detract from the moment.
And let's get a toggle-hud that doesn't get rid of messages before we start clamouring for magic camera sexps and the like, eh?
