I got WC2 to run again recently, and the way cutscenes are handled in that game is very interesting. They don't function like normal movies. The persons, ships and various things are separate graphics/animations that can be combined with every background, and the scenes are all separate. The movies are actually a combination of the same few scenes following each other, but the text/sounds were specified separate foe each scene, so you could have the same scene two or three times, but with new text every time. This was especially great for conversations with other persons since it kept the filesize down. Normally you'd have needed some megabytes for a movie like this, but with this technique it could be kept down to a few dozen kilobytes.
No I propose adapting this. While I don't think we could pull off that thing with separate fore and backgrounds it'd still be very good. You have a set of a few generic movies without sound, and you can put them together in what way you like, for example.
1.Talking head#1 2. Talking head#2 3.generic capship#1 4. Talking head#1
Somewhere you could specify a voicefile for each scene, like for above:
1. "That patrol is boring" 2. "Yer right" 3. "Mayday, Mayday! We're under attack! any ship in range, please assist!" 4. "Understood. We're coming!"
You should also specify some be able to specifiy background sounds and music.
It would be somewhat similar to a command briefing, where you set the voicefile, text and animation, only that it would cover the whole screen and the animations (and avise without sound channels would be best for those movies; anis suck both because of their color limitations and their huge sizes.
This way you could make lots of movies, but still keep the filesize of the download relatively small.
Wht do you guys think?
