As shown above, perhaps one of the most salient items of progress is that the introductory cutscene is complete, aside from sound and music! It's one of the longest cutscenes that I have planned: a little over a minute in length, I believe. (And indeed, of the cutscenes that I have in mind, only the intended first-level cutscene--which begins the main plot--compares with it in length.)
That done--and after a brief change of pace with some coding-side work, including the changes described below--I've moved on to start work on the cutscene for the prologue level.
I mentioned above that music and sound are still lacking from the intro. For some while I had been unsure of how to approach the question of music/ambience in cutscenes--should I use background music, or just sound effects and ambient noise? If the former, what music should I use?
Ambient noise is an attractive option--it obviates the worry of finding music--but I'm not convinced that it's a good idea, especially in the somewhat-abstract scenes of the intro cutscene. Additionally, creating appropriate ambient effects is not a path without its own challenges.
I spent some time hunting around for royalty-free music to play in the intro cutscene, but while I found a number of rather good pieces, I struggled to find something that quite fitted my intentions. And this makes sense, I feel: how likely is it that one of those collections, which span a number of styles and moods, has a piece that conveys quite the feelings that I have in mind?
Additionally, using a single piece for each scene could quickly result in quite a few pieces being called for. Conversely, having one piece cover each cutscene entirely would likely either result in music that fits a cutscene generally but poorly matches the individual scenes, or call for a custom piece for each cutscene.
But another idea came to me: instead of having one piece per scene, one could have a variety of simple, sparse "mood pieces", then layer these to produce the overall feel of a given scene. In addition to allowing reuse of these pieces, this might allow for scenes to be tied together, sharing "mood pieces" where they share themes or feelings, while remaining somewhat distinct.
However, the cutscene system was not designed to layer music in this way; it inherited the relatively-simple approach to music that the base "world" class employs, intended to play single pieces during levels and the like.
Hence another salient change of this past week: the implementation of a new music system for my cutscenes, and alongside that, an editor with which to specify a given cutscene's musical layers.
The system is fairly simple: a cutscene has three "tracks", each of which holds a number of music-entries specifying a starting time, ending time, and the name of the piece to be played. There is no overlap within these tracks, but they run simultaneously, allowing up to three pieces of music to be layered at a time. As the music-system's time is updated, it starts and stops pieces according to the timings given in the entries. In addition, the system fades pieces in and out, (hopefully) producing soft transitions between "moods".
The editor for this system is likewise simple: it presents the three tracks one above the other, with a timeline and scene-markers for reference, and allows entries to be added, deleted, and altered.
I don't yet have "mood pieces", so I tested the system with oridinary music. The result was... interesting, somewhat overpowering, and
slightly less cacophonic than expected.
A few other features were added to the cutscene system and its editor this past week:
- Black bars now cover superfluous parts of the screen when a cutscene is played at an aspect ratio other than the one in which it was created
- The editor can now zoom in and out, allowing fine placement or a broader overview
- The duration and delay of an object's track-points can now be entered numerically, allowing for more precise values.
In implementing the above-mentioned black bars, I discovered a rather nasty bug: as it turns out, the code that I had in place to handle variations in resolution wasn't working properly. Objects ended up in the wrong places, misaligned, and the mist effect was incorrectly generated. This should (hopefully) be fixed now!
Finally, a few other minor bug-fixes and changes were implemented.
That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^