Cutscene lessons! Right 'ere!

[Bluhman]

RM Cutscene Dynamics

This tutorial is sort of a guide to help you make cutscenes... Well, more lively. Give them more of action and better flair. All too often, I might see a cutscene, at worst, have only people standing around talking. Maybe a little bit of walking here... Or some sort of image appearing... Well, sometimes, some action is needed, and this is where this tutorial comes in!

This tutorial will be updated with different levels of dynamics, but for now, lets start with the basics.

Moving!

Now, first things first is having your little characters move around. So you've got a cutscene map (or area) set up, and we'll just assume you know what's going to happen in the scene. Ok. Put down your different events, including events for the characters involved. Important, however, is to name them in the space in the upper right for future reference in the master event; an Auto-Start event that shall dictate all the actions of the ensuing scene.

Alright, so you've got that done. Let's say we've got a scene where a man is walking down a hallway, and guards turn to face him as he approaches a doorway. We'll assume the hallway is 12 tiles long, and the man is starting at the top. We have four events; Man, Guard A, Guard B, and the master event. The master event will start out by ordering the man to move down 12 tiles, and that's that. Now, you might be thinking now; "But Mr. Bluhman! I've gotta calculate the time that action will take and put in a Wait command, and that's hard!" I know. I didn't know about it at first, but there's a much easier way.

It's called "Proceed with Movement." Located on the lower right of the 2nd page, this command astutely orders all previously given move commands to be carried out before the rest of the event proceeds. Very useful, as it no longer requires you to calculate movement times!

Now, back to the matter at hand; we've got a man who has moved down twelve tiles to the doorway of a hall. Move down twelve tiles, proceed with movement. Alright. Now, we want the man to keep walking forward, and the guards to look at him. All you have to do is have Guard A look left, and Guard B look right, assuming A is on the right and B is on the left. Meanwhile, have the Man keep moving down. Another proceed movement. Have a fadeout, scene transition, whatever. That's that. With "Proceed with movement," and some clever usage of  move commands, you can now have the movement of your characters much more easily put together in a cutscene!

Screen control

Now we'll learn how to pan the screen around properly around a map. Say, the hero enters a big hallway leading up to a mean old man at the end, and we want the hero to walk up to him and confront him sternly.

Now, to keep some things in mind; the viewpoint of the gamescreen is 20 tiles wide and 15 tiles tall. Now, strange as this may seem, the viewpoint, by default, is not actually perfectly centered on the hero! There are nine tiles to his left, ten to his right, and seven above and below him in view at any time in an open area. With this in mind, when panning the screen, it's ideal to keep from panning the screen too far and hitting the boundaries of a map.

So we've got a hallway in here that is 40 tiles long. Hero is right at the bottom, old man at the top. The map, however, is set up in such a way that the hero, being at the bottom boundary of the map, is only 3 tiles away from the bottom of the screen! Likewise, the old man is more than 7 tiles away from the top boundary of the map(We'll assume 9!) Now, we're on a map that's 40 tiles long, yet our actors are not quite as far away. We want the screen to pan in a way as to perfectly center on the old man. Since the hero is closer than usual to the bottom of the screen, the screen panning CENTER is 7 tiles away from the bottom. Since we want to center on the old man, we will only pan the view up 23 tiles, since 40 minus the two sevens of screen centering is equal to 26, Minus the added 3 tiles that the old man is away from the top equals 23!

Complicated? Yes. But now I have taught you the secret, and with a bit of figuring stuff out, as well as a mite bit of testing, these problems can be figured out!

Animating Charsets

Now this might require either an artistically strong companion, some art skills of your own, or even simply a charset with poses. As we know, one char has three columns and four rows, columns for steps in a direction, and rows for the directions. These can be substituted for different poses, and sometimes their images and positions can be hints to how they can be utilized;

• A column of poses in a charset might indicate that it's meant to be used in a rotational manner, making a character face in a sequence of directions.
  
• Rows indicate a looping animation that goes back and forth, much like the way most charas simply walk.

Those are only two of many ways the animations can be utilized, and we'll show you examples for these two;

Now, say, we have a column based animation where a girl crouches down and begins to pray. We only want her to do this once. Now, a more fledgling creator would probably turn on a switch that makes the event go into a "Spin Around" animation type. This can be a bit tedious to deal with, as that animation loops and can very easily boil over accidently in a case like this. What we want to do here, instead, is to order the event to face different directions at a medium frequency, so something like "face left, face up, face right, face down", at a frequency of 6 or 7 to see all the frames. Of course, put a proceed with movement action in there to make sure nothing strange happens before she's done praying!

For row based animation; say we've got a man who begins to dance like a little child after he hears some marvelous news. These animations were meant to loop; just turn on a temporary switch and have the event have a new page where the animation type is "Continuous" or perhaps "Fix Dir. Continuous". This can prove a bit of a roadblock for applying this animation to heroes, as you can't have pages in the hero! Can make a bit of an animation roadblock, but if you can make an event that looks like a hero, it can be done!


Moving II

Now we know how to use the Proceed with Movement command, but perhaps now you cannot do things with movement timing you could do with wait commands! Well, this is what this section is for!

Two characters of different speeds getting to one location at the same time.
This one is simple. Say, we've got two people; one who moves at default speed, and one that moves at speed 3; 1/2 normal speed. Both are the same distance from the location they need to get to; eight tiles. What do we do? Very simple.

Since one person is moving twice as fast as the other, the person at half speed will take four steps first. Insert a proceed with movement. Now, have the person again take four steps, then the other take the full eight; this should take the same time for both, as the names of the speed would dictate.

With this in mind, we now know that both a person at half speed taking four steps and a person at full speed taking eight take the same time! Figuring out the spacing of these speeds can get a bit hairy, so I'll lay out a little bit of a chart here:

4X speed is the fastest. 4 steps takes the same time as 1 step at standard speed.
2X speed takes 2 steps the same time as 1 step at standard speed.
Default is default. Duh.
1/2 speed takes 1 step per 2 steps at standard speed
1/4 speed takes 1 step per 4 steps at standard speed
1/8 speed takes 1 step per 8 steps at standard speed

As you can see, it all goes in exponents of two. If you can figure out how to use math here, you can figure out how to make events move in sync to one location at the same time. This can have its uses, such as, perhaps, a running man, moving at default speed,  saving a cat from being run over by a wagon moving at 2X speed.

Setting up a cutscene map.

There are many times where it is much less of a hassle to, instead of setting an event on a pre-existing map, where randomly-wandering NPC's, parallel events, and other random crap can get into the way, and even then, setting up specific maps for cutscenes can be beneficial in some of the effects it can offer, including saving switch space. Knowing how to create them properly can save lots of unneeded mapping as well. So what do you need?

Well, basically, all you need for most scenes is a 20 by 15 map for your people to walk on. But sometimes, there might be segments where characters walk offscreen. To set this up, you'll need a map size of 22 by 17 to provide decent offscreen space to store extra characters, whether they might be walking offscreen or onscreen. This can even apply to maps larger than 20 by 15; simply add one extra, passable tile to the left, right, and top edges of the map, and two extra to the bottom, as most charsets are tall enough to take up more than one RM2k tile visually.

Using a map like this will require some tricky camera working, so refer to that section of the tutorial for some tips. Most vital in a cutscene map would be the 'Lock Pan State' function, as to prevent the camera from revealing your offscreen space.

Isolating cutscene events.

Ok, so perhaps you're set on your cutscene taking place in the midst of your bustling town, where NPC's and the like roam freely. Well, the easy way to prevent NPC's would be to simply make them all stop moving for the duration of the cutscene, by setting the message display options to prevent other events from operating when a message, or event, is in action.

This can be... Quite unrealistic, as all the NPC's just stand in a single position for the duration of the cutscene. What if you simply wanted the NPC's to continue their milling while the events of a cutscene carried out? The answer lies in blocker events.

See, when a cutscene is activated, a switch is turned on, and with this switch, several events, all transparent, below the hero, but most importantly: Forbid Event Overlap, appear around the area in which a cutscene takes place. This way, NPC's can continue to move. They just can't cross into the area where a cutscene is happening.

Only drawback to this would be that, if NPC's have been moving around for a while before the cutscene was initiated, some might accidentally end up within the cutscene area within the boundaries, meaning they could very well block your events from being carried out smoothly. A simple remedy would be simply to start the cutscene from a different map, or perhaps reteleport into the zone to reset NPC locations. Other than that, I'm not sure how this can really be fixed.

Very specific Charset effect: Dissappearing.

Ok, so I just figured out how to make a pretty nice dissappearing char effect, using the increase/decrease transparency movement effect. The key to doing this correctly is to actually understand how this move effect works.

Basically, it's not shown ANYWHERE, but transparency has eight different stages, ranging from fully opaque, to near invisible. The default transparent effect is approximately at stage 2 of transparency, meaning it's not too transparent at all.

But regardless. Fading out is quite simple to do. At a frequency of eight, just do seven increase transparency actions, with wait actions inbetween, which should be enough to bring the char to almost complete clearness. Only thing to do after that is make the char itself clear, and poof. He's thin air.

Reversing this effect starts with the charset being restored, then seven decrease transparency actions, with wait actions inbetween. The wait actions are needed, because for some very odd reason, transparency effects ignore frequency, and no matter what frequency you're at, they'll be executed immediately. Hope this small blurb brought a bit of insight to y'all.

[Zerlina]

Cool! V. Basic, but good for beginners and refreshing for more advaned rm users

[Uberpwn_w00t]

Schweet. About time somebody made a lesson for this.

[Red Fox]

Niiiice.

[Fisherson]

This should get a sticky!Its very good,nice work Bluhman!

[Felix-0]

Very Helpful!!!!

It's basic stuff but A quick Mental Refresh is always good...and new users will find this useful

[Bluhman]

OP got updated.