[Tutorial] Another Way To Do Animated Cutscenes (5.1 ONLY) (Easier)

Firstly, if you are new to SORR and/or making cutscenes in general, please refer to Bomberlink's tutorial on creating an FPG file:
http://www.sorrcommunity.com/t53-tutorial-how-to-build-a-stage-using-fpg-edit

And secondly, please refer to Benny26's animated cutscene tutorial to get an idea of what to do:
http://www.sorrcommunity.com/t30-tutorial-animated-cutscenes



As most of us know, making cutscenes in SORR used to be pretty hard. You would have to stack the same image on top of each other and it would just count as 1 frame, making animated cutscenes last about 2 mins 30 secs max. Now you can exceed that with the new way to create cutscenes and it's MUCH easier too. Before if you made a mistake, chances are you had to redo the ENTIRE cutscene all over again and you would have to recreate a 900-image based cutscene. That wasn't fun at all. Now if you make a mistake, you can just correct a number and continue on, just make sure you place all the images you want in order first.

Let's get started:

First of all, be sure to create your cutscene either the manual way or with the Cutscene Maker. Now, let's create a new fpg file. Put all the pictures you want in your cutscene in the order you want them to be in.


Right click on your first image and select edit.


A new window will appear. Click on the second tab, Control Points.


Now this is important, you will be creating only TWO control points when creating a cutscene and it has to be in order. The first control point will dictate where your image will appear on screen when the cutscene displays. For most images, the best choice will be to select the center dot (marked by 1 on the image below), and then for all images, you will click on the "Put Center" option next.


Once you do this, the control point for where your image is shown on screen will be created for you. You can choose the other ones if you want to, but ONLY do this if your image is not centered on the screen properly. This should not be a problem if your creating images that are 277 x 144, which is the closest to what SOR3/BK3 displayed along with SORR cutscenes. For cutscenes that are bigger or smaller than that in both height and width, you may get some funky looking cutscenes, but it should not be too bad unless you are stupid and create an image that is 1980 x 2040 and get a closeup on Axel's crotch.


Next on the list is creating your next control point. This is VERY IMPORTANT. This control point will dictate how many frames your image will appear on-screen. Remember, 60 frames = 1 second in our time. So find out how many seconds you want your first image to appear on screen before it switches to the next one. For example on this particular image, I wanted the first image to display for the first four boxes of dialogue that will appear in the cutscene. So by looking at this image, 240 (4 seconds) x 4 = 960 frames, which is 16 seconds.


You will want to put your total amount of frames in the X box (no pun intended). The X takes command of the frames. The Y box below it will decide whether or not your cutscene will continue...in theory at least. 1 is supposed to make the cutscene continue after this image is done, and 0 is supposed to freeze the cutscene on this image. However, I have not noticed the difference between the two, so for the time being, just put in 1 to be safe until the last image in your cutscene. When you are done filling out the X and Y boxes, select the arrow pointing outwards into the control point box with an already exported control point that we have created earlier.


If everything looks right, choose accept at the bottom of the window.


Continue the same thing with the other images, while choosing how many frames/seconds you want the image to be on screen, up until you get to the last image in your cutscene.

Cm_Blast wrote:I want to complete this info by saying that you actually can freeze the last frame as long as you want.

If you write "0" on the Y box, the cutscene will loop from the beggining, but if you write "1" (as for the rest of the cutscenes), the frame just freeze until the timer set on the .txt file ends.

- Thanks to CM Blast for this info

You can also go ahead and time how long the last image is supposed to appear up with the last dialogue box, THEN go ahead and add an additional 240 frames on it so that you have enough time to see that this will be the last image your cutscene will see before it loops back again. For example, I wanted the last image in my cutscene to last about five seconds, I went ahead and added about 240 frames (540 frames altogether, nine seconds total) so that it didn't loop on me. Once you are done figuring out the total, export that control point and hit Accept.


Congrats, you are done setting up the timing your cutscene! Now it's time for you to compress it. This isn't mandatory, but for the sake of users out there, please compress your cutscenes/levels so that we don't have to download ridiculous sized mods that can be downsized with no loss in the picture quality whatsoever. So, save your file. Then click on Tools and find Compressor for FENIX.


Find your game's folder, then go into the script folder where the cutscene should be, then find your file, and compress it.


Wow, look at that difference in file size! I just turned what was once a 399KB file into a 6KB file and it still looks great!


I went ahead and uploaded the cutscene from this tutorial to see how I did it if you are still having some trouble:
https://mega.nz/#!e8dyARAJ!kghf2k-G3ZjfJ5PsN8xRptSj_TImKdEn-f56grvVosE

Anyways, I think this was my most favorite feature in 5.1 as it made modmaking MUCH easier on my end. I hope it becomes easy for you as well and I hope that this tutorial was helpful.

Wow, this was very useful and practical. Thanks a lot for the tutorial.

Thank you, me and my computer appreciate it (my pc semi-freeze loading/saving average/long cutscenes). Tried a bit and works.

I tried also the "compress file" option. My 70.000 KB cutscene was reduced to 7.000 KB.
As a test, I used that option to compress every single .fpg I had (even the smalls). From 676 MB, the mod dropped to 400 (half of that size is because the .ogg files).

Then I used winrar with it to create a ".rar" file. Oddly enough, the ".rar" file has almost the same size than the one done to the 676 MB version. Even more odd, the "compressed" version is bigger than the original (394 MBs the original, 411 the compressed one).

I want to thank again for this tutorial. Having access to this was what encouraged me to update my old mods with better cutscenes.

Saven wrote:Like I mentioned in theory before, 0 in the Y box is supposed to freeze this image on this cutscene. However, as you might find out, it really doesn't, and if you don't put as many frames as you need on the image, the cutscene will loop right back to the first image in the cutscene.

I want to complete this info by saying that you actually can freeze the last frame as long as you want.

If you write "0" on the Y box, the cutscene will loop from the beggining, but if you write "1" (as for the rest of the cutscenes), the frame just freeze until the timer set on the .txt file ends.

Cm_Blast wrote:I want to thank again for this tutorial. Having access to this was what encouraged me to update my old mods with better cutscenes.

Saven wrote:Like I mentioned in theory before, 0 in the Y box is supposed to freeze this image on this cutscene. However, as you might find out, it really doesn't, and if you don't put as many frames as you need on the image, the cutscene will loop right back to the first image in the cutscene.

I want to complete this info by saying that you actually can freeze the last frame as long as you want.

If you write "0" on the Y box, the cutscene will loop from the beggining, but if you write "1" (as for the rest of the cutscenes), the frame just freeze until the timer set on the .txt file ends.

Thank you for the support and also for finding out what the 1 does. I will add that to the Tutorial.

I know this is basically necroposting, but... does actually anyone know how to center the image inside the cutscene? as in what are the coordinates for a 320x240 image? If someone knows, appreciate in advance


EDIT: Okay, I figure it out. If you want a full screen of your cutscene at 320x240. set your control points of the first one at X 195 Y 80.