Intro Questions

[Falcon988]

First of all, how do I make an intro seperately from the mission, and then splice it all together so people see the intro BEFORE they see the mission briefing? I'm aware of the little bar you click to change to either "Intro, Mission, Outro-Win, Outro-Lose" in the editor, but I don't know how to operate it to make my intros & outros work before and after the briefings. Also, are the units in the intros & outros seperate from the ones in mission? by that I mean whether or not they're all on the same map. For lag purposes.

I'm going to study up on camera movements, but I'm wondering. Let's say, for example, the title of my mission is "MISSION" (generic name). I want it to start with an entirely black screen, list a few credits first (designed by, music by, based on the blah by, etc etc), have the title "MISSION" appear in big letters or some other flashy format, and THEN fade out to show the intro itself. How exactly would I do that?

[macguba]

Ah ha!  We can answer all of these, and it's easier than you think.

All in one answer.    Download the tutorial mission from the Ed Depot and take it to pieces.    It covers most if not all of what you want to know.

Bit by bit answer.     The Intro and Outro are like seperate little missions.    The only real difference between them and the Mission part is that the player has no control.      You're right about that drop down menu box:   the Intro plays automatically before the Briefing, the Outro plays after the debriefing.    

To create the Intro you need to place all the units:  if there is a base or something you may need to copy and paste from the main mission.     You can of course get lag in an Intro but the Intro and the Mission don't really "cross-lag".  

The other critical thing you need to make an Intro is a camera script, which is very easy to create.   Read snYpir's tute on the subject, followed by messiah's camera.sqs tutorial and all will be well.

As for whether you get Outro Win or Outro Loose (loose is not the same as lose) that depends on the type of the trigger that ends the mission.    Read any decent trigger tutorial to find out more.

As for the black in and text, the camera tutes or the camera scripts in the Tutorial Mission will show you how to do that.    The command for bothe is titlecut or titletext.  For flashy letters rather than the default you need the font tute by ... I think it's Xenofane, can't quite remember.

[Falcon988]

Thanks a lot. I got a lot of stuff working but am still having some issues. Notably what I want is a total black screen in which to display the initial credits (a quotation and the title with some music playing in the backround). But I can't get it to do this. It just starts to fade into the game screen immediately and you never get to see any black screen.

[macguba]

Yes, I remember this one, took me a while to figure out.   The answer is brilliantly simple.    The start of your intro script is going to look something like this


titlecut [" ","BLACK IN",300]

enableradio false

playmusic "rtrack2"
2 fadesound 1

~2

titletext ["missionname", plain, 2]

~6

titletext ["text", plain, 2]

~6

_cam = "camera" camcreate [0,0,0]
_cam cameraeffect ["internal", "back"]

titlecut [" ","BLACK IN",2]

_cam camsettarget logic1
_cam camsetrelpos [-80,100,7]
_cam camcommit 0
@camcommitted _cam


I'm slightly making this up so you'll have to check all the syntax and play with it a bit, but the critical parts are the numbers that go with the titlecut commands.   These are the time in seconds that it takes for the effect to happen.    So at the start you ask for a fade in from black over 300s, which over the 15 or 20s of the titles means that it just stays black.   Then of course you have to do a normal timed fade in of say 2s when the titles are finished.

[Falcon988]

Thanks, I'm slowly but surely getting this to work. However I'm getting a couple of errors. For instance when it starts the "Missionname" and "text" areas I just see an ERROR message at the top left of the screen and none of the titles where they should be. Also, when it makes the titlecut at the end I suddenly just see a whole -lot- of water. It's as if the camera was dropped a few feet above the water and is hovering there. I've seen this happen many times actually and am wondering why this occurs?

[macguba]

If you've got water at the end you probably haven't destroyed the camera correctly - remember it was created at position 0,0,0 which is the bottom left hand corner of the map, which is sea.

If you're getting an error message read it carefully - it's telling you what the problem is and even puts a # to indicate where.    Doesn't always work, but it usually tells you what's going wrong.    If you can't figure it out post the error message here.

[Falcon988]

titletext [Test Mission 1, Plain, 2] |#[: error type any, expected string

titletext [The Assault, Plain, 2] |#[: error type any, expected string



Those are the two error messages I'm getting. The initial titlecut however works just fine.

[Falcon988]

Oh, and one more much easier question.

how do I make those small blue radio messages that appear at the bottom left of the screen?

[Planck]

Try:

titletext ["Test Mission", "Plain", 2]


Planck

[macguba]

loon1 sidechat "Wow! a small blue message"

Also extant:

groupchat
vehiclechat
globalchat

They all have different colours.