Scene Cutscene Authoring

What This System Is

Scene cutscene authoring defines camera, actor, dialogue, audio, weather, time, presentation effects, labels, and control flow in scene content.

How It Works

Cutscenes are authored in the scene cutscene section with stable IDs and JSON step data. Parsing turns step data into runtime definitions, validation checks references and control flow, and runtime planning executes steps with blocking rules.

Step families include camera changes, actor motion, dialogue waits, audio cues, weather/time changes, presentation effects, labels, and jumps.

How Authors Use It

Use stable cutscene IDs and explicit actor references. Use the player actor convention for player-directed steps and scene NPC or mob IDs for authored actors. Keep labels unique, jumps intentional, and blocking rules narrow.

Prefer validation-backed references over free-form strings whenever the schema supports it.

Rules And Invariants

Blocking rules must have a release path: duration elapsed, dialogue completed, external release, or actor arrival. Loops must remain bounded. Missing actors, missing dialogue, missing audio, and missing labels are content errors.

Validation And Debugging

Run scene validation after editing cutscene data. For runtime issues, inspect the planned step sequence and the blocking rule that is currently waiting. Bad labels and actor references usually fail before runtime; timing and external-release issues usually appear during playback.

Examples

A dialogue-led cutscene can move the camera, start a dialogue step, wait for the dialogue blocking rule to release, then jump to a label for a presentation effect. If validation reports a missing label or actor, fix the cutscene JSON before testing runtime playback.