Make cutscenes and render them

A cutscene in Eggy is a clip played live in your scene, in the game's own time and lighting: the player walks up to the boss, presses a key, and the camera, the characters and the dialogue move as you keyed them while the world goes on around them. It is an entity with an Animator whose clip moves other entities, and the same clip can be rendered to a video from the Render menu.

Set one up

1. Select an entity named after the cutscene, say boss intro, and press Make a cutscene in Window > Animation: it writes a clip into resources/cutscenes/ and sets the Animator up as below. Or by hand: make a clip (New > Animation > Cutscene in Assets, five seconds long), then an empty entity named after the cutscene, say boss intro, and give it an Animator with that clip. Turn its Playing off so it waits for the game, set Repeat to once, and Takes over to input_and_hud.
2. Select it and open Window > Animation. Pick an actor (boss, player, camera) in the target list and key it, or turn on Record and move the actors with the gizmo: every move is keyed at the head. The panel stays on the cutscene while you select its actors.
3. Use Key… for the rest: the camera's fov_deg to push in, a dialogue screen's visible and the text of its nodes for each line, a sound to start, and events for your code.

Cut between cameras on the Camera cuts lane at the top of the timeline. Put a Camera on each shot's entity (turn its Active off so the game doesn't look through it), scrub to where the shot starts and press Add shot: it cuts there to the next camera in the scene. Each shot runs until the next one. Click a shot to pick its Camera (Game camera hands the view back to the game's), and choose Cut or Blend with how many frames and which ease it blends in over, from the shot before or, for the first, from the game's camera. Drag a shot to move it. When the cutscene ends the view is the game's again anyway.

While the panel poses the cutscene, the Scene panel shows the shot at the head in its corner, and looking through the game's camera from its toolbar shows the cutscene as the player will see it, cuts and blends included.

Lines of dialogue are UI scenes: make a dialogue.ui.zon in the UI Designer with a line node, put it on an entity with a UiScreen, and key text on the line node. Its buttons work during the cutscene.

Start it from the game

Start it when the player interacts with the boss, and answer its events in the animationEvent hook:

const std = @import("std");
const eggy = @import("eggy");

pub const Game = struct {
    pub fn update(_: *Game, app: *eggy.App) !void {
        const boss = eggy.animation.inScene(&app.world, "boss") orelse return;
        const player = eggy.animation.inScene(&app.world, "player") orelse return;
        const intro = eggy.animation.inScene(&app.world, "boss intro") orelse return;
        const near = app.world.get(boss, eggy.Transform).?.position.distance(app.world.get(player, eggy.Transform).?.position) < 2;
        // The cutscene holds the player's input while it plays, so this can't restart it.
        if (near and app.input.pressed(.e)) try app.animation().start(intro);

        // The player answered the boss: carry on from where the clip waited.
        const dialogue = eggy.animation.inScene(&app.world, "dialogue") orelse return;
        if (app.uiScenes().clicked(dialogue, "accept")) try app.animation().unpause(intro);
    }

    pub fn animationEvent(_: *Game, app: *eggy.App, event: eggy.animation.Event) !void {
        if (std.mem.eql(u8, event.name, "wait_for_choice")) try app.animation().pause(event.animator);
        if (std.mem.eql(u8, event.name, "start_fight")) {
            // Your game's own code: wake the boss, start the music...
        }
    }
};

While a cutscene that takes over plays, the player's input doesn't reach the game (UI buttons still take presses) and screens the clip doesn't animate are hidden, until it ends; one paused on a choice keeps them. Turn on the Animator's Letterbox for black bars over the top and bottom of the view while it plays. Holding Escape for a second skips to the end; the events it skips over are still sent, so the fight still starts. app.cutscene.takeover says what is taken now, for HUD you draw yourself in gameUi.

Render it

The Render menu renders cutscenes of the open scene as Blender does, through their camera cuts (or the scene's active camera), in the Render window, which shows each frame as it is made. Render Animation (Ctrl+F12) renders the cutscene chosen in the window, which starts as the one open in the Animation panel; Render Image renders the frame at the Animation panel's playhead; Render All Cutscenes renders each in turn. View Render (F11) opens the window without rendering, to change the size, frame rate, motion blur and format first.

Every frame is rendered at a fixed step, however long that takes, and Stop keeps the frames made so far. They go to the project's zig-out/film/<clip>-<n>/frames/, and with ffmpeg installed they are encoded into film.mp4 there, with the clip's sounds mixed in at their keys.

The same works for any shot that isn't a cutscene in the game: an entity with an Animator and a clip that moves the camera is a film of its own.