Cinematics and cutscenes are historically non-interactive sequences used by many games to provide a back story. With the advent of stronger hardware and more sophisticated technology in recent years, cinematics and cutscenes have become far more interactive and don't necessarily need to take control away from the player, though they are still useful to frame specific and important events.
In this chapter, we will use the cinematic and cutscene system known as Track View within CryENGINE, to create real-time scripted sequences and later on to render these sequences to video.
In this chapter, we will be:
Creating a new Track View sequence
Learning how to animate cameras in Track View
Triggering a sequence using Flow Graph scripting
Animating entities in Track View
Playing animations on entities in Track View
Using Console Variables in Track View
Using Track Events to send triggers to Flow Graph
Capturing video from CryENGINE 3
Let's get started...