Building a cutscene intro

An intro that films the game's own running scene, then lands on the title.

An intro is the cutscene plugin filming the game's own entry scene: its real kinds, run by their own rules, the camera cutting and sweeping between them, then letting go onto the title with the scene still running behind it.

#Where it plays

1. Play it in the entry scene, the title, before its menu. A separate intro scene that moves the seat on to the title puts another scene behind the menu, started over, and the cut shows it.
2. Keep the title a plain seat (Scene flow). The cast are rows the game drives itself, never a seat's player row.
3. Add to the title's plugins render3d and the look plugins its set uses, with cutscene after render3d and before ui. Give it world.cutscene and catalogue the cue file. A title with its own world.loader lists only what its set draws.

#The cast

1. Give each cast kind what cutscene asks of one: a name, direct read in its tick, and the act advance(dt).
2. A kind that drives itself, a CPU racer or a bot, goes on by its own rule while direct is set, so the camera films the real thing. It throws, naming the verb, when handed a walk, face, play or gesture.
3. Cast every row that moves in the shots, not only the ones a shot names. A skip steps the cast and nothing else, so a row left out stands still while the rest leap ahead.

#Starting it

1. Leave auto out of the cue file: the page that just arrived is still fetching its models, and the intro would play to an empty set.
2. The curtain's look sends its open act ready once, on the first frame every model and texture of the catalogue has landed or failed. Its rule does the same after its definition's wait seconds. Either one, once, calls the cutscene's start and starts the action, a race's flag say, in the same step.
3. The curtain's look covers its panel in black until the cutscene runs, and sends skip on the first key or click while it runs.

Starting both in one step keeps the cue clock and the action's clock together, so every car or ship is where the cue file was written for it.

#Writing the cue file from the run

When the action is a pure function of the seed and the numbers, assets/intro.ts writes the shots from the game's own run: node --experimental-strip-types games/<game>/assets/intro.ts.

1. Boot the manager as the server does, step once, and send the curtain ready as a page would.
2. Write a first file with the cast and no cues, and after every write call the loader's written(url, content), or the next boot reads the old file.
3. Record every cast row each step: place, heading, speed and progress.
4. Lay the shots on what the recording shows, alternating wide and high with close and low (frame: "body"). The first shot has over: 0; the last follows one cast member with an offset in the world's axes.
5. Write the file and check every frame of every shot with the cutscene's pose: the subject on screen inside the bars, within a distance, nothing between it and the camera, and the camera inside nothing of the set as it is drawn, walls, banks and buildings included. Throw on the first frame that fails.

#The title after the intro

1. Draw the menu only once the cutscene row is done, brought up on the page's clock by an appear in the title's definition.
2. Claim render3d's camera and carry the last shot on with the cutscene's view, turned slowly about the upright on the page's clock.
3. Draw a 3D name or 3D menu words in render3d's overlay, with an environment map the look builds, since the overlay has none. Each menu word stays a ui button with clear fills and its hit area set each frame to the word's box from render3d.project.
4. Make the words one glb from one Blender script that reads them off the title's definition, built by the game's bake.

#Checking it

1. In the title's <title>.sim.test.ts: the cutscene waits for ready; ready starts it and the action in one step; every frame of every shot passes the check; at the end direct is null and the action runs on; a skip ends it at once; and the curtain starts it alone after wait.
2. A page test of anything on the title skips the intro first, as a player would.
3. Play it from the game's index.html, as in Starting a game, and watch every shot.