MADS/M4 engine now has cutscene support

Well, it's been a very productive month for work on the MADS/M4 engine.

Since the last posting, I started working on the cutscene animation system. This is a separate module to the basic cycled animations that get loaded into a screen.. rather, the game uses an animation manager to handle so-called 'cutscene animations', such as that of Rex waking up in the first room. In this case, the animation manager handles the work of animating the sequence of frames of Rex waking up, looking around, and then getting up. Given that this was the fist major action in the game, it made sense to have that properly implemented first.

Above and beyond that, the animation manager is also used for handling all the full-screen animations done in both the introduction and ending sequences, so once I had Rex properly animated in the first scene, I moved onto implementing proper support for them. With some help from Md5 on the handling of digital voices during the intro, the introduction sequence now plays completely if you press 'F3' from the main game menu. There are only a minor few issues remaining with the introduction, in that:

• The tempo of the intro isn't quite matched to the original yet; I'll need to properly calibrate the timing loops at same stage
• I haven't implemented palette cycling, which is used by some scenes within the introduction sequence to simulate basic animation.

I consider the above minor things, and I'll get to them eventually. For now, I again got distracted from polishing up the remaining issues by making a breakthrough in my understanding of the code that controls the player (you) within the screen. Within the last week I've implemented a great deal of code associated with player control, and now Rex is corrected displayed when the wakeup animation is completed. Not only that, but the idle animations run for Rex, and you can even turn him around by using the Ctrl-T key.

The obvious next stage for me to look into is actually starting to give some movement control for Rex, and have him be able to walk around on-screen. This is where I'll need to worry about figuring out the pathfinding algorithm, and how actual movement is done. I've already identified some of the methods associated with handling Rex's movement but, as I expected, there's a lot of calls to unknown sub-methods that I'll need to figure out the purpose of. Since the MADS engine was designed to be generic for multiple games, there's a lot of complexity in both the movement and pathfinding code that I'll need to figure out.

I'm really looking forward to this. It'll be another major milestone reached when I can move Rex around the room. At that point the game will finally be properly interactive. I'll then be able to work on interacting with objects, which I already understand a lot about, and maybe even moving between rooms and/or teleporting.