Scripted camera movement within a scene?

[tarotfan]

I need to put together an introduction sequence for an NPC character that should go something like this:

Player comes across NPC shackled to a wall.
NPC force greets with a request for "water"
After the Player gives the NPC water (either picking up the near by clean water or from stored inventory) the NPC will ask to be released. NPC says the shackles are controlled by the terminal.
Player hacks the terminal, and opens the shackles.

You know, the usual, easy stuff. :P

Now for the tricky part...

After the Player selects the "unlock shackles" off the terminal and it exits, I want a scene played (First person camera) where we hear the NPC clobber the Player over the head. The player (first person camera) falls to the ground and vision goes blurry, then fade to black.

When we fade back out from black, the Player is now shackled to the wall, and the same NPC continues the conversation.

I'm not sure how to simulate/move the camera first person to make it appear when played that the Player was knocked out and face plants onto the floor before fading to black?

Searching online hasn't provided what I need. Anyone have any ideas?

[ShabnamHoward]

I am not convinced that that anything more than simple CK support for dialog Camera movements are supported. In the CK dialog “Edit Response Text”. Lower left hand corner, there are the settings Camera: Path, Location target. It appears as if the feature is functional, because the pulldown list for Path includes a plethora of items like EC_Actor_AandA_MediumR, EC_Actor_AandA_CloseupL and so on.

 

Yet in none of the Beth Vanilla game scenes have I seen them employed. Has anyone else? [Addendum- I got some of these to work, including one pan shot. You must tick Player Dialog checkbox. It may or may not be required to have at least one Playerdialog action. I suspect not, but experimentation is slow due to lag time between editing and runtime. If there is any interest, I will post a youtube on how to get this to work. ]

 

In other scenes with compelling angles, and actor poses, there is no CK visible items like Scene at all- for example Min00 is emply except for stages defined, references-aliases and tiny papyrus lines. The main quest data tab refers to a SWF file, so I suspect that ActionScript is doing all the work. Same for Piper scene outside of DC after being locked out by danny.

 

Further, although there is a Papyrus function game.playeventcamera, You will see that it is referenced by only two quest scripts (One is dogmeat and greet), but both lines are commented out. Why. Does use crash the system/ cause instability/ have unwanted side affects on other animations? Anyway the commented out line in papyrus script TIF_DogmeatQuest_000AD4E7.psc is not too illuminating: game.playEventCamera(myEventCamera, akSpeaker)- it is just sitting there alone, with no other state or structures prepared before the call.

 

Speculation aside, as a novice to this platform, I am inclined to not spin my wheels trying to figure out a feature that Bethesda themselves were unable or unwilling to use. But PlayEventCamera at some time worked or it would not be commented out. Maybe you will have some luck with it. As for the type of scene you are going for- It reminds me of some functionality the author of the knockout framework mod had implemented. He has a mode where instead of death, assailants can knock you out, take your things and you wake up many hours later in the latest bed you slept in. He does a kind of blurry fadeout so at least you should look at how that was done.

 

I will just stick to the above mentioned canned Camera movements.

 

It seems rather odd that something as rudimentary as a camera position and angle in a virtual reality game would be such an opaque and lightly documented subject, but there you are.

 

If anyone can just post a pointer to documents or discussions that might get us headed further in the right direction, that would be much appreciated.