Island Anims - Care and feeding

Care and feeding of Island Animations

What it is

Island animations are cutscenes that are loaded in the main menu. There is a specific island and its cutscene(s) loaded by default. Via the ArmA:_Startup_Parameters -world can set a different island or none as default.

If you load a different island for a SP/MP mission or in the editor, and return to the main menu, you will see the cutscene(s) for the island, that was active last.

If the screen remains black or the last mission continues / is active in the background, the currently active island's cutscene is broken or not present.

Create main menu cutscenes

Config definition

First you need to define the cutscene(s).

You will define an identifier ('DesertIntro1' and 'DesertIntro2' in this case) and the location of the intro mission.

class CfgMissions
{
	class Cutscenes
	{
		class DesertIntro1
		{
			directory = "ca\introAnims\data\scenes\intro.intro";
		};
		class DesertIntro2
		{
			directory = "ca\introAnims\data\scenes\intro2.intro";
		};
	};
};

Add identifier(s) the list of the cutscenes array to your island:

class CfgWorlds
{
..
	class Intro: CAWorld
	{
		cutscenes[] = {"DesertIntro1","DesertIntro2"};

Building a cutscene mission

The cutscene mission is standard mission that can be built with the games mission editor.

Only requirement is to have the 'component' set to intro.

You are very much recommended NOT to use a player entity and AI units as part of the intro mission.

If you do so, it will take a lot longer to load the cutscene in the main menu. This results in very annoying wait times!

Instead your intro mission should basically only consist of camera scenes of the terrain.

An example of such a fast, loading simply cutscene can be found here (PROPER World ... Instant IntroAnims).

Cutscene mission location

It is good programming practice to separate your island anims from the island addon to a separate pbo.

The suggested naming schema for the pbo container is OfpecTag_M_Cutscenes_IslandName.

• OFPEC_tags
• M = mission container abbreviation

Example:

aceip_m_cutscenes_nogova

OFP specifics

The suggested naming schema for cutscene folder is OfpecTag_M_Cutscenes_IslandName\introX

There is an Ofp Island Anim bug that requires you to do the following:

• The anim must remain in a folder. It cannot be packed inside a pbo container.
• All ofp island anims are hardwired addressed because of this.

Because of the lack of pbo, Any ofp island cutscene folder must have a hardwired address. There is no way round this.

By convention, most island oem creators have designated the official ~OFP\Addons folder. SImply because, that folder is guaranteed to exist!

cutscenes[]={"..\addons\aceip_m_cutscenes_nogova\intro1","..\addons\aceip_m_cutscenes_nogova\intro2"};

Some, few, Mod creators (FDF eg), have improved this situation by putting their anim in a mod folder as follows

cutscenes[]={"..\MyMF\addons\aceip_m_cutscenes_nogova\intro1","..\MyMF\addons\aceip_m_cutscenes_nogova\intro2"};

The point remains however, that an island anim folder for ofp, is a hardwired object, that, unlike pbo's, cannot be moved anywhere other than where the author designates it to be.