Cutscene question

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Game specific. Some games use in engine cut scenes. Some use cg.

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These days, they are often rendered in real time, as in Halo 2. The view will narrow into letterboxing, the scripted, in-engine sequence will play, then the view opens up and the player-character's POV and HUD will be restored. I find it to be generally more immersive, since the quality of rendering doesn't change during the cutscene. (In Halo 2 this wasn't quite true; the quality of the cutscene graphics was noticeably inferior to game-play ).


Xbox 360 games are pretty much all going to have in-engine cutscenes (or multiple disks ), due to a DVD9's insufficient capacity to hold both the code of a game and any significant amount of pre-rendered high-definition video.

There are plenty of games that render cutscenes in real-time using the game engine. Examples would be Doom 3, Quake 4, Far Cry, Half-life 2, etc. All you have to do to notice whether a game's cutscenes are rendered in real time is to determine whether the scene looks like in-game gameplay and not a video of gameplay. The obvious case of a cutscene being pre-rendered is if it's CG.

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What is CG, and by in-engine do you mean real-time? I thought most of the time cutscenes had much more beautiful graphics than actual gameplay, and that this was a result of pre-rendered video. I have even heard the phrase "anyone can make a beautiful cutscene".

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CG was perhaps a bad term to use since real-time rendered computer graphics can fall into the category. What I meant was computer-generated imagery akin to movies like Shrek and Toy Story. Games with cutscenes modeled after such CG graphics is the Final Fantasy series.


If a cutscene looks like it does when you are actually playing the game, it is likely to be rendered in real-time. It is rare these days for games to have in-game movies captured by other hardware, especially when those movies look the same as when you are controlling the game.

You will see more in-game renders because it doesn't cost the company as much money to do this. They just use the game engine and that is that for the most part..........If they want CG, then they have to hire a team of peeps that will do just that.........Sure CG looks great and I love it too, but don't expect to see it in games as much anymore............

Also space becomes more of a restriction now. You can fit a ton of 480i scenes on a DVD, but you'd be lucky to cram in 1 hour of full quality 720p videos along side your game. The PS3 certainly has a bit of an advantage in that respect (but I'm not looking forward to the loading times between scenes).


Personally, I prefer in game engine scenes. They are not as good quality, but I find it keeps you in the game and the "suspension of disbelief".

Japanese RPG developers have traditionally used prerendered cutscenes, using an army of artist for anime-film-quality results. It's like watching a movie with little interludes of gameplay where the graphics aren't nearly as good. They can't do this in HD on Xbox 360 and some developers have hinted at multi-disc releases. Microsoft recommends the use of "procedural synthesis" (the use of much less detailed graphics with automatic rendering of fine details at runtime). These techniques are used in ES IV: Oblivion, which they managed to get all on a single disc.