[All EE games] Max zoom-out during cutscenes

swit

This report has been written by Roxanne, author of the Sandrah mega-mod for vanilla BG2 engine. I'm just posting it here. Of course I agree with it too.

--------

I am pretty sure this observation has been made by more players already, but it's still not included in the "List of Known Issues", so I've created a new topic for it. Some people may consider it a "feature request" rather than bug report, but please think a little about conseqences of the current implementation before rejecting this as something that is not important to be fixed. If it won't be considered an issue please move the whole topic to "feature request" subforum. I'm sure Beamdog devs are wondering why some modders and players still prefer original releases. This is one of the reasons.

Description:
1. Start new game
2. Choose any character
3. Watch the Irenicus opening cutscene

Observed:
When a cutscene is triggered by dialogue or script StartCutSceneMode(), the GUI is disabled (desired), the view is zoomed-out to the largest possible area (depending on screen this may be very large), the zoom option is disabled during cutscene-mode (i.e. if the zoom-out is too large to witness the scene, there is no way to correct this).

Expected:
The automatically selected zoom during cutscenes should not be the largest possible but be equivalent to the default of Infinity Engine for which all cutscenes were written (or AT LEAST the zoom level that was set before the cut-scene started). Cutscenes will not have any events happening outside of an area which was originally selected as the default in the old game.

Notes:
Cutscenes, regardless of vanilla scenes from the original Baldurs Gate Series or added by mods later on were designed for a game without the scroll-option that is now available in BG2EE.

Current cut-scene implementation makes the game uplayable (or at least unpleasent experience) for many people with smaller monitors or even bigger ones but with very high native resolution.

Propsed change:
- default zoom level for StartCutSceneMode() should be zoomed-in to replicate the way it worked in the original engine
- add new action, so we can manually set how much the game is zoomed-in during cutscene.

swit

additional quote from a modder that refuse to touch EE games due to this problem:

It is a massive impact on quite a number of mods (including my own but not exclusively). A lot of key scenes in mods are currently presented as cutscenes with stringhead dialogues displayed on the actors = the issues 2+3 are cumulated. You will see those scenes zoomed out so that you are not able to see what is really going on - and then an endless string of unreadble text flashes by. Not useable.

Just think of the Jarlaxle/Entreri opening scenes from RoT in Irenicus Dungeon or the duergar escape in the same area. Trashed.

Means all of this has to be re-written, probably in the nature of dreamscenes, so that they use the normal GUI.

I just estimated I have around 200 of those in my mod - maybe doing a conversion under these conditions is not such a bright idea after all. I was not expecting such impact from the EE GUI, even knowing how bad it was. The whole advantage of zoom is not available when it is needed most, too bad.