Transitions

4 commands cover the moments between shots: a screen fade, a scrolling opening crawl, a centred announcement and a full-screen video.

/crawl is hard-locked to director mode by default, whatever your admin rank. /fade is locked to the director while one is active and falls back to your rank otherwise. /centersay, /cs and /playcinematic only check your rank unless the server locks them too. See director mode.

What it does

A fade hides the room while you move people, dress a set or reposition a camera. A crawl opens an episode. An announcement labels a place or a jump in time. A cinematic plays a pre-rendered video. None of them are recorded to a scene file except the crawl text, so they are live tools.

Fading the screen

/fade toggles a black screen for everyone. Both arguments are optional and their order does not matter, so /fade out iris and /fade iris out do the same thing.

/fade [out|in] [style]

Run it bare to toggle. A fade-out with no style uses wipe. There are 11 accepted style names:

• wipe is a horizontal wipe and the default
• left, right, up and down are directional wipes
• split closes like barn doors towards the centre
• band is a venetian slat wipe
• clock sweeps round like a clock hand
• iris closes from the edges to the centre
• hyperspace and hyper both jump to lightspeed

The reveal always reuses the style the fade-out stored, so you cannot fade out with iris and back in with clock. Fading twice in the same direction is refused:

Directors get a dimmed version of the fade rather than full black, so you can still see the set while you work. Everyone else goes fully dark.

Running /fade info or /fade help prints the in-game style list, which is out of date and misses 2 styles this page covers. That one form runs before the permission check, so any player can read it.

Running an opening crawl

A crawl is 4 paragraphs of scrolling text. Write them, then start it. The scroll takes 80 seconds.

Run a paragraph command with no text to read back what is stored:

2 options fire when the crawl finishes. fade reveals the scene from black, and music starts a looping track.

3 commands drive playback, and none of them print a reply:

/crawl start
/crawl test
/crawl stop

start plays for everyone, test previews for you alone, and stop ends it immediately. Fade to black with /fade out before you start, so /crawl fade on has something to reveal.

The panel also sends a setall form that writes all four paragraphs and both options in one command. Use the panel rather than typing it.

Announcements on screen

/centersay puts a line in the middle of the screen for a set number of seconds. The first argument is who sees it, and all or -1 means everyone.

Type /n inside the message to force a line break, as in the example above. Seconds are clamped to 1 to 30.

Target one player by name or client number:

Pull an announcement early with clear, stop or off:

/cs is the fast broadcast form. It takes a message and nothing else, and prints no reply. The duration is worked out from the length of the text, between 3 and 15 seconds.

/cs <message>

Playing a cinematic

/playcinematic plays a full-screen video file. Give it a path on its own and everyone sees it.

Name a target first and only that player sees it, which is how you run a vision or a flashback for one character:

A broadcast play is recorded, so someone joining part way through is caught up and sees the rest. A private play is deliberately not recorded, so an unrelated joiner never receives it.

Things to note

• A fade-out and most crawl playback commands print nothing. Watch the screen, not the chat.
• The fade style is stored, not chosen per direction. /fade in iris still reveals with whatever style the fade-out used.
• Crawl paragraphs cap at 511 characters and quotes are stripped out of them.
• A crawl always takes 80 seconds. There is no speed setting and no way to skip to the end other than /crawl stop.
• Announcement text loses ", ; and \. They are stripped before sending.
• A non-admin's /cs line is never shown as an announcement. In chat it falls through the shortcode list, and on a default server the slash-chat guard swallows it and tells only you. See say-line shortcodes.
• Cinematic paths accept letters, numbers, _, -, . and / only. Anything with .. in it is refused.
• A scene load wipes the crawl text. Save the scene after writing a crawl you want to keep.

Next

• Music: score the scene the crawl opened
• Scene info: put the standing briefing on screen once the fade lifts