I’m building a very simple JRPG-style cutscene system, where character movement is cued by the player advancing through dialogue boxes: the cutscene starts, an NPC approaches, a dialogue box opens displaying his initial speech, and the rest of the cutscene pauses until the player has finished reading and closed the box, at which point everyone moves to their next animation cue and the next dialogue is opened.
Is there an easy way to sync the two systems up? I’m assuming the mechanical open dialogue box/play matinee would be handled by events in the level blueprint, but I have no idea how to sync the two up.
I would do each dialogue interaction with a single matinee. Speak to that NPC over there? One matinee for the entire conversation.
Use that matinee’s event track to call the functions necessary for playing the initial animations and displaying the dialogue boxes.** Once the initial animations complete and you’re waiting for the player to read text, use the event track to pause the matinee.** You can set your NPCs back to idling anims at this time. After the player has read the text and is ready to continue, you can safely resume the matinee and lead into the next set of animations/dialogue. Wash, rinse, repeat.