title: Cutscene system ruled just by time?
body: <p>This is my first time I need to create a cutscene system. I have read a lot on the web about different ways to accomplish this task and have mixed them with my own ideas. Now, it is implementation time, but I need some info from other people with more experience than me in this field. Here we go:</p>
  
  <p>1) Some years ago, I implemented a system that actions could be queued in a serial/parallel way, building a tree of actions that when executed created the final result. This can be sure used as the cutscene system director, but, wouldn't it be so much simple to just have a timeline with actions ran at a certain time? An example:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>playMp3(0, "Song.mp3)</li>
  <li>createObject(0, "Ogre", "Ogre1")</li>
  <li>moveObject(1, "Ogre1", Vector3(100,100,1))</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>This way everything would be really simple to script. Serial actions are supported buy spreading them correctly in time and parallel actions just need to have shared time ranges.</p>
  
  <p>One problem I have seen is that an action like Sync() (This just waits for all actions to finish before start the other that come afterwards) can't be used because we're using absolute time to trigger our actions. Anyway, a solution could be to have our actions layered based on last "sync()". I mean something like this:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>playMp3(0, "Song.mp3)</li>
  <li>createObject(0, "Ogre", "Ogre1")</li>
  <li>moveObject(1, "Ogre1", Vector3(100,100,1))</li>
  <li>sync()</li>
  <li>moveObject(0,....);</li>
  <li>createObject(1,....);</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>As you may notice, times after sync() starts again from 0, so, when a sync() is ran, and it determines all previous actions from last sync() are finished, timeLine elapsed time would be 0 again. This can be seen as Little cutscene action groups.</p>
  
  <p>2) The previous explanation needs all actions to be added at the beginning of the cutscene playing. Is this how it usually is done? Or do you usually add actions to the timeline as they are needed?</p>
  
  <p>Well, I could be wrong here, but I think this could be a nice &amp; simple way to lay the actions for a cutscene. What do you think?.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance. </p>