Knights and Merchants.net Forum

I came up with this a loooong time ago but never shared the idea; currently there is no way to show a nice storyline. You can only use the briefings and messages. What about the possibility of adding one or more 'pages' before briefings/after missions? This way you can actually share the story with the player and also add a new or parallel storyline in the midsts of a campaign. With a simple 'continue' button players could skip the whole story with one click so it wouldn't be annoying.
In addition it would be nice also to play videos, music or just voice records but that's stuff for later, I can imagine some arguments being brought up against that since it takes quite some disk space.

I don't think any extra space is an issue

Share your ideas, how you see it?

Well the storyline can be slightly expanded thanks to cutscene scripts, but yeah expanding into deep stories sounds nice. I am not worried about filesize but i can imagine some people will. I have no idea yet how we could implement it. Maybe i get a lightbulb moment later on.

Well I was thinking about some nice KaM-styled picture on the background; maybe with a big scroll for the text. I think the background could be the same for everyone, so not something customizable (although I wouldn't mind if it were possible to customize, it's just not extremely important for me). Taking this into account, people who make a campaign and want to use this feature would only provide text as input. Maybe it could be just a text file in the respective folder, for example \Campaigns\The New Lands\TNL10\SomeBrilliantTextFileNameMadeUpByKromOrLewin.txt
Now there might be one parameter needed: whether the text should show up before or after the mission. I can imagine you want to start your campaign with a storyline, but you might also want to end it with a short story. So it would be wrong to have either 'before' or 'after' as only option. This would also provide the possibility to add your storyline before or after a mission briefing although I'm not sure that would have any added value.
Obviously it should be optional, because you don't need it for every mission. So if the .txt file isn't present in the mission's folder it can simply be ignored.

Maybe a simple 'Storyline.txt' file in the campaign's main map could also work.

Finally, as I brought up in my first post it would also be very nice if sounds/videos could be played (I'm especially thinking of narration); but that might require some more sophisticated system than a simple text file here and there.

So far graphics sounds like the biggest problem then - will we have at least 2 campaigns that will use these features and be at par with KaM artistic level.

My campaign will be one, Disco might be two, maybe Vas three?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not in need of this right now as my updating of TNL is far from finished; it's more or less an idea for the future. But since it might require additional graphics I thought it would be a good idea to post it now.

Maybe I am not understanding you %100 percent, TDL, but are you meaning that you'd like a cutscene that expands on the story before each mission is started? (i.e., to allow for more story than the map screen shows).

That is correct. But not necessarily for every mission. Just when the story becomes more complicated, for example. But the most important of all would be the introducing storyline.

@TDL: You've listed existing addon campaigns, but my concern was about features usage and artistic level. There are not many artists around KaM community that can make cutscene videos or paint screens .. at least I'm not sure I've seen any yet

Excuse the poor 240 quality and annoying watermark, but take a look at Stronghold's method of giving an intro story to a mission https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fwYF98H9uk
I always loved the way it looked. The Scene is quite beuatiful and the way the dialog scrolls down the screen with narration is very nice. This intro also did not play before every mission so it works for your idea very well. Of course, we'd need different graphics since we can't plagiarize.

Anyway, is this kind of your idea?

Well cutscene videos are certainly of a higher level than just a background picture... And personally I wouldn't even use that feature because I'm not good at making videos. It was just a suggestion. You have to admit that a nice and well made cutscene would make that campaign (and indirectly the Remake) look quite professional.
But as I said: worries for later, I just really want to be able to fit in a story here and there, preferably with narration, background music or maybe even both. Ben's example is excellent.

i understand both sides. cutscenes like that would indeed make the game look more professional and add on to the experience. However, i also have not seen many KaM video or audio artists around. it could be nice for the feature, but as long as the resources are not available i will continue telling the story both in the misiosns itself and the briefings. (might be slightly offtopic here) All i needed was the optional parameters for audio to work like the pt sound (mute the music temporarily), which thankfully was accepted and offcourse the cutscenes you can make in misisons itself. I believe that was accepted or even implemented already as script, but i could be wrong. The main idea for those optional parameters was that i could use short music clips to set a certain mood like building tension or use heroic music to get you pumped for the action, or music to indicate danger is coming. Offcourse i researched first and found royalty free music that could be used as long as credit is given before i came up with those parameters idea.

But for future perspective it might indeed be something to keep in mind. I would be willing to learn to create such videos, i think it is easier then scripting.

Making a video like I just did shouldn't be too hard. All you need to is access to video making software, photoshop, and someone who can do some nice filters to royalty free pictures I think it would be a handy solution for this proposal.

If the video files are too large, it could always be part of an optional download for unofficial campaigns. Official campaigns would be trickier, as they'd come with the Remake.