Hiding players during cinematics
This guide builds on Visibility and assumes you know how a visibility rule picks its viewers and targets.
A camera cinematic or a locked camera is a private moment, and other players walking through the shot break it. Neither hides anyone on its own: hiding is a visibility rule, so you decide per story whether it happens, and to whom.
The recipe is the same in both cases:
- Get an audience that holds exactly the players who are in the moment.
- Hide everyone from those players.
- Hide those players from everyone.
Steps 2 and 3 are separate rules, because a rule only works in one direction.
During a camera cinematic
1. The audience
Make a Manifest page called something like Cinematic Visibility and add a cinematic audience to
it.
Leave the Cinematic field empty and the audience holds every player who is in any cinematic. Point it at a cinematic page instead and it holds only the players watching that one, which is what you want when a single cutscene needs the treatment and the rest do not.
This entry needs no parent. An audience entry without parents starts with every player on the server, and the filter narrows it down from there.
2. The effect
Add a hide effect to the same page and rename it to Cinematic Hide.
3. Hide the world from the player in the cinematic
Add a visibility rule, set its viewers to the cinematic audience, its targets to everyone, and its
effect to Cinematic Hide.
The player watching the cinematic now has an empty world in front of the camera. They are not hidden from themselves, since a player is never their own target.
4. Hide the player in the cinematic from the world
Add a second visibility rule, this time with everyone as the viewers and the cinematic audience as
the targets. Point it at the same Cinematic Hide effect.
Both rules stop the moment the cinematic ends and the player leaves the audience.
Step 3 can also be an Audience Visibility Rule placed under the cinematic audience, which takes its
viewers from the audience it sits in and only asks for targets and an effect.
During a lock interaction bound
There is no built in audience for "this player is inside a locked bound", so mark the moment with a
fact and filter on it. If the locked interaction is a dialogue, you can skip the fact and use a
Dialogue Audience instead.
1. A fact for the moment
On a Static page, add a permanent fact called In Locked Interaction and give it the player group.
2. Set it while the bound runs
Select the Lock Interaction Bound entry and add a modifier that sets In Locked Interaction to
1. Modifiers run when the entry is triggered, which is the moment the bound starts.
Clearing it again takes two places, because an interaction can end in two ways:
- Add a modifier that sets the fact back to
0on the last entry of the sequence, for the run where the player sees the interaction through. - Link an action that does the same to the bound's Interrupt Triggers, for the run where the player leaves early.
3. Turn the fact into an audience
Back on your manifest page, add a criteria audience with the criterion In Locked Interaction == 1.
4. The same two rules
Add the same two visibility rules as in the cinematic recipe, pointed at this audience instead of the cinematic one. Both use a hide effect.
| Rule | Viewers | Targets |
|---|---|---|
| Hide the world from the locked player | the criteria audience | everyone |
| Hide the locked player from the world | everyone | the criteria audience |
Things to watch
Give the page holding these rules a high priority. Hiding during a cutscene should beat cosmetic rules like glow or ghost, and priority decides that. See Priority.
These rules only cover players. NPCs and other entities are not part of the visibility extension, so an NPC standing in the shot stays there. Use the entity extension's conditional showing for those.