The arrival at The Source

The first in-engine cutscene. Ioma rides into the camp at The Source; the bars close over the ride; the keepers of the drawpoint, who sent word that the water had stopped, greet her at the fire; the problem is named once; she already knows; she is offered the fire. Then the bars go out and the player has her back on foot at the fire's edge, free to walk to a boulder and sit down.

It is a test of the whole chain rather than a finished scene: can the game cut a scene on voiced lines, with the camera, the horse and Ioma all driven by the same pieces the ride uses, and hand control back cleanly? The five lines are the user's:

KEEPER:  Ioma, it's good to see you.
IOMA:    It's good to see you. It's good to see fire.
KEEPER:  Fire we've got. It's water that's the problem.
IOMA:    I know.
WOMAN:   Ioma, sit and get warm.

The seven shots

Every frame here is from the review movie (46 s, the ride in from 70 m south through the scene, about eight and a half seconds of control (it comes back at 31.5 s, the held keys lift at 38, D at 40), a step to a boulder and E).

1, riding in. Low beside the woman at the hearth, her belt and hand in the foreground, looking out past her: the horse comes out of the dusk. The reins are synthetic: the scene takes the horse at the place's 40 m reach and brakes him along the dismount's own curve to a mark 7 m from the fire (0.38 m off it in this run).

2, down. The horse's near side, low: she gets down on the dismount the E key plays.

3, "it's good to see you". A fixed camera south of the fire on the keeper across it; she walks into the frame from the lower left on her way to her mark, walked there by a Steer command a frame, as the player would walk her.

4, "good to see fire". Close and three-quarter, the fire's light from below. She plays talk_open here and listen from the next shot, her Meshy clips through a named override on the hero.

5, "fire we've got". Wide across the fire, all four of them; the woman's stoke flares the fire on the line.

6, "I know". Tighter than 4, the same side; the 1.2 s after the line is held: the silence is the point.

7, "sit and get warm". Over Ioma's shoulder on the woman, firelit.

Control back at 31.5 s: the bars opened on the on-foot chase camera behind her, the HUD fades in, and the key card already offers E sit, since she stands within reach of a boulder.

D for half a second, E: she sits on the south-east boulder facing the fire. E again, or a step, stands her.

What it proved

• The bars come back. The letterbox is the cine camera's filmback, closed again by the lerp the opening's release runs open, so nothing has to keep in step with Slate's scale. The HUD hides under the bars and fades back after.
• Shots cut on lines. The scene is data (data/cutscenes/source_arrival.json, the Godot schema the old explore3d_stoke scene used, plus a dismount mark, riding-only shots, a hero clip and an aperture per shot), run by FCutscene on the scene clock: a line shot lasts its pre-roll, the wav and a tail, so the edit follows the takes. Arriving on foot skips the two riding shots and runs her in under the bars.
• Voices and subtitles. The keeper is the wellwright's voice, Ioma her adult scratch voice, and the woman a new voice designed for her (late fifties, low, warm but worn). Each line was taken on four seeds on ElevenLabs v4, every take checked by machine ear (tools/check_takes.py: scribe's words against the line; all twenty clean), one picked per line on a board (audio/dialogue/source/board.html) and normalised to -17 LUFS (tools/pick_takes.py). The lines play 2D, the film mix, over the fire, the wind and the score; the subtitle is IM Fell in the lower bar, the speaker above the line.
• The hand-back. Control returns on foot with the horse parked where the scene stopped him; keys held through the scene are ignored until they lift.
• The skip. Space fades to black for 0.15 s, writes the end state with the same logged commands the scene uses (the horse to his mark, her Spawn at hers) and fades back into the opening bars; the line playing stops.
• The sit. Seats are dressing ("seat": {"height_m": 0.55, "face": "fire"} on the two boulders); E within 1.2 m sits her.
• Nothing else moved. The four opening traces are unchanged; a fifth, source, rides through the whole scene. It caught her walking through the fire after the scene: the hearth is an obstacle now, and she walks round it.

What it did not

• The figures don't look at her. The keeper and the woman loop their clips through the whole scene; a head that turns to Ioma is the next thing the people need.
• No transition into the sit. She blends from standing onto the stone over 0.8 s. Meshy has no stand-to-sit clip that we know of, and her floor-sit clip holds her feet at the seat's height rather than on the sand.
• The voices are scratch. Ioma's is a stand-in for an actor; the speakers are KEEPER and WOMAN because the keepers are not written yet, and the woman wears the mother's model until they have their own.
• Faces. Shot 7 has the woman closer to frontal than the three-quarter the scene asks for, and lit; the drinker's chair-height sit has him sitting on air in shots 3 and 5.
• The mix. The lines sit only a little over the camp's bed: momentary peaks of -20.5 to -24 LUFS against a bed around -26.5 at the fire, though in the speech band (300 Hz to 3.4 kHz) their peaks stand about 9 dB over it. The sound in the movie is the game's own output, recorded in real time over the same drive and laid under the frames. A judgement for the ear.

Open

The backlog has the rest: the figures' look, a sit transition, a log seat, the keepers' own models and names, a MoveTo sim command if a second scene wants it, a hint that Space skips, exposure compensation for a shot at a wider aperture (every shot is f/11 today: under the physical camera a shot's aperture is its exposure).