Staging

The beats and the voice of First Light: Lucina.

Mounted once, on mount_staging. It puts nothing in the lamp room and owns no geometry: it listens to the night and answers with a shot and a line.

The beats

One beat at a time. An ending (relight, lost) displaces whatever is on screen; anything else waits its turn, and a beat already waiting is not queued twice.

The opening is the one beat the night waits on: however it ends — played out or skipped — staging emits uiRequest("skip") so the phase machine moves on.

Skipping

Every beat is skippable, from all three families at once, through staging.inputMap:

That map is live only while a beat is running, and it stands down the player and ui groups while it is — so the night's controls and the card controls leave the screen along with the gameplay camera, and come back with it.

A skipped beat keeps its decisions and drops its remaining lines. The cutscene runtime fires every cue between here and the closing fade, which is what makes the lens end lit whether or not the ending was watched; a line cue checks the clock actually reached it before speaking, so what has not been said yet is not said over the game the player has just been handed back. The line mid-delivery stops with the shot it belonged to.

Every shape of screen

No station in a beat is a fixed camera position. Each is a direction from what the shot is about and a distance solved from the live ui.screenSize() against the narrower of the frame's two half-angles — so a tall frame stands back for a wide subject and comes closer for a tall one, by itself. game.staging.beats holds that solve, and clamps every station into the lamp room, widening the lens by exactly as much as the clamp took away. Measured at 3:4, at 16:9 and at a 19.5:9 phone, every station lands inside the room and every subject stays framed.

The voice, and the reading of it

One speaker: the Keeper, over the speaking tube from the watch room below. Her whole script is game.staging.lines, in text, and game/staging/voice/ holds one .soundClip per line. Whichever arrives, the words reach the player:

• Inside a beat, the line is a cutscene subtitle — drawn inside the frame, clear of the letterbox bands, sized for the frame it is read in. The cutscene is the one renderer while it runs, so Core.state.subtitle is left nil rather than putting a second copy on screen.
• Outside a beat, over live gameplay, the line goes into Core.state.subtitle for the screens slice's strip, and staging draws a strip of its own only for as long as the words are painted nowhere else. That is read off the live screens rather than assumed from which slices exist, so the line is on screen exactly once whoever is drawing it.

A line whose recording never landed is still said: the subtitle stands for its reading length and the beat is exactly as long as it would have been.

The voice plays on a non-spatial Audio under the mount, on the voice mixer channel, so the sound slice's mix can put the Keeper over everything else.

What it listens to, and what it says

Reads, on the game.core bus:

phase · levelStart · dawnCrest · doseWarning · plateFixed · say · uiRequest("skip")

Emits:

• beat(name) — a beat took the camera; beat("") — it gave it back. A slice drawing a card or a HUD should hold it while this is not empty: the cutscene camera and the game's screens are drawn into the same frame, and the engine does not take content UI off a cutscene (dropping the ui layer would take the subtitle with it).
• uiRequest("skip") — the opening is over, move the night on.
• sfx(name) — dawn_crest as first light crests, relight as the lens ignites, night_ends as the room goes.

Writes Core.state.subtitle, and drives Lens.lit on mount_hero when the hero slice has mounted it.

Public

local staging = entity.find("mount_staging").component.get("Staging")
staging:playBeat("relight")
staging:report()   --> { beat = "relight", linesVoiced = 10, linesTotal = 10, … }