Cutscene Browser

The Cutscene Browser lists every cutscene this build of GTA V ships and, for a large part of the list, plays a 3D preview of it. It is the quick way to find the cutscene name a script needs, see who is in it and how long it runs, and check what it actually shows before you wire it up.

What is in the list

Every cutscene is read out of the game’s own cutscene files, so each row carries the real data:

• The cutscene name, exactly the string RequestCutscene wants.
• How long it runs and how many camera cuts it makes.
• The ped models that act in it, with the character name where it is obvious.
• The props and vehicles the cutscene places.
• How many subtitle lines it has, and the lines themselves for the exported ones.
• The world position and heading the cutscene plays at.

The list is grouped into story missions, story heists, Strangers and Freaks, GTA Online heists, the GTA Online updates and test files. That grouping is read from the cutscene names, because the files themselves do not record which mission they belong to.

What the preview shows

A cutscene in GTA V is not one animation. It is a set of actors with their own character models and faces, a camera track, props, lighting, audio, subtitles and a piece of the world around it. The preview covers the parts that can honestly be rebuilt in a browser:

• Each actor’s real body animation, played on our own freemode ped.
• Every actor standing where the cutscene puts them, relative to each other.
• The props we already have a 3D model for, animated by the cutscene.
• The cutscene’s own camera: position, rotation and field of view, with its real cuts.
• The subtitle line that belongs to the current moment.

It does not show the cutscene character models, facial animation or lip sync, lighting or effects, audio, vehicles, or the world the scene plays in. Treat it as a blocking pass, not as the cutscene.

Cutscenes without a preview still show all of their metadata and the Lua. They were left out because they run longer than the export limit, have no ped actor, or are test files.

Watching one

• Scene camera looks through the cutscene’s own camera. Orbit gives you a free camera you can drag and zoom.
• Scrub the bar to find a moment, change the speed, or turn the loop off to watch it once.
• Each actor has its own male or female ped switch. The animation data is identical on both.
• Floor hides the ground plane, Reset view puts the orbit camera back.
• The page URL keeps the selected cutscene, so you can link straight to one.

Playing the real cutscene in game

Click the cutscene name to copy it. The Lua panel gives you the working sequence:

local scene = "ah_1_int"

RequestCutscene(scene, 8)
while not HasCutsceneLoaded() do
    Wait(0)
end

StartCutscene(0)

while IsCutsceneActive() do
    Wait(0)
end
RemoveCutscene()

A few things worth knowing:

• Register an entity before StartCutscene, never after. The handle string is the model the cutscene expects for that actor, which the actor rows show you next to the character name.
• SetCutsceneEntityStreamingFlags and the flags on RegisterEntityForCutscene decide how much of the ped the cutscene owns. Flag 64 is the usual “let the cutscene drive it”.
• A cutscene streams the world around it. Played somewhere else it will look wrong or hang on a black screen, so warp the player to the coordinates in the panel first.
• Always call RemoveCutscene when you are done, or the next request will fail.

Credits

Every cutscene here is our own extraction from the game files. The public gta-v-data-dumps name list was used once, as a cross check on the names we found.