The idea is that Eggman's making a mockery of the master emerald shards to get a rise out of Knuckles and to show he has bigger plans. In hindsight I should have added more variation in silly devices he used their power for. Oh well.
Next update maybe.
Oh, the cutscene plan WAS to just have a slideshow.
If you check version 1.2, you can see the opening cutscene working in-game, slideshow style. Like how it was in island tour.
As seen in this person's playtrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKZVJHLF7R4&
It's only after I gave up putting it in SRB2 that I made the cutscene animation more complex.
As for why I gave up, rather not go too much in detail since I'm not entirely sure if it's my own fault for being terrible at writing code, or the software's fault.
Simply put, the problems were:
The timing. It seems SRB2 puts priority on the text on screen over the amount of tics I tell an image to last in the code.
I don't use text, so each image sequence in a scene would override the tics I tell it to last and immediatly transition to the next sequence.
To solve it, I have to make each image sequence as short as possible so the amount of time each image lasts goes by faster then the default "no text" shut down.
Each image sequence causes a delay of a quarter of a second. Since my cutscenes are a cartoon and have to be timed perfectly with the audio, that's a problem. ESPECIALLY when the previous problem forces me to use as many image sequences as possible, thus increasing the amount of delays I have no control over.
Testing. Calculating the random delays into the tic count of the images requires me to test the cutscene dozens of times. And I can't just straight up test it, I have to boot up the game and mods and sometimes beat a stage before I can see how the cutscene fails this time. Which ain't fun if it takes 50 tries to get it barely right.
And finally, I can't get more then 1 cutscene working. When I have 1, it works fine, whenever it's the intro, end screen, level transition. But as soon as I have 2 cutscenes, one works, the other crashes or plays the wrong one.
Tough I suspect it's probably me screwing up in the coding somehow.
Urgh, my messy brain really isn't suited for the exact nature of coding.
Those are the main reasons why I gave up and just use my 1 cutscene slot as the end credit sequence where the timing doesn't matter too much.