Voices and text synchronization

[Kuulintu]

I was just wondering something here. Would it be possible to have "text speed: infinite" setting working also with voice acting, so that you could click to the next sentence. The text doesn't sync well with acting, and it bugs me quite much. Sure, you can skip the dialogue with mouse when voice acting is turned on, but the problem is, that it skips ALL of the lines, not just one.

Also: my achievements are not working (issue that I have with like 50% of Steam games for some reason). In the game, they do pop up, but Steam doesn't register them. And when I've got them in the game, how am I able to ever trigger them in the Steam client?

[kspes]

Originally posted by Kuulintu:

Awesome, kspes! I really wish every developer would be like you! Such a wonderful interaction with players.

Hehe, I'm glad to :)
Every interaction is worthwhile, especially if it results in fixing problems or making the game a bit better for players. We've made many improvements to our games over time because players brought some annoyances to our attention.

Originally posted by Kuulintu:

Maybe I'll be buying The Legend Of Crystal Valley too, just to support you and your hard work :)

You're too kind :)

PS: We're also working on some major improvements to Legend of Crystal Valley as well, we already published some recently. We're currently working on Mac and LInux versions and trying to re-render the entire game to work in widescreen (Currently it's 4:3 which looks outdated)

[kspes]

A new build is now ready in the "test" beta branch, let me know what you think of the new subtitle logic and if achievements now work for you

[Kuulintu]

Wow! Awesome!!! Now the achievements work, finally :) And also the sync issues are gone when the whole acted content comes to the screen at once. There's a lot of text indeed, but for me it's still better than off sync text. Will be trying that manual advance next week. Fabulous work there, thank you so, so much.

[kspes]

This problem has now been solved, an update will be live in a few days hopefully.
Basically the problem was that on some machines, it would take a bit longer to load the voice file, while the voice timer has already been started, thus causing a desync.
I've now made code that uses the actual playback position from the audio driver instead of my timer, now it can't get it wrong no matter how long it loads the file :)

On top of that, I'm adding 2 new subtitle options:
* No subtitles - for players who prefer playing only with voices
* Full subtitles - to display the whole subtitle (with a reduced font size) - this will be very useful for other languages.

Thanks for bringing attention to this ^^

[kspes]

Originally posted by Kuulintu:

And also the sync issues are gone when the whole acted content comes to the screen at once. There's a lot of text indeed, but for me it's still better than off sync text. Will be trying that manual advance next week. Fabulous work there, thank you so, so much.

Hey, can you try the new build please and let me know how the subtitle sync feels now? In English or German, whichever you prefer, both should be fine now.

ps: turn the "default text mode on", where larger subtitles are split into multiple lines, as was the problem in the previous build.

[Kuulintu]

Hello kspes and thank you kindly again for looking into these things. I really appreciate that. The sync is really much better now. Maybe some text lines are sometimes few milliseconds late from the voice acting, but it's really huge improvement over the starting point. Clickable text works really well now, and I prefer to keep playing with that. "Click to continue" text is a good addition, but I don't think it has to be constantly present, because it causes a little bit of clutter to the screen. Maybe for the first few lines after switching to clickable mode? Actually scratch that, it does go away after it's shown few times :) It's perfect now.

[kspes]

Originally posted by Kuulintu:

The sync is really much better now. Maybe some text lines are sometimes few milliseconds late from the voice acting, but it's really huge improvement over the starting point.

Awesome! Thanks for confirming :)
It's hard to sync down to a millisecond. I'm aiming at 0.1 seconds tolerance. I actually programmed a tool to help me sync everything and then I basically synced all voices manually, one by one. Took most of the week heh :D
PS: There's actually 2000 voices that have more than one split in them...

Originally posted by Kuulintu:

Actually scratch that, it does go away after it's shown few times :) It's perfect now.

Hehe, I didn't think anyone would notice that :) The click to continue has to be there but it really gets annoying after a while. So I adjusted it to show on first 25 subtitles, then it goes away. It resets every time you launch the game though, but it doesn't last long.

Also, compared to the beta branch, the full text mode reduces font size if there's too much text on screen. Hopefully that'll cover all situations where there 's a lot of texts. If anyone finds text that goes off screen in full text mode, please let me know (and send a screenshot or approximate text you see so I can find it)

[Kuulintu]

New issue: After giving the pacifist report to the computer (in the middle room), the next cutscene dialogue becomes unclickable (when click-to-advance is selected from the options). And it literally halts the game and I have to force it to shut down.

[kspes]

Originally posted by Kuulintu:

New issue: After giving the pacifist report to the computer (in the middle room), the next cutscene dialogue becomes unclickable (when click-to-advance is selected from the options). And it literally halts the game and I have to force it to shut down.

Thanks for letting me know! I'm on it, I'll take care of it next week.

In the mean time, you should be able to switch off click-to-advance and it should let you through (let me know if it does please)

[Kuulintu]

Yeah, by-passed it with auto advance :)

[kspes]

Originally posted by Kuulintu:

Yeah, by-passed it with auto advance :)

Nice!
That's the end-game right? when the final animation starts, you no longer have the ability to play? or is it after inserting the first report since you can insert them at any order?

[Kuulintu]

Yes, it's at the very end of the game

[kspes]

Thanks!

Btw, did you replay the game with full text mode from the begining? Did you ever encounter a situation where the text was cut because there was too much of it? It's hard to test this with so much texts and languages in this game.

[Kuulintu]

Well partly. I played it in full text mode, but the click-to-advance option was present in the last 10% of the game.

[kspes]

Problem fixed, a new update will be live in a few hours. Thanks for reporting!
I tested the game to the end from that point, only this one location was affected.