Audio / Video out-of-sync issue

[0x57A1CFA117]

Let me start off by saying that I like the game. Granted, yes, there are some things that, -I- feel improving would be nice (voice acting, texture resolutions could be increased or at least stronger bump-mapping to simulate surface texture to make them "pop" more -- turning down my brightness might help too; so I'll try that in the meantime). But overall, I don't notice any issues with the aiming (as others have experienced, or performance issues, etc.) and I do enjoy the game.

My issue:
However, there's one bug that prevents me from even understanding what's going on in the game, and that's this audio / video desynchornization I'm experiencing. Obviously, it's not a "game-breaking bug" since I can still technically play the game and play the game without an performance issues when I'm controlling a character. However, it's catastrophically detrimental to the experience of playing the game (i.e. hard to enjoy the game, if I can't understand the story due to the cutscenes' audio and video being out of sync :)).

Their issue is with the gun shot sounds being delayed by about a second, my issue is similar except that it's in regards to cutscenes (which is perhaps worse than gun shot audio being delayed -- since cutscenes are to tell the story :( ). In regards to my issue, I've noticed that the video plays at a speed that appears normal (i.e. it's not like the video is playing in extra speed). The audio ALSO plays / sounds in normal speed (i.e. it does not sound like chipmunks talking or anything like that). But, the video, eventually got up to a good 3 - 4 seconds ahead of where the audio should be (I'll explain what I mean by "eventually got up to").

someone elses -related- issue:
Now, I spent a little bit of time looking through the Steam forums and found someone experiencing something similar but not -quite exact- what I'm experiencing. I don't know if the underlying cause is the same. The url to that steam thread is: https://steamcommunity.com/app/842100/discussions/0/1750148101145385164/

My analysis (so far):
At first, I thought it might have been the timing between the lips of those speaking and the audio, but when I beat the first mission and the 2nd mission cutscene started (the one with the guy in the radio tower up to the point of Liev dropping into the water from the helicopter), it seemed like the distance / difference between the audio and video got progressively worse and worse as the cutscene ran -- so much so that it got up to the point where the cutscene and the sub-titles were like 3 - 4 seconds ahead of where the audio was. It got so out of sync with each other I couldn't understand what was happening. I'd really like to solve this since, like I had said at the start of this post, that I actually do really like this game. It's just, I can't really enjoy it if I don't understand what's going on :(

I'm wondering if it has something to do with audio buffering / quality (i.e. in console emulators, if you decrease the latency, the audio doesn't sound as smooth, but if you increase it, you get smoother sounding audio but the latency goes higher) and maybe some sound cards are more prone to it than others... I am using just the standard stock built-in on mobo sound card (my motherboard is a RoG ASUS Rampage Gene II -- so I don't think they necessarily skimped on what they implemented for a sound card though).


INITIAL Post: 03/28/2020 5:46PM ET - Posted here for reference as edits will be made for formatting, and future edits are possible for clarification.

EDIT 1: 03/28/2020 5:49PM ET - Formatting edits
EDIT 2: 03/28/2020 5:54PM ET - Adding some clarification

[ReiKaz]

For cutscenes, same problem for me. How cutscene works is playing audio file (i bet wwise fmod .wem file) and video file (.mp4 avc files 1080p 16-10Mb/s 60FPS) plays separate in that moment.
What causng desync?! Audio files works good how it should be (-there is no desync or delay), but video files is lagging, stuttering - so is video delay. If your video files stuttering just a bit, you not noticing and just thinking is audio desync - but actually is video file playback lag.
For me on longer cutscenes (bigger, longer video files) is starting stuttering badly, only on shorts cutscenes not bad.
What i did for me, and shared to everyone (check in guides section) - is reconvert video files to lower quality and size for PC and Game easier to hande.
It fixed that desync for me (but still, some times in cutscenes videos stated little bit stutter and cause small video desync to audio). I don't think is HDD speed problem (cause some peoples with SSD still hade that problem).
Maybe Invader Studios have a clue, how better to solve this cutscenes problem?

[0x57A1CFA117]

I actually don't have any stuttering or hitching at all. The audio and video play perfectly, they just wind up out of sync. for some reason. It's certainly not because my machine is underpowered either (Intel i7 quad core w/ HT - 8 logical processors, 22 GB of ram, and an nVidia 1050 Ti).

I did notice that there is a mix of how the videos files were made. In the Daymare_MASTER\Content\Movies folder some of the videos (the ones that are loops) contain audio with the video, the other ones don't. Which means they baked the animation (machinema) into the video file but kept the audio in the pak file. This is leading me to believe that the cutscene scene-timing is off and the lip-synching (baked in, since it's a video file and not part of the engine's ability to do built-in engine-cutscenes) of the video is NOT a correct match to the audio. Specifically, (referring to the lip-synching instead of the scene-timing since that's harder to explain) for example, a word that has 3 syllables, if the baked in video only has lip-synching for two syllables, then no "solution" would ever really correctly work. In that case, the only way to -potentially- fix it easily would be to take the audio files out of the pak file and encode it into the video file, but again if it's an issue (as it seems like on with my issue) of not-enough lip-synching per word then it would still be off. Ideally, since it looks like they used the game engine to render the movies, just leave the movies in the game's pak file and let the engine do the automatic lip-synching with its built-in libraries and functions and additionally time the audio and video together in lock-step instead of just fire and forget (play the audio and video and think they're sync'ed)

[0x57A1CFA117]

Unfortunately, I now have a new problem. I'm tried to reload my last save (since it apparently wasn't auto-saved when I got to the 2nd mission) and the game placed me at the point that the alarm is going off and I need to escape from AEGIS laboratories. I get to the closed off gate, the guy says he's going to try to bypass the gate mechanism and nothing. I've let it sit there for a solid 10 min. and nadda. The first time I had to fight a few enemies, now they never seem to spawn and the gate never gets opened leaving me trapped in the lobby of AEGIS. I'm thinking the gate is tied to the spawn of the enemy being killed, but since the enemy never spawns, there's nothing to kill thus the gate never opens. I enabled the debug console through injection so I'm going to try to either confirm my analysis on that problem or find a workaround so I can continue and get back to at least where I was (A/V sync issue-focusing).



EDIT: After hours of regex parsing and digging through 10 of thousands of strings, I finally found that I can do:

switchlevel 00_HarborPersistent

from the debug console and jump to the 2nd level, however I have no input. That's about all the energy and effort I can put into this, at least for now. I could have just restarted since it was only the end of the first level, but my concern is suppose I get much further in and something like this happens again, I'm going to need a way to workaround it.

[Diego]

We know about the videos problem, is very machine dependent. Basically unreal has a player that doesnt work very well (and epic knows it too, said they were fixing it years ago, never did lol)
We didn't know this during the development, everything was fine in engine.

The other problem. The gates open on a timer not when you kill enemies, so it was weird what happened. The game autosave AFTER you start the new map (meaning you pressed start after the loading screen) There are 2 possibilities why it reloaded back to aegis: You closed the game in the loading screen or you closed it while it was saving.
We have a "the save file got currupted but i wanna try to work" system, where the game puts you back to your last save when the save file gets corrupted, ofc is not perfect so i think this caused the problem of the gate not opening.

PS: Don't try to load maps using the console, it will never work cuz the game never calls the begin play. At that point it doesnt know who's the player to posses and get stuck

[0x57A1CFA117]

gotcha, thanks! Yeah the gates not opening always occurs when I try to load this save; I'm wondering maybe if it thinks the gates are already open via some savestate flag, combined with the game utilizing the "the save file got corrupted" mechanism, the save is in a state that will never resolve itself. You did shed a bit of light on this though for me, thanks! I actually feel a little more confident to just replay the first mission and continue forward.