Voice speech cancels out ambient sound - SOLVED

Dave Gilbert · Mon 17/12/2007 16:26:40

I have an ambient sound playing on channel 1 (as per the manual), but when I imported the speech files I noticed that the ambient sound disappears when the speech plays. The manual doesn't tell me anything about voice speech channels. I tried changing the ambient sound channel with the same result.

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious and I am risking a stern RTFM, but I am hazarding a go anyway. Any advice?

edit: to clarify, the ambient sound comes back on when the voice speech finishes playing.

SSH · Mon 17/12/2007 17:26:26

Does changing the value of game.speech_music_drop make a difference (default is 60)?

Ashen · Mon 17/12/2007 17:38:33

As a related-but-not-quite RTM: PlaySoundEx is the only mention of a voice speech channel I've seen.

Quote
AGS now uses a multi-channel sound system. There are currently 8 sound channels, numbered from 0 to 7. They are used as follows:

0    Background music, used by PlayMusic
1    Ambient sounds, used by PlayAmbientSound
2    Voice speech, used when you have automatic speech in your game.
3-7    Free channels, used by PlaySound, view frame sounds and so on.

So voice speech shouldn't hijack the ambient sound channel, unless you're using some custom system for them. On first glance, I'd say it's more likely to be game.speech_music_drop as SSH suggests.

Dave Gilbert · Mon 17/12/2007 21:20:28

Alas, no joy. The issue is with ambient sound, and not music, so changing that variable didn't change. The ambient sound doesn't drop in volume, it disappears altogether.

AGD2 · Wed 19/12/2007 03:42:40

I think ambient sound drops automatically whenever speech plays, so as not to potentially drown out the voices.

What volume level are you playing the ambient sound at? If you play it with the volume parameter set to 200, then the ambiance should still be audible whenever speech plays alongside it. Of course, then you may need to re-adjust the ambiance track in an audio-editing program in order to get the levels sounding right in the game.

subspark · Wed 19/12/2007 09:40:17

As far as Chris explained it to me, Dialogs in AGS are a blocking function. So animation and any audio besides music will pause.

Cheers,
Paul.

Gilbert · Wed 19/12/2007 09:54:14

I think it's probably just how dialogs are implemented, IMO ambient ambient sounds and bg frame animation are more like background stuff, too bad not much can be done at the moment.

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens · Wed 19/12/2007 10:39:38

I know this is a bit overkill, but you could get around this by opening up a program like Goldwave and mixing a version of the background music with the ambient sound as a work around. This is only really workable if you do not need to do it a lot.

Dave Gilbert · Wed 19/12/2007 13:15:18

AGD2 nailed it!

Thanks so much. This was driving me nuts.

subspark · Thu 20/12/2007 05:34:42

Good to know theres a resonable solution.

Paul.