Messages

[Voice lip synching]

Voice lip synching

If you're working on a 'talkie' game and would like to synchronize the lips to what is said, I think I could help. I have a setup where I could mostly automate the lip synching (well, I have yet to make it, but I will if someone needs it ), all I would need is the MP3 voice files and a list of the spoken text (like speechref.txt as AGS makes it). I've made some tests, and I think the result is usually quite convincing, even when it's not perfect.

Of course, this would be time permitting, but contact me at jzikovsky at hotmail dot com to discuss. Good quality recordings should help the process. Also, in the process of checking the lip synch, I would playtest your adventure - so you get 2 services for the price of, well, none! 

Yes, portraits sound good to me. For one thing, I've been playing with voice lip synching, and I think it doesn't work in lucasarts-style speech. I don't know if I'd ever get to the point of actually recording voice, that seems so far away

If I do have speech, I would probably still keep the narration text-only. That would make for a LOT less of recording to do, and so the file size would be more manageable. But I do like the 'talkie' adventures - good voice acting makes a big difference. Take for instance the 3rd monkey island, having the characters voiced like that really helps the game.

Well, this is a bit cliché, but lightning and wind and the sun were, at one time or another, beyond our understanding level. And they were thought to be manifestations of god(s), or spirits, or whatever depending on the culture and era you're looking at. But the belief that Thor was responsible for shooting lightning bolts around gave way to our knowledge of how it really happens, and that it is not supernatural, but natural.

So, your main character is what, about 8, 9 feet tall? Or is he of normal height and all doorways in the city 5 feet high?

Your walkable areas should take into account the 'footprint' of your main character, and not go all the way to the edge.

Some rooms have an entry but no way back, for no visible reason (like the "Alphacorp 2km" sign screen).

I got a helicopter to land somewhere and that's all I seem to be able to do.

I like how your solution gives complete control over placement, etc. But I have an idea that the expression changing system could be made to work with the usual dialogs, but it would require a plugin. Basically, the plugin would edit loop 0 of the speech view. You send a command to switch to loop 2, and the plugin replaces all the sprite numbers in loop 0 to those in loop 2.

Everything else could essentially stay the same. Conceivably, the expression could be changed within one line of dialog, but giving a delay before applying the effect. Of course, the plugin would make it non portable.

I though the graphics were really good too. They went to the trouble of animating a lot of motions. It could be said that the character art didn't quite match the background art, but it didn't bother me much. And there is some genuinely freaky art there - try this for instance:

Spoiler

When the game first starts, but BEFORE you get the note giving the combination to control the droid, go to the droid control station and enter the code (Patience While You Grill Bacon Rind). It's kind of an easter egg, I think.

[close]

While I never managed to get the Redemption ending, I did find that the files in the \Assets\ subfolder were just renamed .AVIs, so I could at least view the end movie.

And, if you believe in string theory, dimensions 5 through 11 are also already taken.  So we're left with the 12th dimension

All kidding aside, a lot of people think that things like ghosts and spirits will never be explained by science. But I don't believe that - sure enough, science can't explain that kind of thing now, but science is just another word for a body of knowledge on a particular subject. We don't know what ghosts are or if they really exist, but if they do then they are a part of nature, and it would be possible to find a way to observe them, reproducibly and objectively.

I based this script off of one of those which come with the program, but I don't think that's a problem. Plus, if you have Magpie, you don't really need to use Pamela, so it's not like it would take any business away. In fact, I don't think it would load in Pamela (I haven't tried). It's just so that it can work with AGS directly.

Hi everybody,

I found this interesting program called Magpie that is used for synching lip movement to voice:

http://www.thirdwishsoftware.com/magpiepro.html

It is similar to the Pamela program, but more powerful. It is commercial (and expensive ) but there is a trial version to play with. The Pro version in particular has a really cool feature: automatic lip synching! It evaluates from the speech file where the phonemes should go, and it looks like it's right 95% of the time or so, depending on the recording quality.

The output of Magpie Pro is not directly compatible with AGS, because AGS expects a Pamela-format file. So I've made a custom file export script for Magpie. By placing this file:

http://www.dmgenie.com/ags/export-pamela.lua

in your \Magpie Pro\Scripts\Export\ folder, you will be able to export directly to a format readable by AGS.

Anyway, I hope this comes in handy for some people. It's a pretty neat program, I think it's worth checking out the trial version.


...


Since the script is short and my link may not be valid forever, here is the script code directly, for future reference:

Code: ags

export = {}; -- create a new export object

-- return label
function export:label()
	return "Pamela";
end

-- return category
function export:category()
	return "2D";
end

-- return argument list 
function export:options()
	groups = {};
	for a,actor in magpie.getactors() do
		for g,group in magpie.getgroups(actor) do
			table.insert(groups, group);
		end
	end
	return { 
		{"group", "Group", "choice", table.concat(groups, "|")},
	  	{"moho_output_file", "Output File", "output_file", "Pamela files (*.pam)\tAll files (*.*)"}
	};
end

-- perform the export
function export:run(from, to, options)
	-- create an array of all the poses that are being exported
	poses = magpie.getposes(options.group);
	
	-- open output file
	fd = io.open(options.moho_output_file, "wt");
	if (fd == nil) then
		return string.format("could not open '%s'", options.moho_output_file);
	end
	
	-- write header line to file
	fd:write("[speech]\n");
	
	-- write data to file
	oldk = "";
	for frame = from, to do
		k = magpie.getgroupvalue(frame, options.group);
		if (k ~= nil and oldk ~= k) then
			fd:write(math.floor(frame*360/magpie.getframerate()) .. ":" .. string.gsub(k, "[^%.]+%.", "") .. "\n");
		end
		oldk = k;
		
		-- update progress bar in main window		
		magpie.progress("Exporting...", (frame - from) / (to - from));
	end

	fd:write("\n");
	fd:write("\n");

	magpie.progress("", 0); -- close progress bar
	
	fd:close(); -- close output file
end

Yes well, Janik, you see, if someone really is a Ph.D. he'd probably never waste his talent on something as useless as this.

He he, I don't have the Ph.D yet. It kind of sounds like you doubt me, perhaps I'm just misreading you.

Though I remember seeing pictures with ghosts in them... Or not necessarely ghosts, things we reckon as ghost-like or even supernatural. But the might all be photoshopped or not. What I get from your post, is that it is not impossible for cameras to take pictures of such?

Yeah, I've seen some pictures too, but even without photoshop still pictures are kind of easy to fake. A video (plus some witnesses) would be harder to fake, but sometimes can be misinterpreted. I remember seeing a show called "proof positive" where a video of some strange lights was investigated. It didn't look like any human shape or anything, but it was kind of weird; the video expert showed it was just reflections in the lens of some of the light sources in the room. It wasn't fraud, but just misinterpreted.

This is just a tiny suggestion, hopefully it's easy to do but if not it's not very important:

When I use the script editor, I tend to press Ctrl+S often to save the script. It's a reflex from working in Word and other code editors. It would be nice if that shortcut did save the script (without closing the editor, as suggested here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/tracker.php?action=detail&id=324).

Right now, it seems to delete the last thing you wrote down, with no undo  :o, so I end up pulling my hair out each time I accidentally press Ctrl+S. Even if it didn't save, if it were changed to not do anything that would help prevent my premature baldness


Thanks!

Your topic title intrigued me - I'm a Ph.D. Student in physics, so here's my "expert" opinion 

Later on I started thinking: In every decomposing process is burning in variable froms, reacting with 0₂ to be exact. Now burning in most cases, if not all, produces amounts of hydrogen.

No burning process I know produces hydrogen - H2 is highly combustible by itself. As was said before, almost anything can emit light if excited. Most of the time though, the electron returns to its former level and dissipates heat instead of light.

Anyway, there are some wavelengths that can be seen by some and not others, nor can they sometimes be seen with qualified equipment!

Well most people can see pretty much the same wavelengths (with apologies to the colorblind, who miss some). But light (electromagnetic waves) in general covers a HUGE breadth of possible wavelengths, many many times more than what we can see. We're talking from high-energy gamma rays to km-long radio waves.

So yes, the world can be seen in many different wavelengths, invisible to the human eye. Put a near infrared filter on a video camera (which are sensitive past visible to near infrared) and you will see things no human can see. Some night-vision systems work that way.

This, however, does not do much to prove or disprove ghosts. Basically, if a ghost is emitting light that humans can see, a camera would be able to pick it up. I've yet to see a convincing video of a ghost.

Yes, there is more to the world than meets the eye, but there's nothing supernatural about that

I'm sure Shade can handle recording the sound - the issue is how to play it in a tidy way.

Here's an idea: How about having an invisible character like cTalker that is always in the same room. You also use SetSpeechFont () to set the speech font to an empty font - all letters are blank. Then, in addition to

lblText.SetText(message);

you add

cTalker.Say(message);

and it takes care of doing the talking, and if &1 or whatever is in the message, then it plays that. It should be a simple matter to remove the &12 from the text you display. All voice files would have to be called "TALK##.mp3", but that's not a big deal I imagine.


I'm interested in how you handle this because I'd like to handle the differing expressions too. What I'd like to know is how you integrate this system with dialogs? Or do you not have dialogs (by which I mean choices for conversations) in your game?
I wonder also if this system could work with the voice-speech lip sync using the Pamela program (I don't know how well it works but it looks very cool).

Good game to play around Halloween.

I've just played through the entire game 3 times, and I keep getting the damned "Damned" ending (I've gotten the decaying and venomous endings too). But I can't seem to get the "redemption" ending, even with the walkthrough.

I've tried answering Yes to " Do you know where you are" and " Do you regret",
and then both No and Yes to "And risk spreading the disease", but I'm still damned. I've also tried: No, Yes, and both No and Yes to the "risk spreading" question. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

If anyone has a save game with the redemption ending and is willing to email it to me (jzikovsky at hotmail.com), I would appreciate it!

Can you do art that needs that high of a resolution?

He he, good question. Art, hmmm, not my strong suit

However, I'm not convinced that 320x200 resolution makes things easier. The RON entry I'm working on is at 320x200 (to match all the other games and the available backgrounds). I'm finding that at the low resolutions, you need to be pretty creative to make 7 pixels look recognizable as a particular object. The Lucasarts artists sure did it well, but my thinking is that something bigger actually makes it easier. That said, 800x600 is probably pusing it . I think I'll go for 640x480, but I'll try drawing the same background at these 2 resolutions first to see what feels better.

These aren't really game design issues, are they? Most of them seem to be graphics questions.

For the speech view, you need to consider the consequences of your choice. What are you planning to do about feedback messages?

Or you could attempt a hybrid form, or go in a different direction altogether.

I also meant to ask about using a narrator versus having the player say everything - that has pretty significant effect on the way each description is written. I tend to like it when the player does the descriptions, but I like the speech portraits too... How would a hybrid form work?

To paraphrase Homer Simpson: Why do they have to make new games? Everyone knows that video games attained perfection in 1994 - it's a scientific fact!

Hi everybody,

I am in the slow process of planning to make a "real" game - I've got a partial story in mind, characters are being fleshed out, etc. But I'm finding that I have a lot of trouble making even basic decisions for the game design  . Things like:


- Resolution: I know I want 32 bit color, and high resolution. But is 800x600 worth it? I get 100+ frames per second on my computer, but what about older ones?

- Speech views: Lucasarts-style, or Sierra portrait-style? I like the idea of the portraits to show changing expression.

- Scaling of the character sprites: I'm thinking something like 1/3 of the screen height at the chosen resolution... Too big bloats the game size; too small means possibly scaling UP a character which is usually ugly.

- Even the game engine to use! I really like AGS, but wintermute, with the hardware acceleration, gets much higher framerates (like 600 fps (!) for the demo, which runs in 800x600).


I know these decisions are ultimately personal ones, but I'd like to hear what your opinions are on the subject; say if you made a game with one resolution, did you end up wishing you had gone bigger/smaller?

Toughts? Comments?

I tried it at work with a P4, 2 GHz, and at home with my Athlon 64 3500+; it worked the same on both computers, as far as I could tell.

Perhaps you need to make the walk blocking, thus:

character[BIL].Walk(oPic.x, oPic.y, eBlock)

Your tech demo was pretty impressive - I found that turning the sax solo on/off worked fine, and the "transition to variation" too. However, with the "transition back" button, there was a little silent pause before the first tune started up again.

I wonder, would your method still work if only the short transitions were WAVs, with the longer tunes kept compressed?