The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release => General UQM Discussion => Topic started by: Kelju_Ivan on December 26, 2002, 03:18:52 am



Title: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Kelju_Ivan on December 26, 2002, 03:18:52 am
Will the text be going forward at the same pace as the speech in the final version? The current mode is quite confusing as either the speech or the text is way ahead of the other. The text can easily be fastforwarded, but then the speech stops, which sucks. Any comments on these?


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Black Monk on December 26, 2002, 10:33:43 pm
Other people have brought up the sync issues and I *think* at some point this will be tidied up, but I dunno.

There are other things to do first, I think, and that'll probably take a TON of time since they will have to time the text to the sound--and if they allow paging ahead one page of text at a time WITH the sound synched (which would be cool), that would be even MORE of a pain in the ass to go back and check and time ALL the dialog content in the game.


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Evil_Sheep on December 27, 2002, 08:59:55 am
Yeah they are gonna sync the text and speech...go look at the To Do Changelog in the Bugs forum. Like you said, it's gonna be a bitch to do, so they are looking for volunteers to help them out too, if you're interested.


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Burpmaster on December 27, 2002, 01:13:29 pm
Remember, you can just disable the subtitles completely if you find them too distracting.  Just add the command line option -u.


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Black Monk on December 27, 2002, 08:21:37 pm
And...  have...  to...  suffer...  through...  the...  Ur-Quan's...  slow...  talking?...  That...  is...  a...  fate...  worse...  than...  a...  trip...  to...  a... Khor-Ah's...  bone...  pit...


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Kelju_Ivan on December 29, 2002, 02:13:43 am
Black Monk said it... so no can do Burpmaster.


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Burpmaster on December 29, 2002, 05:45:25 am
If you skip through the dialogue, you might as well turn off the sound altogether.  Then you won't have to worry about syncing problems.
How much time do you spend talking to them, anyway?


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Zeroarmy on December 29, 2002, 12:11:38 pm
A mod said awhile ago, that he doubts they'd ever get the two to match up prefectly. But, I'm pretty sure they'll be able to do much better then how it is now.


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Burpmaster on December 29, 2002, 12:49:32 pm
I feel quite the opposite.  I figure someone will eventually volunteer to do lip-syncing!
Really, I think by allowing you to press a key to skip to the next line and recording the timestamp, you could sync pretty good, probably near perfect.
And we could probably get pretty good results without any timestamp info by making sure the subtitles pass at the appropriate rate so that they end at the same time as the speech.

Speaking of voice/caption syncing problems, has anyone seen Starfox Adventures?  With some of the unimportant NPC's, they just play the voice and let you advance the caption manually with the A button. (Surprisingly, it's still lip-synced)  And in some of the cutscenes, the captions and voice are way off in timing and often don't quite say the same thing.

So at least it will be better than that.


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Black Monk on December 29, 2002, 08:14:39 pm
Thing is, some parts I want to skip through (damn Sylandro explaining 500 times about their stupid probe program) and other parts I want to listen to.

Like, I'd want to skip through 5 pages of Shofixti yapping but want to hear the 6th page spoken because it's funny or amusing.

This is more a feature for oldtimers who like to replay the game and hear the dialog at certain points.  

Per-word synching and graphics lip-synching is too fine a granularity, it would be more cumbersome for a user to manipulate and the benefits are dubious.

Per-page voice synching with the same graphics gives an appropriate granularity and is no more difficult for the user to handle than the current system.

I'd think the only issue would be finding approximate times for each piece of dialog (at least for the pages that match up, PC/3DO version differences...) as I can't imagine the code would be too hard to implement once the sync points are found?  Doesn't even have to be an exact match... pace the text to the synch points in the voice, or if skipping, just restart playback at X position and then pace the test to the synch points.

Conceptually it seems simple.  Implementing it, well, that's another thing... ;)


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Zeroarmy on December 30, 2002, 01:24:35 am
Quote
I feel quite the opposite.  I figure someone will eventually volunteer to do lip-syncing!
Really, I think by allowing you to press a key to skip to the next line and recording the timestamp, you could sync pretty good, probably near perfect.
And we could probably get pretty good results without any timestamp info by making sure the subtitles pass at the appropriate rate so that they end at the same time as the speech.

Speaking of voice/caption syncing problems, has anyone seen Starfox Adventures?  With some of the unimportant NPC's, they just play the voice and let you advance the caption manually with the A button. (Surprisingly, it's still lip-synced)  And in some of the cutscenes, the captions and voice are way off in timing and often don't quite say the same thing.

So at least it will be better than that.


What is there to disagree about? All I did is tell you what a mod said, not give my personal opnion on the situation.


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Burpmaster on December 30, 2002, 01:31:43 am
Quote
What is there to disagree about? All I did is tell you what a mod said, not give my personal opnion on the situation.

And all I did was tell you that I feel differently than him about that.  You didn't think I was talking about you, did you?  :)


Title: Re: Conversation with subtitles
Post by: Zeroarmy on December 30, 2002, 03:51:40 am
Quote

And all I did was tell you that I feel differently than him about that.  You didn't think I was talking about you, did you?  :)


Well the thing about that is that if he didn't think he could do it, it probably won't be done and I figured you understood that, so you probably misunderstood me for having that idea myself. Ah but whatever. As long as I'm not the only one who can understand my twisted way of viewing the world I'm happy.  ;D