Blogs - Silvermint

Hello again, peeps! I am taking a short break from tinkering to tell you I've made some fantastic breakthroughs!

I FIGURED OUT LIP SYNCING!!!!!

I know that sounds rather mundane, but its surprisingly difficult in New Vegas. Bethesda, in all their infinite wisdom, did not include the encoding file GECK needs to generate lip files, the files responsible for lip syncing. Modders have to Frankenstein the encoder from Skyrim's Creation Kit and paste it where the GECK can find it in order to make lip files.

I did that forever ago, but it still didn't work for me. Turns out the issue was...

this.

See the table of voice types? What's SUPPOSED to happen is that there should only be one voice type listed, the voice type of the NPC speaking the line. I assume that because I originally had silent dialogue, and I am only now adding voice lines after the fact, for some reason the list was never narrowed down.

TLDR: All I had to do was select Boone's voice type, and THEN the generate lip file button would work.

I always have mixed feelings when stuff like this happens. On one hand, its a relief that it was a really simple fix and you don't have to do the programming equivalent of parting the Red Sea to get one little thing to work properly, but on the other, it REALLY makes you feel super dumb.

A similar situation happened with the bugged lines. It occurred to me that the bugged lines all had something in common - I spliced them together in Audacity. Changing the WAV files from 32bit to 16bit fixed it no problem.

Anyway, you want to see these changes in action, right? Here you go!

BBR - Voice Progress 2 - ModDB

(p.s Thank you to hirken8 over on Pixabay for their animated confetti effect! Pixabay.com )

On a slightly more sour note, now that I know how to lip sync, its going to significantly slow down my workload to generate a file for each line and make sure each one works. There are utilities out there that make lip file generation more streamlined and less tedious, but I'd rather do it the old fashioned way. If something does go wrong it will be easy to pinpoint the problem files if I did them one at a time.

My original plan was to release a new version once I had voiced all of the original dialogue and have it out sometime in summer so people had time to play with it, but with this new discovery that may push back the release until after summer.

Would you peeps be okay with WIP releases? Like, the first release would have voice dialogue for the first few quests, and each update would add more? Let me know what you think!