Friday, September 26, 2008

Day Twelve: Beeing a Bit Techie

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

Nothing really interesting to say today. I just managed to fix the biggest problem we faced while making this mod. Here's an extract of what I wrote on the Valve Developer Community during the last month, it's a bit techie, so you may not want to read this :

18 Aug 2008

I'm somewhat having the same problem. Although, I have more than 450 lignes of closed captions, and in-game, there's a few of them that never show up when the NPCs are talking. The strange thing is that it shows up perfectly when I call them using cc_emit <soundname>... But not when the NPCs are talking. I noticed that it's always a continuous part of the captions that doesn't show up. I mean that, it's not one isolated caption, it's always a dozen of them in row. It stops working at a given caption, and restarts to work at another one. Always the same.

22 Aug 2008

I'm actually wondering if the problem isn't choreo-related. Could it be FacePoser 'the crappy' that messes up the .VCD preventing them to show up the closed caption? I'm wondering this because, when I made them (the vcds), I copy/pasted each one in a row to build my dialogues until I decided to take a break and start with a brand new empty choreo a few days later. That could explain why subtitles are not showing up in a row. I also tried to rewrite one VCD from scratch and there had been change. One closed caption showed up where it wasn't. It needs to be investigated a bit further.

25 Aug 2008

Ok, I found it. That was particularily stupid. In my case, it's a problem with Portal, because basically, GlaDOS is a generic_actor in a box far away from the map. And in the source engine, there's a command named "scene_maxcaptionradius" with a default value of 1200. This is why it stopped working at a given choreo... when the player was too far from the generic_actor. My god... several weeks, maybe months, wasted because of this. I can't believe it was so stupid.

27 Aug 2008

Ambient_generic are not a solution, because when you pause the game, they're not paused at all, and the NPCs continue to talk. Also, there's nothing else to do than just increasing the value of "scene_maxcaptionradius". I set it to 65535, just to be sure.

26 Sep 2008

And that was not the correct solution. First because zero is the official value to disable this command, and not some ridiculously large number. And second because if it's related to choreos, you should just add cc_noattenuate in each entry of the .VCD file you want the captions to always appear. The problem is now DEFINITELY fixed