Synchronizing sound and messages-dialogs

[+Dani+Iris]

Hello,

 

I haven't experimented with this yet, so this is just to gather your thoughts, do's and dont's, best practices, ... before venturing in this area.

 

I want a dialog sequence between two characters synchronized with sound that fits the dialogs. Basically the sound will be the speech of the characters and a somewhat longer spoken version of the text that is displayed under the character image. How do I make sure that what you see on the screen is matched with what you hear? Ideally this is autoplay and does not require user interaction to continue.

 

I was thinking about these strategies:

1. start playing one big audio fragment and start a timer of the duration of the first snippet that shows the next dialog screen and starts the next timer for the next dialog to show. Questions: will the audio continue playing while timer events trigger and/or new dialogs are displayed in the timer events? Will pressing the default dialog OK button stop the audio playback or could I prevent pressing a button (e.g. have messages without buttons defined)?
   
2. all snippets are separate media objects. Starting the sound along with showing the dialog, either I set a timer for the duration of the sound to start the next sound and display the next dialog or is there a way to detect the end of the sound media and have that trigger an event to start the next sound media and display the next dialog? Questions: can the end of the sound media be turned into an event? Same question as in the first option: can I prevent interruption of the sound playing or the dialog/message showing?
   
3. worst case: I display a message and start the sound snippet and the message has a next button defined that when pressed will show the next message and starts playing the next sound snippet
   

 

I have some ideas on the pros and cons of these:

1. risk of interruption of the one big audio playback without an easy way of recovering (only restart from the beginning); risk of images/text getting out of sync with the audio on different devices (iPhone timer issues, ...?), ...; Ease of programming: just a sequence of timer events...
   
2. a bit more of programming events but only small risk of breaking little audio snippets (but breaking up one will not interrupt the playing of the next scheduled/timed event)
   
3. needs user interaction to play (and makes it less of a continuous dialog) but will be a sure bet to work
   

 

Maybe some of you already did this and can share his experience here? I really appreciate any help you can provide.

[+Forest-Ghost]

I think adding a large spoken audio file is going to be very tricky with a Wherigo as the hardware currently works. As a general rule I try and keep the audio files small 50 kb or less and in the following format:

 

mp3

Bit rate: 32 to 56 Kbps

Mono

Sampling (sample rate): 22 kHz

 

(these are the urwigo recommended specs and I find they work well)

 

With this said though I have not experimented with using really large audio files, although others have said this will make the cartridge crash. With all of the new smart phones it might be worth it to try and experiment with some larger audio files and see how they perform on various devices. Please post the results here if you do.

 

For the triggering of audio events. I try and keep a sound file short so that the audio event triggers with the dialogue and ends before the player has finished reading that dialogue or message. After the message/dialogue is displayed I include a "stop sound" command on pressing "ok" to ensure the audio file does not overlap with other audio. Using this method would not allow to have consecutive audio files though as the stop sound command would cancel out any sound on the second message.