Attempted voiceovers, OHR went crazy..

I recorded voiceovers for some of my lines in my game and was gonna import them as sound effects to be played while the text boxes were up. They were in MP3, so the OHR had to convert. The first one went okay, but then the second one it kept importing repeatedly and got stuck in a loop. I hit escape and it went to the main menu and kept doing stuff. It drew lines on some letters in the font, changed some bitsets, and even a hero palette, god knows what else, and it saved changes. Thank god I had just backed it up. I exported the graphics I had just drawn and just replaced it with the backup. I then tried again and turned the quality down a bit. Same result, and upon closer inspection the voiceovers that did import sounded a bit slow. I'm thinking convert them to OGG using a different program if I decide to try again.

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Demo updated 8/13/2014

Wow. That is a terrifying bug. Good thing you had a backup...

I seem to remember hearing that there used to be bugs with importing MP3s sometimes, but I thought that stuff got fixed a while back. Weird that trying to import music would be molesting all kinds of random stuff throughout your game like that... I would definitely suggest not using MP3s anymore (or not converting them through Custom.exe itself anyway) until whatever causes this is fixed.

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

It's worked great with music, I've only had the problem in the sound effects menu. Maybe I'll try imploring them through the music menu and exporting them to reimport through sound effects. It might even be a problem with the recorder I'm using. I'll definitely back it up first.

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Care to help me out by giving me advice on my game? Get the early demo by clicking here
Demo updated 8/13/2014

I've seen this too, but never with such amusing effects. The problem is that whatever keys you were pressing at the time sometimes get stuck down when running an external program. Usually only the enter key gets stuck down; just press enter again to un-stick it. In your case it seems some other keys got stuck as well. There shouldn't be any difference between importing sound effects and music.

I assume you are using Windows and the default graphics backend, gfx_directx? (If you don't know, then you're using gfx_directx). Bug report here. Unfortunately I think this problem affects gfx_sdl as well, or at least it happens under Linux.

As for the audio sounding too slow, that must be because it's not encoded at either 44100Hz or 22050Hz and is an SDL_mixer bug. However I thought that when we convert from MP3 to OGG that we resample to a supported bitrate, so something has gone wrong there.

Could always use audacity for voice recordings and export them as ogg right then and there.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
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Lol, wouldn't have been amusing had it been more than 5 minutes of work to fix. I assume you're right about my graphics settings. I don't know if it's the exact same bug since I've not had a problem at all with music.



The microphone on my laptop doesn't work, so I was using an app on my phone. I could use Audacity to convert it though, right?

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Care to help me out by giving me advice on my game? Get the early demo by clicking here
Demo updated 8/13/2014

I'll check if you can convert mp3 to ogg or wavs. audacity is weird about converting things at times. especially midi files.

edit: seems to work fine with converting mp3s. but in my experience, though there's expressly an option in audacity to do it, mid files really don't convert. from what I've tried. I'm sure there are people who know how to make it play nice.

but yeah, mp3s work fine.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

I'm not using any midi at all. I have a bunch of public domain music I'm using for the soundtrack and they're all mp3. Will definitely try the Audacity thing. Thanks guys.

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Care to help me out by giving me advice on my game? Get the early demo by clicking here
Demo updated 8/13/2014

When converting to ogg with Audacity, after you pick "Export" and choose Ogg as the file format, click on "Options" and take the quality down to 2. It will make the file size smaller, without any noticeable loss of sound quality. I even go down to 1 for some of my music.

Audacity defaults to quality 5 which is just wasteful.

-1 = bad
0 = low
1 = medium
2 = good
3 = great
4 = waste of space
5 = waste of space
6 = waste of space
7 = waste of space
8 = waste of space
9 = waste of space
10 = waste of space

This is good to know. Every time I import music I've done it at 5 for high quality, but I guess I really should import at 3 to save space and still have high quality.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
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It does make a big difference what you're encoding though. Rather different bitrates are appropriate for voice (low I think), ambience (low), sound effects, noise, and complex rapidly changing music with lots of instruments (higher).

Okay. Well I guess I'll keep that in mind, and judge my imported music by ear. I'm sure if there's an obvious loss in quality then I'll hear it, and know to import at a higher number.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
⍠ C O L L A B M U S I C: https://dustpuppets.bandcamp.com/releases

Why not try using the MADPLAY.EXE and OGGENC.EXE tools directly to convert the MP3 over to an OGG. If you use a Windows batch file, you can make the process more streamlined and perhaps even automated. For example, you could convert an entire directory of MP3s over to OGG using a batch file. You will need to consult one of the Windows Gurus on these forums for a usable batch file, but I can at least try and assist with the usage of MADPLAY.EXE and OGGENC.EXE.

Firstly, you will find both of these EXEs inside the SUPPORT directory which is in the directory you installed the glorious OHR.R.P.G.C. Engine. I'd recommend copying these EXEs to another working directory, where you will place your MP3 files to make things easier. Then create the following batch file:



This will generate the file OUTPUT.OGG which you can import into your game, then delete afterwards. So, using this batch file, you can drop your MP3 file onto the batch file's icon in your explorer window, which would pop out OUTPUT.OGG, then in CUSTOM.EXE, perform the import. Then process the next MP3, rinse and repeat. No need to download and try using Audacity or ReZound, just a nice drag-and-drop system using the tools already provided by the engine. This type of batch file should actually be included with the engine, just a better batch file, one that could loop over all MP3s in a directory, and convert them all to OGGs to avoid the headache this poor chap experienced with the in-menu convertor that still needs to be resolved. Just a thought, take it or leave it.

Certainly, if you don't already have Audacity already installed, that batch file is the simplest solution.

But don't ask me to write any batch files. Complex DOS batch files are so bad, I switched to Unix.

I just got Audacity and am glad I saw this! Will remember for future use!

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"One can never improve enough nor should one stop trying to improve."