Getting a Pamela lipsync to work

Datadog

I've been following the 2D portrait lip sync tutorial (and the Pamela tutorial from their website) and am stumped as to why my character's portrait will not animate when lip sync is turned on. It'll match the auto-sync if I select "From Speech Text", but when I load a file from Pamela, the portrait stays on the first frame. I think the problem may be a communication error between Unity and Pamela's Phoneme Editors, but without a reference for comparison, I don't know if my switch data is being exported properly.

I've screencapped my phoneme editor, the Pamela export, and other assorted settings. Any nudge in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Click here for the large screencap

Thanks!

ChrisIceBox

Do you have a version number for the Pamela you're using?  Any error messages in Unity's Console when they should be playing?

Datadog

It's the latest version (031). And there's a recurring error marked "cannot play clip_r".

Datadog

Fixed that recurring error by removing a problem sprite. But now there's no error message at all when the speech plays.

ChrisIceBox

The file contents look like that of a Papagayo file, are you sure you're using Pamela?  Try setting your Lipsync method to Read Papagayo File.

Datadog

I'm definitely using Pamela (Beta 3.0, April 2002), and setting it to "Read Papagayo" makes no difference. But when I export a file from Papagayo, I get the exact same txt file, so I can see the confusion.

What does a Pamela export look like? 

ChrisIceBox

Sorry, I didn't really think you mistook one tool for another - but it is strange that the two tools output the same.

Pamela should output something along the lines of:

[framespersecond:24]
[Speech]
2:etc
4:UI

The code to read these files is in Dialog.cs from line 353, if you want to delve into it.

Datadog

No worries. Even I was skeptical about it being the right program when I read "2002" on the website.

There's nothing glaring in the dialog.cs that could be causing this. I had some success by modifying the exported lipsync to match your sample format, but it only works if I remove "framespersecond" (which of course means the mouth shapes no longer sync to the FPS). But it's more concerning that Pamela doesn't export the txt file correctly to begin with. In the long run, that would be the bigger problem, and it doesn't look like Pam is updating anytime soon.

Thanks for taking a look at this with me. I'll experiment with other lip sync options and see if any alternatives work.

ChrisIceBox

Indeed, Pamela is supported more out of my old nostalgia for AGS

Sapi's a good free tool if you're working on a Windows machine.  But if you have a bit more of a budget, I'd recommend the Unity asset LipSync, which AC fully supports.

Datadog

Ah, thanks for the recommendations. I'll look into those!