Question: Custom Radio Station Silences (or pauses)

[Djjulien]

I've been working on a radio mod for a while now. It is quite an extensive radio station. The mod works perfectly fine, with one very annoying issue: there are long silences between the different music and/or speech and I have no idea why they are there. I did find that it seems to happen between randomized actions, but as far as I can see, I programmed those correctly. I compared the actions with those in Diamond City Radio and they seem identical in all the right places. Diamond City Radio, however, does not suffer from those long pauses. In my mod, each topic in the randomized actions is neatly flagged as random and the last one in the list is flagged as Random End as well as Random.

 

I'm pretty confident that it has something to do with the randomizing action. All pauses pass one of those functions and a pause never occurs without such a function being there. In detail, what I did in order to make the randomizing functions was as follows:

In a scene and in a phase, I added a radio action. In it, I added topics for each big of music or each bit of text (depending on the scene). These topics have no sound files, but rather check conditions like lastSongPlayed1 != 1 and then set currentSong = 1 in a papyrus fragment (a later phase evaluates the currentSong value and, if true, plays the corresponding audio file that is added to a radio action, just like in Diamond City Radio).

 

At first, in the randomizing action, I added a response text for each topic (like 001TexBenekeAWonderfulGuy) as I found that it showed this text in the creation kit. This made it easier to see which topic controlled which piece of music. Since, however, I removed those texts again and substituted a single space for them, as I figured this might have been the problem. Unfortunately, this did not work.

Now, I also tried making a new, clean randomizing radio action with the exact same content, only without ever adding a response text other than a single space. (I thought that, maybe, some lingering problem persisted even after removing the text.) But this did not work either.

 

Does anyone have any idea on how to fix this?

[Djjulien]

Requested screenshots:

 

Overview of the first few phases (including a large randomizing action that chooses one out of 67 topics (Diamond City Radio uses the same technique to choose one of 42 options and I have the problem with 11 options as well, so it's not just the size :tongue: )

 

 

 

 

 

Music Controller Action Open

 

 

 

 

 

Second Topic Open (one with a single space as response text, like most topics)

 

 

 

 

 

Response Text of above Topic

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for taking a look at this!

Edited August 14, 2016 by Djjulien

[Reneer]

Just as a guess, you may want to remove the "Has a LIP file" checkbox, because it seems you don't actually have a LIP file. And just based on what I can see, there are many different Topic Infos with no sound files / voice files attached to them, which would explain why you are experiencing the pauses, because your code randomly selects an "empty" topic, "plays" it, then moves on to the next phase.

Edited August 14, 2016 by Reneer

[Djjulien]

I will try the LIP file checkbox tomorrow morning, but having empty topics should not be an issue. Diamond City Radio uses the same structure without this issue (having the LIP file checkbox checked, by the way). But I will try nonetheless and will give an update when I have.

[Djjulien]

Unchecking the LIP file checkbox had no noticeable effect on the pauses. It gave me another idea to add a very short silent sound to each response text (which I already tried before) and then generate a LIP file from that .wav file (which I had not tried before). But that did not work either.