Play Speech Action Does Not Complete

JacobFalling

Hello! Quick question without much to go on, but does anyone have any ideas why an actionlist would stop on a play speech action, and with only part of its text passed to the UI element? It only prints 10 characters and does not skip to the next action.

Happy to elaborate if this doesn't spark any thoughts.

ChrisIceBox

What are your AC/Unity versions, and is this occuring for a specific line, or all?

Does the line have associated audio, use tags, or is played through Timeline?

If the menu uses Unity UI, temporarily switch its Source over to Adventure Creator to help isolate the source of the issue.

JacobFalling

Hey Chris,

Using Unity 2021 LTS, AC 1.76

Not using audio, tags, or timeline. The OnStart cutscene initiates a a separate actionlist for the dialogue. I've tried the actionlist and associated conversation as both assets and in the scene. All the Constant IDs seem to track correctly either way.

From some experimenting:

It doesn't seem to be recognizing that a speech is happening or a conversation follows.

• If I have Scroll Narration Text, the text freezes after ten characters and the speech action does not complete
• if I turn off Scroll Narration Text, the dialogue menu doesn't open at all, unless
• I set it to manually open and trigger it in an action. Then it appears and shows the expected text, but still the actionlist does not move on to the next action (conversation) and remains frozen on the speech action
• Adding a second speech action after the first still does not allow the actionlist to advance, so it doesn't seem to be an issue with the conversation initiation intended to follow.

I'm using Unity UI prefab and TextMesh throughout; no benefit to switching to an AC one. Neither instantiates in the scene (unless I activate manually).

All of my other menus are working well with both AC and Unity UI and with TMP for everything.

I also had dialogues working previously in this build, but I do believe that was with AC at the time and prior to switching.

Thank you so for your time!

ChrisIceBox

To be clear: is this occuring with a specific line, or all lines? Also, when you say "conversation", are you referring to AC's Conversation prefab - or just a series of speech lines?

Does the issue persist if you move the speech to the OnStart cutscene - without having it run a separate ActionList?

It'd be worth testing the latest release in a backup/duplicate project. However, the issues you're describing are very odd and I can't think as to why this would occur. It may be some combination of settings that'd be hard to pin down through descriptions like this.

If the issue is still present with the latest release, PM me your project files along with instructions and I'll take a look.

JacobFalling

You're absolutely right that there's just a lot of details with how this all gets put together. I think this was just an odd combination of factors, and making a few different changes set me back on track. I don't think the update was a factor here, but was certainly worth a try and definitely didn't hurt. There were a couple of change log notes that might have been related.

Some things I'll note for any curiosity:

• I needed separate menus for delivering the subtitles (dialogues) and conversations (responses); I had built one large UI Canvas that contained a journal and all dialogue components, but the Appear Type on the parent menu/canvas prevented the child menus/canvases from firing (since they need their appropriate appear types for speech and conversation; related:
• Having one menu open that pauses the game prevents the subtitle and conversation menus from opening period. This just happened to allow partial speech text to play before opening it. Again, this may also associate with the appear type. I'll play around more here since I do want the dialogues to occur while another UI is open -- probably just a settings combination.
• I'd played around with menus so much (effectively splitting the UI in pieces) that their canvases reversed to negative values and effectively disappeared. That's just Unity UI understanding. Also of course critical to make sure the Unity canvases have a proper sort order, as Chris reminds people regularly.
• Switching to using animations to control visibility was also necessary for me, so I removed Remember Visibility and other convenience AC elements. Great to prototype and have quick results, but Mecanim does seem to be a better way to go for my use cases.

Fully an aside:

I still have to say you've managed to maintain a great balance with AC. It's not the only good set of tools out there, but you've managed to keep AC focused on adventure style gaming while still enabling us to go way beyond point-and-click territory.

I have most of the core systems templated for what's arguably closer to an RPG/Crafting game than Adventure. Not everything lends itself obviously to that, but accepting some guardrails it's pretty workable thus far. I still have very little custom code in play. Pretty monstrous actionlists in some cases, to be fair, but nonetheless I've been able to stick almost completely to the core toolsets and a few scripts provided in readily available resources.

I even decided to switch my build from 2D to 3D. That's probably not recommended very far into a project, but I would have fully expected it to be impossible. It was definitely easier than rebuilding from scratch, particularly with key elements of my build in menu-based functions (crafting, dialogue) anyway.

Just wanted to express thanks again for your work.

ChrisIceBox

Glad to hear things are working out - and I look forward to seeing what you're working on!