[Dark Hunter]

I've resumed work on my campaign after taking a couple of weeks off for the vacation. And, now that I have resumed work, something is bugging me very much.

In the briefings and command briefings, the game automatically advances the briefing to the next stage after a certain amount of time has passed. Now this is a nice feature... however I, as mission designer, seem to have no control whatsoever over it. It waits for about ten seconds then advances to the next stage of the briefing, though in the case of command briefings it'll wait until the animation is complete before advancing. I assume it does the same with sound files, waiting until they are complete before advancing the stage.

However, I am attempting to synchronize this campaign with the MS Sam voice (MS Sam will not be required for playing it correctly, I assure you of that) out of personal preference. For in-game messages this isn't a problem because there's a "delay next message" option under the message-list SEXP. There is no option for delaying a briefing or command briefing as far as I can see, though, which is extremely annoying because MS Sam will be only halfway through the message when the stage advances.

So: is there any way to delay these advances without using voice files and/or longer animations?

[Mefustae]

When any given player is listening to the voice and the briefing advances before MS-Sam is finished, about 99.9% of players will take a hint and use the 'pause' function to advance manually when the voice has finished. Do you really want to go to the trouble of catering to 0.01% of your player base? I didn't think so.

[Dark Hunter]

Look if nobody likes the Microsoft voices, then I'll drop that right now. I happen to like MS Sam, and you'll note that I said out of personal preference up there. I'm well aware that my tastes are bizarre (they are in many things), but, as I assured others earlier, the campaign will function properly without the MS voices, I'm making sure of that. Please stop telling me that I am doing something that needn't be done, I am growing quite annoyed with that. This is more for my own benefit than for others'.

I'll repeat the question:
is there any way to delay these advances without using voice files and/or longer animations?

[Mefustae]

You'll forgive me for offering my opinion. Yeesh.

[DarkShadow-]

Play nice, guys

As far as I remember there is no way to do it in FRED, except if you pause the briefing (sometimes MS Sam will stop talking, but that should be no rpoblem after restarting FS2). I have two ideas for a workaround:

Adding an "empty" wave-file that lasts as long as MS Sam needs to talk. Whatever, I'm very sure that this will kill MS Sam because usually Sam isn't used when there's already a wave-file present.

Adding an animation containing out of black images (or whatever is displayed below), but I think that the animation doesn't affect the time after which the briefing switches to the next stage.

Both are not the best ideas, but I think they're worth a try.

[Dark Hunter]

You'll forgive me for offering my opinion. Yeesh.

Sorry, Mefustae. I was already aware of that opinion amongst other people, so I was getting a little exasperated that people try to tell me to drop something rather than just answer the question.

@DarkShadow: Hmm... those sound like they'd work. I was rather hoping it could be done in FRED, but oh well.

[karajorma]

Try an empty .wav file called generic.wav

IIRC that's one of the names that the voice synth ignores when deciding whether to play or not. However the briefing code might not ignore it when deciding how long to stay on a stage for.

This is all from memory though as I don't have the code in front of me at the moment.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Perhaps modify the voice-synth code to check for files called "*-empty.wav", similar to the tbms.

[karajorma]

If we're going to modify the code we should simply allow the FREDder to specify an actual delay. What I was suggesting is something that may work without any code changes.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Anyone confirm a workaround for this?  I'm having the same problem.  No matter how long the message is it gets cut off about half a sentence short.