Citra: Tomadachi life - voices cutting out

[ghost]

In the game tomadachi life the voices cut out
im using Citra nightly #1009
here is footage of it happening
https://streamable.com/y8adv

and the dialog boxes go too fast too

[ghost]

still happens

1020

[death1223]

still happens #1030

[Dragios]

Stop linking the pull request number please. You guys just referencing unrelated issue and causes unnecessary log generated.
If you still want to reference, please edit the hyperlinks manually.
#1030

[death1223]

Voices still cut out #1040

[jroweboy]

@death1223 DO NOT report builds that don't fix it. DO report when a build fixes it. If you continue to report builds that DO NOT fix it, i'll lock the conversation.

No one has even looked into the issue, and its not magically going to fix itself, so reporting every few days that its not working is pointless spam (that shows up in my inbox). Thanks for understanding

[death1223]

So no one has looked into an issue that's been open for 8 days? What's the point of this board then?

[RocketRobz]

@death1223 The issue tracker is for reporting bugs that are in (in this case) Citra.
There are many issues open, even I have one that's been open for a while (as of this post).
The point of this board is to report found bugs here, and the devs will fix those issues whenever they're ready, no matter how long they're open.

[NotThatSuperman]

Try updating to the newest Version, then go to Emulation > Configure > System > Audio Then set Emulation to LLE

[RocketRobz]

@Superman321 Still happens using LLE.

[NotThatSuperman]

Its not skipping for me anymore

[ghost]

How do I open the settings (Mac)

[NotThatSuperman]

I dont know

[EmpressLexi]

Using HLE, it would appear that the voice skip happens at the exact same amount of time after an islander starts speaking, no matter the speed of their speaking, if they finish what they're saying before the amount of time, they can say full sentences.

The only situations in which they DON'T cut out, is when their speech is being timed to something, such as the rap battles or the songs you can make. I think the issue may be to do with this timing problem.
Perhaps the emulator isn't sure what to do when there is no specified time for the audio to stop playing, as Tomodachi life's sounds for voices are very variable.

Sorry if this isn't helpful, I've just been trying to figure this out for a week or two and thought it may be useful to post what I've theorized so far.

[FearlessTobi]

Thanks for looking into this! ^^
However I believe this bug can and will only be fixed by enabling Audio LLE in the settings which currently is a pretty heavy hit on performance. The game probably uses a audio firmware different from the standard one we emulate in HLE and this probably causes all the voice skips to happen.

[FearlessTobi]

Taken from Discord.
B3N30 heute um 19:41 Uhr: @fearlessTobi the cutted audio as well as the other audio desync issues are probably fixable in HLE. ATM signaling the game that the decoder is finished isn't handled properly but instead we just signal in a fixed interval. But signaling when the decoder is done is probably not enough but we have to do a similar aproach like with the file open/close/read delay. Nevertheless I think it is fixable. But thats just a theory and I didn't verify anything.

[Panquesito7]

Each time an islander calls from the cell phone about problems related to the baby, the voices don't cut that much after that: they last longer than they normally do.

[DogeIsCut]

this is still happening, any fix without lle? becuase it lags waaaay to much for me when i use it

[HEYimHeroic]

yeah, if there's a possible HLE fix with this, i'd love to see it happen; text that automatically scrolls (which 99% of spoken text is) goes really fast and in some cases is unreadable.

[jroweboy]

I started investigating this issue without any results yet. I've got a few more ideas on what to test, but i'm still not sure whats wrong. It would help a lot if someone could upload a save file here that is close to a spot that can replicate the issue and tell me how to replicate it as well. Currently I have to fill in the a bunch of set up stuff like player name everytime i want to test a change and click through a bunch of menus. Would really appreciate it if there was a faster test case <3 thanks!

[HEYimHeroic]

savedataArc.txt
here you go!! hope this helps; just open any Mii's apartment and tap the three ... icon, and they'll usually say something. if it's too short, try again.

[HEYimHeroic]

the save data? it works just fine for me...

EDIT: oh, i should mention it's PAL. whoops..

[SmiVan]

With Tomodachi Life a good way to test would be to listen to Mii News, as the voices always cut out with the relatively long phrases that Mii News uses.

---

I made a save file (USA) filled with slow-speaking characters, watch the news on the news tower to see the voices cut off:

savedataArc.txt

[kabuk1h3r3]

hi here, i made a save file (JPN) after making a mii with the slowest voice setting possible and interacted with them in their apartment by tapping their speech bubble.

---

savedataArc.txt

[JambyJC]

Okay, so I don't know if this will help anyone, but this happened to me for the longest time and I couldn't figure out why. When I was playing I realized I was playing on Nightly instead of the normal Citra. I loaded the game up on normal Citra and the voices stopped cutting out. Yes, I know, I'm dumb. That is the fix to the problem, at least for me.

[wwylele]

@JambyJC But Nightly is the normal citra. Which version were you actually using?

[JambyJC]

@wwylele Sorry for any confusion. I meant the Canary version of Citra.

[wwylele]

@JambyJC so you mean, there is voice cutting out issue on nightly, but it works fine on canary?

[JambyJC]

@wwylele Exactly.

[kabuk1h3r3]

it's weird because i have canary and i still have issues with the audio...

[JambyJC]

Have you tried disabling audio stretching?

[kabuk1h3r3]

disabled audio stretching and the mii's voices still cut off, unfortunately. every suggestion that's been made in the past to fix the audio i've tried with little to no results.

[SmiVan]

Checked on Canary 1511 and the audio cut-off is still present (with and without audio stretching).
Very odd, @JambyJC are you certain the voices stopped cutting off?
Which exact version are you on?

Also, just for your information, there are some conditions in which the voices don't cut off, e.g. in songs.
Be sure to check Mii News and long phrases in rooms.

[JambyJC]

I don't know if this gives the information on what version I'm on, if this isn't enough information then tell me what I need to do instead.

[JambyJC]

And yes, I am sure that the voices stopped cutting out once I switched to Canary. The news works fine.

[PKPeri]

Any updates on this yet? I'm on Canary and it still seems to cut off, LLE makes my game lag.

[jroweboy]

@PKPeri I've started investigating the issue, but I have no fix for it yet. Since its near Christmas, I've been really busy with other things and can't promise I'll be able to find a fix for it any time soon. I'll post back here when theres anything new to report.

[PKPeri]

@jroweboy Alright, that's fine

[HEYimHeroic]

yeah @PKPeri usually they'll try to get it to work on HLE and not just on LLE, if that makes sense ^^

[Aggekis]

Check this out. How is this youtuber not having a problem with the audio if he is using an emulator? maybe is another one but still useful... min 3.36. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYeVKq8kxFg

[Josh138]

Yes, @Aggekis. I have seen that YouTuber play the game using an emulator on his computer. I am still puzzled how he could freely play without the speech cuts.

[JambyJC]

I can play freely without the speech cuts as well. I guess its just getting lucky

[BreadFish64]

@JambyJC how recently did you play it, we put a PR into Canary last night that should fix some audio bugs, but I don't think this is one of them.

[SmiVan]

@JambyJC how recently did you play it, we put a PR into Canary last night that should fix some audio bugs, but I don't think this is one of them.

Checked on master-1435aab3 (2020-03-13) and the issue is still present, so unfortunately that PR didn't fix this.

[SmiVan]

Well if JambyJC is not having this issue, perhaps it is platform dependent?
I'm running Citra on Ubuntu LTS 18.04.4, and I used to run it on macOS last year and the issue was present on both of those.
Could someone else with a Windows OS (which I presume is what JambyJC using) check whether or not it is absent specifically on that.

Side note: I've seen other claims backed with video evidence of voices not cutting off on really old versions of citra, with a seemingly similar version to JambyJC, so just in case - I'm going to try to descend down the commit history and see if those work.

[SmiVan]

I've done a git bisect through the last 2 years of citra commits, and arrived at the first commit where Tomodachi Life is supported (5dacf92fd73a9abe721a6525dda633d7b0c6133c), and never seen any versions which have sound working.

Next I'm going to check out the exact commit that JambyJC uses - a8f5c57.

---

Huh, what's with the weird commit history on that commit?
And I don't see it on the master branch commit history.
And the author of the commit seems to be @vvanelslande.

So it seems like that commit cannot be checked out, has someone messed up branch deletion?

But yeah this explains this entire weird inconsistency - apparently someone's been distributing old Citra copies from this weird missing branch - and perhaps whatever was done there does fix the audio issue. I hope some dev who is more savvy in the codebase could check that out.

[vvanelslande]

@SmiVan that weird commit is from a deleted unofficial branch and the issue is fixed with custom ticks.

[SmiVan]

I've tried setting various lower and higher CPU clock speed values on the recent commit that @jroweboy put out (which supposedly is the same as "custom ticks"), but to no avail.
Is there some particular value that it should be set to, or is this just an unrelated patch that uses the same terminology by accident? Or is this still a work in progress patch and I'm rushing a bit?

[pmalleytally]

was having the same voice cut-out issue on nightly. saw that some people had luck after switching to qt, so i tried that. weirdly enough, it fixed my issue.

[SmiVan]

@pmalleytally What do you mean by "switching to qt"? Were you using the retroarch edition before or something?

[pmalleytally]

@SmiVan i was originally using your regular citra nightly. i heard some good things about "citra-qt.exe". it was easy to find, i just typed in citra and it popped up along with canary and nightly, since i have both.. i opened qt, and ran the tomodachi life rom on it. it worked like a charm, though very, very long sentences do sometimes still get cut out. you can see qt in the screenshot i attached.

[xperia64]

Fixed in #5548