How do you make Level Sequences run smoothly?

Development World Creation
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In the video you’ll see the pilot hasn’t loaded in (he should be in the left seat. On some runs he loads in, but usually quite late) and at 11 seconds you can here the audio restart


(you can ignore the green flash. that doesn’t happen in the game)

So far we’ve:

  • Made sure all the assets used don’t stream based on player position
  • Kept them reasonably small
  • used ADPCM with a low bitrate
  • show the sequence for instigator only.

It plays better for people with a better connection, but still not reliably. The video above was recorded from a connection with a 500Mb download.

How can we use the sequencer if the outputs aren’t reliable?

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Hi Sean, we’ll have someone take a look at this.

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Hi Sean, the team has a couple questions:

  • What is the pilot and how is it loaded in?
  • The title says it’s not playing ‘smoothly’ - is there some issue around framerate or interpolation?
  • Is the audio restart indicative of a problem or is that expected?
  • How is the sequence actually triggered? Is it through Verse or some other device?
  • Is bLevelSequenceActorAlwaysRelevant enabled on the device?

Thanks!

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Hi,

What is the pilot and how is it loaded in?

The pilot is an animated mesh

is there some issue around framerate or interpolation?
Is the audio restart indicative of a problem or is that expected?

The audio restarts, sometimes several times and goes out of Sync with the animation. The audio restarting is not expected; it should play once along the length of the sequence.

How is the sequence actually triggered? Is it through Verse or some other device?

The sequence is triggered through verse, we pass in the player as the instigator to get it to run client side

Is bLevelSequenceActorAlwaysRelevant enabled on the device?

Yes

A few other things to note - it happens away from the player spawn, but all assets have been set to not stream.
It’s directly off the back of a title screen sequence (which has no issues but is relatively simple) - we have other farily complicated sequences later on in the game that seem to not have issues either.

Thanks.

EDIT!!

I misremembered the point about Verse.

Actually what I do is I trigger a different sequence through verse, then that ending triggers the one i’m struggling with. Both are set to show for instigator only.

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Per a member of our team:

They need to make sure they are calling the Verse function that takes an instigator agent in order for it to work correctly.

Can you confirm this is the verse API you’re using? Thanks!

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We’re doing that

TitleScreen3.Play(Message.Player)
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Hi @SeanOfEarth Would you mind sending me your project via DM or some other method? The project will be kept confidential but it would be hugely helpful for the team to see what you’re doing. Thanks!

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Just to add to this - we have removed several things from the scene in order to test for a smoking gun, we still see the issue if we remove each one of these items:

  • Voice Over Audio
  • Pilot and Pilot animation
  • VFX spawners
  • Camera Shake layer
    Sometimes the timing of the stutter changes, but in further testing we see the same thing over and over again. The problem seems to be tied to the network in some way.
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image
image889×1248 138 KB

We ‘may’ have fixed it by changing to this setting - we need further substantial testing to be sure.

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Fortunately we managed to get it working! (I pasted how above in case anyone else runs into these issues).

M

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Having to re-open this one, we’ve certainly improved it - but we’re still occasionally seeing the cinematic loop when it shouldn’t.

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I’m interested in this topic as well as I’m making a pre-game sequence currently. I have a short piece of audio that plays during a flyby. It plays perfectly in the editor but once I test it in a live edit session its out of sync.