Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Inquisitor on August 22, 2003, 11:03:43 am

Title: simulated speech?
Post by: Inquisitor on August 22, 2003, 11:03:43 am
I KNOW fry_day committed stuff, but it does require the SDK, and there is a compile time flag to get it working.

Fry: is it ready for primetime? If so, can you give u a primer on it?
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: Fry_Day on August 22, 2003, 11:47:46 am
Okay, first of all, it requires the Microsoft Speech SDK V5.1 (Not the 1.0 .NET Beta SDK), and the add the preprocessor definition FS2_SPEECH for it to be compiled.
It's not done yet (And I really couldn't do any work over the last month, and I won't  be home for another week), meaning that there are still a few loose ends to tie, like the fact that speech in briefings will continue (for the current stage) even if you move over to ship selection or weapon selection, or that in-game speech (That's right, in-game messages that don't have a wave file attached also get text-to-speech) doesn't pause when you go to a menu or hit escape. Those are simple stuff to implement (and the functions to do so are already there), but I just need my home computer to implement them, or perhaps RT already did, and I didn't have the updated files to integrate.
Okay, now to what it DOES do. Every command briefing, red-alert briefing, or in-game message that doesn't have a wave file attached to it has the Microsoft text-to-speech algorithm go over it. I won't lie to you. The voice is ugly, monotonous, and beyond that, also VERY sensitive to proper quotation (So put as many commas as possible). Why is it good, then?
You don't have to read anything, and you don't have a chance to miss messages (Though, I'm not sure that it does training messages).
Quite a few times, in user-made campaigns, I missed sometimes important messages in the heat of battle, simply due to the fact that I couldn't pay attention to the upper right corner of the screen for enough time to read the messages.
I think that the fact that this problem will be gone without the need for every campaign to do voice-acting is an advantage that outweighs the limitations of the feature.
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: Ferret on August 22, 2003, 01:01:09 pm
*Presses F4*

Sorry, what was that?:lol:
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: Lightspeed on August 23, 2003, 06:20:31 pm
just be sure to run it with different options for vasudan / terran spacecraft.
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: Bobboau on August 23, 2003, 06:30:15 pm
is there any way to change the charicteristics of the voice, so that maybe we could have male/female/vasudan voices some time in the future
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: Trivial Psychic on August 24, 2003, 01:55:20 am
Here's a cool one... I've seen some animation programs that can render a computer simulated head so that voice comes somewhat close to matching what is being said.  It was some kind of email program I think.  If we could render ourselves some command heads, they could actually be able to appear to be saying what they're saying, for as long as they're saying it.  To make both the simulated voice and the simulated head work properly, one might need a way to add some sort of background coding to highlight raises in volume etc. for the sound, and the occasional head nod or eye-brow angling for the animated heads.

Just wishful thinking probably.

Later!
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: RandomTiger on August 24, 2003, 05:04:52 am
Quote
Originally posted by Bobboau
is there any way to change the charicteristics of the voice, so that maybe we could have male/female/vasudan voices some time in the future


Yes
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: Sesquipedalian on August 26, 2003, 09:14:51 am
Quote
Originally posted by RandomTiger


Yes
Yay!  SA is happy about that.  When the voice of the Vasudans is supposedly being run through a translator anyway, who cares if it sounds mechanical?
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: redmenace on August 26, 2003, 12:01:46 pm
Quote
Originally posted by RandomTiger


Yes

What about a paniced or angry voice?
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: Flipside on August 26, 2003, 12:10:59 pm
I think the voice can take an urgent tone if you put '!' at the end of the sentence and questioning if you put '?' at the end of it, I don't know about panicked though :)
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: RandomTiger on August 26, 2003, 01:21:27 pm
Quote
Originally posted by redmenace

What about a paniced or angry voice?


No.  Flipside has the idea, its probably all documented in the SDK.
Perhaps someone, doesnt need to be a coder could take the time to find out that kind of stuff and document it for general modder stuff.
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: bottomfan on August 26, 2003, 01:23:01 pm
I could, but it would go pretty far down on the todo list.
Title: simulated speech?
Post by: Inquisitor on August 26, 2003, 03:14:46 pm
But it IS in :)

Cool :)