Last week I continued to work on TeenAgent, in particular implementing the support for voiceovers. I first wasn’t sure about that since I could not find anything related to voicing in the sources we had. However, because the engine can load the voices and play them, I decided to map the voice indices to each text and play the voices in the same places where Text-To-Speech’s sayText() are called. Apart from this, there was a bug report for the qdEngine game, so I quickly returned to it to add support for punycode.
The idea for implementing the voiceovers is as I said to map the voice indices (1..2043) to each text. I played with the sounds to see how the voice resources are located and figure out the ranges. For the most part, it was sequential. The ranges are as follows:
- 1 – 333 Messages
- 334 – 566 Scene objects descriptions
- 567 – 591 Combination messages
- 592 – 683 Item descriptions
- 902 – 2040 Dialogs
Interestingly the range [684 – 901] between Items and Dialogs is empty. Implementing the first four items were relatively easy. For the display message methods I just added an additional argument for voice ids, for others I extracted that from the newly added method – getVoiceIndex(). However, the dialogs were hardest to get right. At the moment of writing, I am still working on it, most of them are working, but still some parts are wrong. The main problem I discovered is that the voice resources for dialogs are not really ordered, not every dialog line is voiced and some voice resources are empty. For the empty voices, I discovered that checking the size, i.e, if its too small is enough. That is, all of those voice resources are 4 bytes in size and I got the list of them and implemented isVoiceIndexEmpty() helper method. But the fact that some voices are not ordered, really became an issue and I had to manually find, listen and check every problematic dialog/lines. Because of this, the method for computing voice indices became a mess, and I had to rewrite it over and over.
Despite the difficulties presented above, I am close to finishing it, and once the dialogs are done, all text in the game will have a voiceover. Good thing is that I have every line of text extracted from the previous weeks, so even if I don’t know Polish, I still can with relatively no problem find the the exact text from the voices I hear.
For this week, I first plan to finish this task (today) and then move to working on the next engine – MacVenture.