Introduction
The first week of GSoC is over, and I’m fairly happy with how it went. My TeenAgent PR was merged, and I’ve opened two new PRs: one adding TTS to WAGE and one adding TTS to Cine. They’re still under review, with Cine requiring more testing and translation verifications, and I imagine that there will be more work to be done with them, but the hardest parts – getting familiar with the engines and adding TTS to most of their text – are over.
WAGE
I started this week with WAGE, which was a relatively simple engine. There was an abandoned PR adding TTS to this engine that I picked up, but while it provided a base for me to work with, it was buggy and unfinished, meaning there was still a significant amount of work to be done. As for the engine itself, WAGE’s games were almost entirely text-based, with few graphical components. For me, this had its benefits and disadvantages. On the positive side, I didn’t have to worry much about hovering over objects, and finding where text was output to the screen wasn’t too difficult: nearly all of the text was in the form of the action log, which was modified by only a small number of functions. On the negative side, the greater quantity of text meant that there was more to look at and be aware of.
For the most part, adding TTS to WAGE was simple. It was a matter of adding a toggle, identifying the small handful of methods that displayed text, and feeding it through the TTS manager. There was no need to clean up any of the text. I soon encountered a caveat, however, with how WAGE handles its command menu. Rather than being embedded into the engine, WAGE uses the MacWindowManager class to manage its menu, including submenus and dialogs. My first approach was to identify and process this text inside WAGE’s Gui::processEvent method by retrieving the menu item that the mouse is over from the MacWindowManager and voicing its text. This worked fine initially, until I tried to voice the buttons: once a MacDialog is open, it pauses the loop inside of WageEngine::run, which is what runs Gui::processEvent. Without Gui::processEvent running, I couldn’t check for the mouse hovering over a button from it. At this point, I realized that it would be difficult to keep everything exclusively in WAGE itself, so I added TTS code to MacWindowManager, which worked much better. I did end up restoring some of my original code to Gui::processEvent for menu items, since MacMenu didn’t seem to have a trigger for hovering over a menu item (only for clicking one, and I wanted to voice the menu item as soon as the user hovers over it). The end result was TTS working as expected for the command menu.
Ultimately, WAGE wasn’t particularly difficult, but the fact that it used MacWindowManager for much of its GUI was an initial challenge. With a little extra code, however, it functioned fine.
Cine
After WAGE, I worked on adding TTS to Cine. Cine’s games, Future Wars and Operation Stealth, have much less text than WAGE games, and much of it is displayed through a few methods. Voicing the majority of the engine’s text was as simple as feeding the text into a small handful of methods, mainly drawMessage, drawMenu, and drawCommand. From there, all that was necessary was making sure it all behaved in a user-friendly way, like voicing the “USE” and “INVENTORY” commands when using the F3 and F4 keys and vocalizing inventory items.
Unfortunately, Cine came with a rather large problem: it has a lot of text in the form of images. Just about any text in Future Wars and Operation Stealth that isn’t directly related to gameplay (i.e. commands and menus) is an image. This includes credits, some cutscene text in Operation Stealth, and everything in the copy protection screens. Two problems resulted from this issue. For one, much of Cine’s work is handled by global and object scripts built into the files, which meant that there was no easy location to find where these images are displayed. As a result, I had to go to the methods that render general images and catch the exact conditions (PRC name, object index and frame, background name, and so on) under which they display. For another, I needed to know the text of these images in all supported languages and versions, so I could hardcode it. This meant a mixture between looking through videos on YouTube and asking the community (thanks to my mentor, criezy, for providing the copy protection images in French, and eientei for providing the German, Spanish, and Italian copy protection fail texts for Operation Stealth). It also meant keeping track of exceptions: Future Wars has two different copy protection screens, one for DOS and one for Amiga and Atari ST; Operation Stealth’s opening credits has a credit for the IBM version only for the DOS version, but its end credits has this credit in all versions; and Future Wars has a different opening title screen for the French version (“Les Voyageurs du Temps: La Menace” as opposed to “Future Wars: Time Travellers” for Amiga and Atari or “Future Wars: Adventures in Time” for DOS). Accounting for these exceptions meant more checks and more text to include, but it has been done.
In the end, getting the copy protection screen and credits to be voiced was the bulk of the work for Cine. Finding the different translations, deciphering the best place to voice them, and adding a new method to recognize hovering over buttons in the copy protection screens was time-consuming, but entertaining.
Conclusion
WAGE and Cine weren’t too difficult to add TTS to, and it was fun to implement it. The most time-consuming was working with Cine’s copy protection screens. There were some difficulties, but through enough investigation, they’ve been resolved. However, as of this blog post, a fair number of translations in Cine need to be verified, and other versions of the game have to be tested.
Next week, I’ll be focusing on adding TTS to the cruisE engine. I’m looking forward to exploring it.