Project update

Hello, last week I have been making some finishing touches to the TTS project. I improved voice mapping in the Mortvile Manor game, because I used to use pitch values from the original game to map the characters to different voices. That would mean for example that if a user has only 3 female voices available, both female characters would map to the same voice. So I added an array of voice indices, so the voices map as evenly as possible. I improved TTS in GUI, but that still needs some more work. But the biggest addition to the TTS actually isn't from me, because Criezy implemented TTS for Mac OS, which I couldn't do (I don't own a Mac).

Because TTS is almost finished, I started to work on my next project, which is adding a way to convert between different character encoding. Right now, if you need to convert between encodings, you can:

  • use the U32String class to convert between a few encodings.
  • use TransMan (if TransMan is enabled) to convert between unicode and current GUI charset
  • use platform specific code (SDL, Win32 and Mac have their own ways of converting encodings).
  • implement your own conversion (The most reliable, probably even after I finish this project).
This seems quite messy and confusing to me, we probably don't want each engine to implement it's own encoding conversions. So I am adding an option to compile ScummVM with iconv, which is a library, that specializes in encoding conversion. The plan is to first try to use iconv, then the platform specific conversion code and as a last resort use the TransMan to try to convert the string either to the GUI encoding or UTF-32 and try to convert that to the final encoding.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mortville Manor TTS

Image
Hello, in the past week, I worked some more on the TTS project. First I finished the GUI TTS, I needed to make sure, that everything behaves the same way on Windows and on Linux and I had to make sure I free everything I allocate. I even had to implement reference counting for a class, which wasn't that hard, but it still was pretty interesting, because I have never needed to do this. I also had to implement conversion of the text being said to UTF-8. On Windows this involved adding a  table to the code, which would allow looking up codepage identifier by its name. On Linux I just used SDL_iconv_string, which can convert from most of the GUI encodings, but unfortunately it seems, it cannot convert from CP850, which is apparently quite often used by game engines (it is used by the Mortevielle engine and also by the supernova engine). So right now I just convert the strings like if they were in ASCII (most of the encodings are just ASCII extensions, so I hope to successfully convert...
Read more

GSoC update

Hello, last week I almost finished the Supernova engine. All of the bugs I managed to find should be fixed, I added translations to most images and help files, I merged .dat files with translations for each game and tools to create them into one and I also added the "improved" mode. Right now the improved mode: In the first game Automatically dresses and undresses the player from space suit every time he walks through the airlock (after he first does this on his own). Automatically closes one side and opens the other side of the airlock (after the player first walks through the airlock on his own). In the second game Enables using go verb alongside with push verb to interact with the puzzle tiles inside the pyramid (that way the player doesn't have to click on push in between puzzle interactions and can focus only on solving the puzzle) Enables using go verb alongside with push verb to interact with the password locked door inside the pyramid The only thing...
Read more

Supernova images

Image
Last week I pretty quickly finished the merge, there was only a bit of refactoring left. After that I worked on a tool that could recreate Mission Supernova datafiles containing images, which would allow us to translate them. The MS datafile format is pretty simple and it reminds me of .bmp images (there is a header, after that palette and after that pixel data). At the first 4 bytes is size of the pixel data field. After that is 1 byte, which is the size of the palette. The palette follows after that. Pretty interesting thing is, that each color is brightened by the engine (shifted by 2 to the left), so we have to count with that when making a new image and generating palettes for them. This also means, that we loose a lot of colors (We for example aren't able to encode the whole 256 colors of grayscale). After the palette is information about sections. Section is a image, that can get rendered on top of other sections (images). The information is basically only it's size, l...
Read more