ScummVM speaks

Hello readers, first I might have to apologize, because with how busy I was at the end of last week, I actually forgot, I should write a blog post. But at least now I have a lot more to show you.

The Mission Supernova project is near it's end, I created a pull request with the work I have done on it and right now it waits to be reviewed by the ScummVM community. You can find the pull request here.

This allowed me to fully focus on my next project, which is the text to speech. First I implemented the TTS on Linux, which was pretty easy, because the speech-dispatcher API is quite simple to use (A lot simpler then SAPI from Microsoft). The code for that should be close to finished, I just need to add some checks in a few places. Then, so I can test the TTS, I implemented reading of text in the GUI (A blind user could use this to navigate through the menus and maybe play some game, which also uses the TTS to read text). I spent quite a while doing this, because I wasn't sure where to put all the code the GUI needed for TTS, but I quite like the state it is at now. So after I finished the GUI modifications, I started to work on the Windows side of the TTS. This is quite challenging for me, because I am used to work on Linux with my pretty specific setup, so I quite often unsuccessfully tried to use my custom shortcuts I am used to on Linux, which was quite annoying. This was also my first Windows specific C++ code, so working with the COM, or seeing the Microsoft custom uuid operator was quite new for me. But even with all this, I have managed to implement a pretty good portion of the Windows TTS code, I don't have all the features programmed yet, but some results can already be seen, or rather heard.

I guess this is enough of me writing, I promised to show you stuff, so here is how the ScummVM sounds like, when it speaks:

Linux:

This is using the speech-dispatcher with espeak-ng, other TTS engines should work as well (I have tried Festival and it worked). The voices are set by user in speech-dispatcher configuration, but programmer can make some adjustments to them.

Windows:

This is using the Microsoft SAPI, the voice selection depends on the selected language and the set of installed voices (user has to install them into windows first in order to appear in voice selection in ScummVM). As you can see, I for some reason have a Chinese voice installed, so I can show you that switching languages works. But I think the voice is supposed to be used for a different dialect or something like that, because it seems it doesn't understand the text, because it only spells it instead of reading it as a whole

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

Google Summer of Code summary

Hello, the GSoC is at it's end and it is time for me to summarize my work in the past 12 weeks. In case you only want to see the code, here are the pull requests:  Mission Supernova ,  Text to speech ,  Encoding conversion . Projects Mission Supernova As the first project, I worked on an engine for Mission Supernova 2. The project description can be found here The engine for the first Mission Supernova game was already almost finished. At first, I decided to create a separate engine (supernova2) and I started with copying code, that is the same for both games from supernova to supernova2. After this I started adding the Mission Supernova 2 specific parts (interactions with objects, rooms, ...), which thanks to having the original source codes wasn't hard. When I had most of the game working, I had to work a bit on improving the translation. There was a tool from the first engine to create translations of game strings and images with only 2 colors. But unlike with the f
Read more