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SCI Programming => SCI Development Tools => Topic started by: ZvikaZ on October 30, 2020, 07:56:17 AM
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Hi.
I'm looking at Freddy Pharkas CD in SCICompanion, and can't seem to find where are the messages recording.
Let's take a concrete example - Willy's "speech" at the beginning of the game.
It's in room 230, noun 28.
(let's ignore for now the differences between the floppy's text + CD's voice on the one hand, and the CD's text on the other hand...)
But where is the corresponding voice?
In SCiCompanion's doc it looks so nice: http://scicompanion.com/Documentation/messages.html
But for Freddy (at least mine...) it doesn't look like this.
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Aren't they just in the RESOURCE.AUD?
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It looks like Companion is not loading RESOURCE.AUD (my GOG version puts it in a subdirectory; somehow, moving the files around doesn't seem to help). Because it thinks that file is missing, you don't get a preview pane for message audio.
EDIT: You can go into 'Game/Version detection' and put a check mark in 'supports message audio' manually. The playback button looks a bit weird under Linux/Wine, but it does work (but you do need to move/copy/symlink the files)
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Does Companion read the RESOURCE.CFG or version detect the interpreter? The FPFP interpreter includes the resAUD path flag for the RESOURCE.CFG.
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SCI Companion does not read the cfg file, I think. So putting the AUD file in the same directory as the rest would be a requirement.
Just for fun I put resource.aud, resource.map, resource.000, resource.sfx, and all the other map files in a new folder, and loaded that in SCI Companion. Picked a message resource at random, but the first one wasn't meant to have audio.
The others, though? Yeah, that worked.
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Well, thanks everybody.
kawa, maybe SCICompanion can be improved to look for the files in the subdirectories as well (therefore, not requiring moving them around manually)?
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I think the best thing would be support wherefiles¹ at all. I tweeted about this before (https://twitter.com/NoxicoDev/status/1315631301882531840)... but blindly looking in all subdirectories may be simpler. I think SV does that? It just has to not read anything from the audiocache folder, those aren't the right map and aud files. And then there's the part where The Dating Pool has two folders with release copies of the game, one to stage an ISO image, one to upload to itch.io. It also shouldn't use anything in those subdirectories.
(¹: What resource.cfg technically is. A where-file not only tells the engine which drivers to use, but also where various resource files can be found. We're talking about audio here, but if you check the twitter thread...)
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One reason to not look in all subdirectories is that there may be some old resources in a backup folder that might get confused with current resources.
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One reason to not look in all subdirectories is that there may be some old resources in a backup folder that might get confused with current resources.
Same difference.
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Hi.
So, we have here 2 options:
- Use 'resource.cfg' to find the relevant subdirectories
- Use some known 'common' subdirectories list (PATCHES, AUDIO, probably few more), assuming that no one has copied some old resources to a backup folder with that name.
The first solution seems more accurate.
However, GOG is starting to deliver games without Dosbox support - only with ScummVM, and since ScummVM ignore 'resource.cfg', it's possible that they will deliver games without 'resource.cfg', or even worse, with wrong 'resource.cfg'.
I don't have concrete example for such problem, but we might encounter such one in the future...
Therefore, I think that the preferred solution is the second.
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You're probably right.
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I'm not sure about that, there's a bunch of exceptions in the ScummVM resource manager for Collection CDs that were improperly laid out. A random comment from the code:
// The warning dialog is shown here instead of someplace more obvious like
// SciEngine::run because resource sources can be dynamically added
// (e.g. KQ5 via kDoAudio, MGDX via kSetLanguage), and users really should
// be warned of bad resources in this situation (KQ Collection 1997 has a
// bad copy of KQ5 on CD 1; the working copy is on CD 2)
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"KQ Collection 1997 has a bad copy of KQ5 on CD 1; the working copy is on CD 2"
It is not that the copy on CD1 is bad, just incomplete. CD1 includes just the files for a base installation. The collection's installer does not copy the large files from the games to the user's HDD, so it does not need the RESOURCE.00* or RESOURCE.AUD, etc. Kind of naïve to call it "bad".
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I don't own that collection, so I can't say what is and isn't true. I'll just say that ScummVM parses the map files fully at startup or whenever the in-game switches mentioned are used, so any errors are caught sooner rather than later. There's a bunch of different error situations that can trigger the warning dialog (which I didn't show). Missing files, inconsistent files, broken files...