Author Topic: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests  (Read 461345 times)

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Offline Kawa

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #375 on: October 04, 2015, 06:19:27 PM »
One MLG Larry comin' up. Not.

Offline Collector

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #376 on: October 04, 2015, 06:31:19 PM »
Of course when Brian expressed concern that some would take liberties with the games was when the MT forums were still around. Many of the Sierra fans were much younger then with more juvenile senses of humor. Some of the fan AGI games were examples of his concerns. You could make the case that he had placed the Sierra games on an unreasonably high pedestal. I love the games too, but they are not objects of worship.
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Offline MusicallyInspired

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #377 on: October 04, 2015, 10:39:56 PM »
Another point is that you could always mess around with Sierra's AGI games with no problem (other than obfuscation, I guess). Yet no one did. However, they did make some fan patches. Like Roger's hair etc.
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Offline Collector

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #378 on: October 05, 2015, 12:32:52 AM »
True. I think that Brian's concern was was a bit too much ado about nothing. I am with you on the SQ5 mod. It was one of the first things that occurred to me as well, though I expect that it would be a bigger project to add speech to a game with none over just changing the audio track of a game that already has speech. And sadly in the case of SQ5 no Gary Owens.
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Offline troflip

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #379 on: October 14, 2015, 08:52:32 PM »
Ok, this is a big release. I'll fix any issues with this and then hopefully release an official beta.

Download link as usual

There are two main changes:
1) autocomplete/tooltips/"goto definition" for the script editor
2) audio support for messages

Autocomplete
---------
This is on by default, but it might be off if you already had SCI Companion on your machine (as I'm sure you do). In that case, go to Tools->Preferences, and check "Enable browse info"

Now you should have autocomplete (e.g. "intellisense") as you type. You can also hover the mouse cursor over variables/functions to get more info. Or right-click on them and "goto definition". You can also quickly navigate through the script using the combo box at the top of the script editor.

Hopefully this is all reliable and fast now :-)

It does take a few seconds when you open a game for the "browse info" to be built (status should be on bottom left)

Message audio (speech)
--------------
- If you have a microphone attached to your computer, you can now just click on a message entry and press the record button to record audio for that message. Or you can load a wav file.

- If you record your own audio in SCI Companion, I keep around the original recording as a wav file. That way you can re-process it with different settings (using the little button with a waveform icon). The original recording is 16-bit audio, but the default for message audio is 8-bit, which is fairly noisy - no way to get around it. You can play around with different compression settings, or noise gates, etc..

- Since the resource.aud file can get really huge (typically around 400MB for Sierra games), I don't rebuild it every time you save a message (with audio) resource. Instead, the audio resources are kept as individual files in the audiocache folder. Whenever you run the game, it checks to see if anything has been changed, and it will automatically repackage everything into resource.aud. It should be mostly transparent, i.e. you shouldn't need to think about it. You can also force things to be repackaged using the icon that looks like a compact disk (in case you're not using SCI Companion to run/test your game).

- You can automatically generate lip-sync data for a message entry with audio. "Quick Lip Sync", or more options in the Advanced dialog. The lip-syncing can be a bit hit or miss. Obviously the more clear you speak the better. If you've used SCI Companion to record the audio, I feed it the post-processed 16-bit audio (even if you've specified the actual audio resource to be 8-bit).  I'm not too familiar with the wrapper library I'm using (which uses Microsoft SAPI underneath), but it seems to be hard-coded to US English. It probably wouldn't be too much effort to have this configurable for different accents and languages, but I'm not sure (I suspect the lipsync results will still be somewhat reasonable for other languages anyway).

- You have the option of using the message text to aid in the lip-syncing. Sometimes this makes it worse (it gets the right mouth shapes, but they don't line up with the audio - whereas just using the audio, you get things lined up nicely, but maybe they are the wrong mouth shapes). If you get bad results with one option, try the other.

- You can use the "sample" mouth to check how good/bad the lip-syncing is. But to actually get it working in the game for an actual mouth view, you need two things:
    - you need to say which view/loop is the mouth for a given talker number (this should be whatever your Talker instance uses)
    - you need to come up with a mapping of the phonemes to particular cels in that mouth view/loop


Let me know if there are any questions! Hopefully it's not too hard to figure things out.

I'll release my "explore SCI1.1" game soon, with full speech and lip-syncing in it.
« Last Edit: October 15, 2015, 03:05:17 AM by troflip »
Check out my website: http://icefallgames.com
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Offline MusicallyInspired

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #380 on: October 14, 2015, 09:45:04 PM »
Yey!
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Offline Collector

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #381 on: October 14, 2015, 10:30:14 PM »
Sounds good. I hope I can find time this weekend to kick the tires.
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Offline Kawa

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #382 on: October 15, 2015, 09:44:56 AM »
Well, everything seems to work... except for Rebuild Resources. After adding speech support to my game, it keeps saying "corrupted resource!" and my resource.000 file is ballooning. On the other hand, things seem to still load and such...

Also, possibly related, I get a Zero Hunk Allocation Request in-game when it actually tries to play a line.
« Last Edit: October 15, 2015, 09:48:55 AM by Kawa »

Offline troflip

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #383 on: October 15, 2015, 11:35:17 AM »
Is this by "converting" an existing game, or creating a new game?
Can you take a screenshot of the Game -> Version detection dialog?
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Offline Collector

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #384 on: October 15, 2015, 11:44:56 AM »
This reminds me of the old problem of a corrupted resource file if you attempted compile or rebuild while the game was running form COMMAND.COM or NTVDM. This is not an issue when using DOSBox, whether because of file locking or whatever reason. Is is possible that using ScummVM allows that old problem to resurface?
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Offline Kawa

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #385 on: October 15, 2015, 11:50:07 AM »
Is this by "converting" an existing game, or creating a new game?
Can you take a screenshot of the Game -> Version detection dialog?
The new game I've been working on for a bit now, so... both? I followed your guide, then got hit by the zero hunk alloc thing and found that Rebuild Resources didn't work anymore.

So I tried to reverse it, as seen in the attached screenshot.

Offline troflip

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #386 on: October 15, 2015, 11:52:16 AM »
(By "creating a new game", I mean with the new version of SCI Companion)

"Audio volume name" and "Audio36 format" are incorrect. Did you not change those?

If "supports message audio" won't go away, it means there is an audio map for a message resource in your resource.000. That's fine, except since your "Audio volume name" is incorrect, it probably means that audio resource is in your resource.sfx (it should be in a resource.aud). SCI Companion will be reading it using the wrong format (hence corrupt resource), and the game will be looking for it in resource.aud (hence the in-game error)

Here's what it should have looked like. Just start again from a backup of your game (hopefully you saved a backup before doing the conversion!).


« Last Edit: October 15, 2015, 12:02:04 PM by troflip »
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Offline Kawa

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #387 on: October 15, 2015, 12:26:22 PM »
Yeah see it used to look like it's supposed to, but then it didn't work in practice -- the zero hunk thing -- and I tried to revert it again. But I'm working through fixing it all now.

Offline troflip

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #388 on: October 15, 2015, 12:33:47 PM »
Yeah see it used to look like it's supposed to, but then it didn't work in practice -- the zero hunk thing -- and I tried to revert it again. But I'm working through fixing it all now.

Remember, after adding the message audio resource when converting, it's necessary to save that, and repackage audio files. If you don't do that, then when you re-open the game, it won't detect resource.aud, and you'll get the result you're seeing.

In fact, you might be able to fix it by making a resource.aud consisting solely of 11 0xff values.
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Offline Kawa

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #389 on: October 15, 2015, 01:10:04 PM »
I've nearly rebuilt my game as it was before, but I can't restore the digital sound effects -- importing an exported aud file from an earlier copy is "not supported", nor is importing a wav file, same result.

The only other problem right now is that even MIDI sound is busted. SSCI remains silent, and ScummVM speaks of an "unsupported resource version 32" the moment the first song is played.


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