Author Topic: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests  (Read 393388 times)

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Offline troflip

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #345 on: September 26, 2015, 03:03:16 PM »
It's not really that baffling. The UI framework I'm using has "themes" built in (a feature which you are clearly using, since you posted about them not persisting), so I thought it would be nice to offer as an option, since it was minimal work to support.

A 20MB binary seems like a strange thing to complain about - that's pretty small these days (SCI Studio was made 8 years ago). IMO, it's really only an issue if the size noticeably interferes with startup time and performance. Does it?

The bulk of the 20MB are the theme resources. I'm not sure why the timezone map is in there. I can look at excluding features of the UI library to try to bring this down.

About 5MB is code. SCI Companion does a ton more stuff than SCI Studio!
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Offline Kawa

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #346 on: September 26, 2015, 03:22:20 PM »
Everything in that reply makes sense, and no it does not perform badly. Thank you for your consideration.

Offline troflip

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #347 on: September 26, 2015, 04:20:46 PM »
fyi, I was able to remove some of the unneeded resources and trim about 4MB off the binary. Thanks for bringing the timezone map stuff to my attention.
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Offline troflip

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #348 on: September 26, 2015, 10:49:18 PM »
Also, fyi, I'm getting closer to putting out another release. This will bring back the navigation/tooltip functionality (in more robust form) that has been disabled by default. You'll be able to right click on something and "goto" where its define. You'll be able to quickly navigate around a script using that combobox at the top of the script view. When you hover the mouse over a symbol, it will show you the parameters it takes (in case of a function call), the value it has (in case of a define, say). And finally, there will be autocomplete as you type (e.g. "intellisense"). This should make it a lot easier to write scripts.

The second big piece of feature creep I'm working on (which will hopefully pan out) is to support audio resources for the messages (e.g. the base36 audio and sync resources). I'm trying to make it as easy as possible. Basically you'll be able to select a message the message view and import a .wav file for it; or, to make it even easier, press a record button and speak into your computer's microphone, and have that saved as an audio resource for that message entry. The issues I'm trying to workout revolve around how the resource management happens. These audio resource volumes (resouce.aud) can be large (~300MB) and that doesn't play well with how I do things now.

The LSL6 interpreter included in the SCI1.1 template game does actually support "talkies". I've verified this by putting in .map and "audio36" patch files. With no extra coding (except for changing a global flag), the corresponding message resource is now "spoken" in game. One caveat is that the talkers in the game are either all text or all spoken. With the template game code as is, if an audio resource is missing there is no fallback to text. It shouldn't be too hard to write code to handle this differently.

I'm not sure what to do about sync resource (this is lipsync data). To me, it seems really difficult and tedious to generate this data (it's basically a list of "tick count"/cel pairs - the cels being the various shapes of the mouth of the talker), and I'm not sure how to expose it in an editor. At the very least, I can let people enter this data manually. That's tedious, but I think trying to match up audio with a particular view cel is tedious anyway. I doubt many people would do this. Certainly it would be possible to try to analyze the waveform and map it to mouth shapes. If someone wants to write a tool that does this... lol

And finally, I need to get documentation done. I'm hoping to produce this automatically off "doc comments" in the scripts. This will be just a basic API reference, I guess. Hopefully I can rely on the community to produce proper tutorials (as some of you have already done).
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Offline Kawa

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #349 on: September 27, 2015, 08:43:20 AM »
I knew it was a good idea to save my reaction for later.


Offline MusicallyInspired

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #350 on: September 27, 2015, 07:35:47 PM »
I forget, was there ever a tool used to import masks for priority/control screens? That would be handy if one was working with images made in layer editors like PSP or Photoshop or even GraFX 2 and exporting certain layers as solid colours for priority or control colours.
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Offline Kawa

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #351 on: September 27, 2015, 07:40:37 PM »
I forget, was there ever a tool used to import masks for priority/control screens? That would be handy if one was working with images made in layer editors like PSP or Photoshop or even GraFX 2 and exporting certain layers as solid colours for priority or control colours.
Import as visual, replace "set vis color" commands with "set pri/ctl color"?

Offline MusicallyInspired

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #352 on: September 27, 2015, 07:54:02 PM »
That wouldn't work with SCI1.1, though. Importing a picture would default to the VGA import version not visual draw commands.
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Offline troflip

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #353 on: September 27, 2015, 08:04:21 PM »
I never implemented that functionality, no. I've found that it really isn't too much trouble to draw the pri/control screens manually. At least in my experience, having done about 15 SCI 1.1 screens.
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Offline Kawa

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #354 on: September 27, 2015, 08:26:21 PM »
Me neither. I've found the biggest trouble to be drawing the visual screen, EGA or VGA.

Offline MusicallyInspired

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #355 on: September 27, 2015, 08:35:06 PM »
I suppose I could always do an import for SCI0 visual, change them to priority/control commands, and then copy those commands into an SCI1.1 game.
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Offline troflip

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #356 on: September 29, 2015, 05:38:28 PM »
I'm not sure what to do about sync resource (this is lipsync data). To me, it seems really difficult and tedious to generate this data (it's basically a list of "tick count"/cel pairs - the cels being the various shapes of the mouth of the talker), and I'm not sure how to expose it in an editor. At the very least, I can let people enter this data manually. That's tedious, but I think trying to match up audio with a particular view cel is tedious anyway. I doubt many people would do this. Certainly it would be possible to try to analyze the waveform and map it to mouth shapes. If someone wants to write a tool that does this... lol

Well, regarding that last sentence, it turns out I found a nice little wrapper around Microsoft's speech recognition software that gives me a list of speech phonemes from a wav file. With the help of a settings file that maps the phonemes to a mouth view's cels, it makes it very easy to generate the sync resource. And it works pretty well, though I haven't tried it in game yet.

The only thing the programmer would have to do is:
- provide information that links a talker number to a view and loop.
- for each mouth view/loop, provide a mapping of 39 phonemes to cels in that loop

Once this is done, it is just the click of a button to generate the lipsync data for a piece of speech for a particular talker.

Check out my website: http://icefallgames.com
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Offline Kawa

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #357 on: September 29, 2015, 07:03:44 PM »
Well, regarding that last sentence, it turns out I found a nice little wrapper around Microsoft's speech recognition software that gives me a list of speech phonemes from a wav file.
That's evil.

I approve.

Offline MusicallyInspired

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #358 on: September 29, 2015, 08:06:18 PM »
I don't care that Microsoft is required, that's awesome.
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Offline troflip

Re: SCI Companion V3 - alpha build notes/bugs/feature requests
« Reply #359 on: September 29, 2015, 08:36:02 PM »
Shouldn't be any additional dependencies anyway, it uses SAPI 5.1, which I think is included with Win XP and up.
Check out my website: http://icefallgames.com
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