Voice acting in Space Quest V - Part 2

[Kawa]

I agree, but also it's "flair'.

[MusicallyInspired]

That's what I said...

[Charles]

Looks like he's completed his SQV Voice Acting mod.  I'm eager to try it out... not sure I ever finished SQ5 now that I think of it... seems like an excellent opportunity to try.

https://github.com/cdb-boop/Space-Quest-V-Voice-Acting-Mod

[Collector]

I see by his readme.md that he tried to register here, but do not see any account requests, nor do I see any users by the same user name as his repo account.

[cdb-boop]

Hi everybody. Looks like I got in.

I wanted to announce it here first but... grab your mop! Voice acting in Space Quest 5!

There was a lot of banging my head against a wall for days at a time trying to debug the code, and so I just wanted to say thanks to the people here for the bits and pieces of information on how to get the code working. I swear half the bugs I encountered were caused by some issue with decompilation. Admittedly, I changed a few minor things (e.g. restoring the cursor after a message, capping the EVA busy wait to 60fps) so I hope you guys don't mind.

Anyways, I know the voice acting is not perfect, but I have a bad habit of starting big projects and never getting them done, so I drew a line in the sand and released it.

If you have any questions or constructive criticism, I'm open talking or listening. Also, there's a nagging issue with loading saved games in ScummVM that I'd appreciate some help resolving.

[lskovlun]

If you have any questions or constructive criticism, I'm open talking or listening. Also, there's a nagging issue with loading saved games in ScummVM that I'd appreciate some help resolving.

Sure! I haven't contributed any code of consequence to ScummVM since Christmas 2018, but if we find out that there's a bug in ScummVM I'm sure I can get hold of them.

[cdb-boop]

Thanks lskovlun! Not 100% sure if it is a ScummVM issue, but it didn't happen in DOSBox or DOSBox-X. Maybe a decompilation-recompilation bug?

In order to reproduce it, you just need to save the game and then load the save. Once you do that, you'll notice that all the text boxes are missing.

I would have supported voice-only, except the text boxes are required for the branching dialogue options.

Last time I tried, I also had some trouble overriding the voice/text settings in ScummVM, so maybe the issue is somehow related to that? Overriding it to have text-only worked, but the voiced options didn't behave as expected.

[lskovlun]

I can't run the patched code at all. Neither with SSCI nor with ScummVM. I'm running a Linux system (so NSIS patching via Wine, not sure if that works), and maybe the patch isn't for the exact version of SQ5 that I have? In any case, I can't investigate for now.

EDIT: Actually, SSCI does run, there's just no sound. And ScummVM bugs out with these messages:

Code: [Select]

User picked target 'sq5-1' (engine ID 'sci', game ID 'chest')...
WARNING: Could not get volume for resource 0, VolumeID 0!
WARNING: Error 6 occurred while reading text.51969 from resource file resource.000: Unknown compression method!
WARNING: resMan: Failed to read text.51969!
WARNING: Couldn't identify game 'chest' for the engine 'sci'.!
(I cloned the game entry for my original SQ5 copy. I have no idea why it refers to 'chest', which was one of the bonus things they included with later games)

[lskovlun]

The version file from my version says 1.04, what's yours?

[cdb-boop]

Same 1.04.

Did you download the audio files?

[Collector]

I see that you used VPatch to generate your patch files. I am working from the GOG release since this is the version that most will probably be using, though most editions of the various releases use 1.04. I had to fiddle around with generating a RESOURCE.CFG since the patch does not copy any of the Sierra installer files or driver files. Simply copying INSTALL.EXE,  INSTALL.HLP, INSTALL.SCR and INSTALL.TXT does not work  because the installer fails with the inclusion of the GUS driver. since the INSTALL.HLP is missing the gmgus.drv entry. I am not sure that the inclusion of the GUS driver really adds anything over the GM driver.

I am curious about the SCI patches. The installation media does not include a "PATCHES" subdirectory, so all of the original included are just in the base of the SQ5 of the installation media. Did you repack all of these files, even the ones that were not changed by your patch. Also, did you include the NRS patch? There is also the official SQ5PAT patch for 1.03. Was this included? Perhaps a list of the SCI patches you created for this project?

I would consider writing one of my DOSBox installers for this but I need some these SCI patch questions answered.

[cdb-boop]

I'm working from the SQ5 from the collection from Steam.

What you're asking is going a bit over my head. I saw your suggestion on here and tried to make an exe for patching. If you look at the project page on GitHub, I included the bat file to generate the patch files and the nsi file to make the exe.

Here's my directory setup if that helps. It's the three patch directories, two script files, the generated exe and the original game files in the root.

[Collector]

Were any of the patch files in the game's base directory modified? I guess I mostly want to know what SCI patch files you created/edited.

[cdb-boop]

I decompiled the whole thing and I might have needed to remove the patch files. My memory is a bit fuzzy because I got the driver working back in December 2023. In my current development directory there are no more patch files.

[Charles]

I had to fiddle around with generating a RESOURCE.CFG since the patch does not copy any of the Sierra installer files or driver files. Simply copying INSTALL.EXE,  INSTALL.HLP, INSTALL.SCR and INSTALL.TXT does not work  because the installer fails with the inclusion of the GUS driver. since the INSTALL.HLP is missing the gmgus.drv entry.

The installer can read external driver.hlp files. I've attached one that can be just dropped into your SQ5 folder that will make the installer work properly.