Spoken messages [to the devs, hopefully before 1.75 airs]

[Zireael]

I have a couple of comments regarding spoken messages. These are not bugs per se, but I want them to be noticed by the devs....

Aboard the Black Widow...
- I've got him in my crosshairs! What's the reading, Sola?
- Identification system active. Identification system locked onto Fer-de-Lance. Identification...
- Blast, can't you just say "ID"? "Identification" is too long, and we have to pinpoint targets quickly!
- No can do, Cap'n, I have to report what the ship systems give me...

Few minutes later...
- Arrrghhh!...
- Are you alright, Captain?...


The problem is exactly as noted in the dialogue. Since I noticed that the text spoken does not exactly (word-for-word) match what is displayed, (and since the spoken messages seem to be said [in Ooniverse] by your second or gunman or whatever) I suggest the following little changes. The reasons are two: first, the spoken messages overlap often (or break off suddenly); two, they get a little repetitive (enough for my Mum to notice ).

"" denotes displayed message
<> denotes spoken message

1. Make the voice say <ID> instead of <identification> in the messages regarding "Identification" (or "Ident") system. (<identification> is the one word that gets overlapped or cut off the most often, being so long!)
2. Possibly omit the <system> from the spoken message
3. Say <on> instead of <active>, and <off> instead of <deactivated>
4. "Thanks!" is spoken as <thanks exclamation>, while "No!" is spoken as <no>. Either add the <exclamation>, or get rid of it. Makes no sense to have two different spoken messages in such a case...

And this one is just for the sake of Ooniverse immersion:
1. Why isn't the countdown for witchspace voiced? Now it's just <Witchspace to X in sixteen seconds...> and nothing more. Why not make the voice say it and then <fifteen... fourteen... thirteen... twelve...> etc. etc. all the way down to zero?

I hope at least some of those five get noticed and implemented before the 1.75 comes out.
Thanks in advance,
Zireael
P.S. I'm not a native speaker of English, I might have gotten some word(s) wrong (not really, just in case).

[another_commander]

All except the countdown one, which is hardcoded the way it is, can be achieved by simple edits in descriptions.plist and speech_pronunciation_guide.plist. No need to make any changes to the game for this.

[Zireael]

Didn't know, thanks, will try.

Maybe those changes could be made to the game as it is, specifically the "identification" (no. 1) and countdown. I'm not a fan of editing things, as I worry I'll wreck something.

[JensAyton]

The <thanks exclamation> thing looks like bug, so it can be fixed for 1.75. However, it doesn’t happen under Mac OS X, so I can’t do it reliably.

[Zireael]

I looked through the speech_pronunciation_guide.plist and I don't know heads or tails of it, so if somebody was so nice and told me what to do in order to achieve pts. 1-3 of my original post, I'd be grateful...

BTW another bug. With Bounty Scanner OXP the voice says the "Cr" after the bounty as <cr>, not <credits>, as it should if I understand the speech_pronunciation_guide.plist correctly...

[another_commander]

<Thanks exclamation> fixed in r4353.

[JensAyton]

BTW another bug. With Bounty Scanner OXP the voice says the "Cr" after the bounty as <cr>, not <credits>, as it should if I understand the speech_pronunciation_guide.plist correctly...

Looking at the script, it seems Bounty Scanner writes credit values without a space before the “cr”. speech_pronunciation_guide.plist can’t reliably identify this case. I can see several workarounds:

• Add a space.
• Use a ₢ (or €) sign – although I don’t know if this will work with espeak, there should probably be spaces around the “credits” string in the rules for those.
• Add a speech_pronunciation_guide.plist with strings for “0cr”, “1cr” … “9cr”.

I just noticed that strings produced by formatCredits() and formatInteger() aren’t read properly by OS X speech synthesis. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to fix this; it would require everything that produces spoken text to take an extra string with a speakable value. (Alternatively, a formatted text object could be introduced that allows a spoken value to be associated with spans of text.) This is definitely not something that can be done before MNSR, and my gut feeling is that speech recognition isn’t sufficiently widely used to revert to less legible number formatting. A workaround would be a small OXP to use unspaced formatting for those who disagree. :-/

[Zireael]

What am I doing wrong?

Part of my descriptions.plist I put into /AddOns/Config:

"ident-on" = "ID system active.";
"ident-off" = "ID system deactivated.";

Relevant part of speech_pronunciation_guide.plist I put in the same place:

(
Identification,
"[[inpt PHON]]AIdI[[inpt TEXT]]",
),
(
Ident,
Identification
),

Does not work. "Identification" is still both displayed and spoken.
Some help would be appreciated!
Zireael

[Commander McLane]

Have you held down SHIFT while restarting Oolite? You need to do this every time you make a change to a plist or script.

[Zireael]

I held SHIFT, and nothing happened.

[Commander McLane]

Did you make any syntax error in your plist, causing it to be completely disregarded by Oolite? Your log should tell you about this.

[Zireael]

Turns out I was holding SHIFT too shortly

Logs show nothing out of the ordinary.

Bottom line I arrived at is: if I tweak the descriptions.plist (keeping the tweaked speech_pronunciation_guide) to read "ID" instead of "Identification" in the displayed messages, they are voiced correctly.
If I remove this tweaked plist (but keep the tweaked speech_pronunciation_guide), the voices overlap (giving me both <ID> and <Identification> at the same time.
I don't fancy having a tweaked descriptions.plist (what I wanted was original displayed messages read as <ID>), so any help?

[Zireael]

One more bit: One of the distress calls involves SOS. I think it's written the way I just did here, not with dots in between. Can somebody confirm it? Because then we'd have to delete the confusing dots.

[JensAyton]

Strictly, it’s written SOS with a bar above it, indicating that it’s a [wp]prosign[/wp] representing the Morse sequence ···---··· (as opposed to the letters S, O, S, which are ··· --- ··· with a short pause between each). Barring that (ha ha), it’s just “SOS”. It isn’t an abbreviation, so “S.O.S.” doesn’t really make sense.

However, the use of “S.O.S.” in [beg-for-mercy] is Officially Traditional. :-)