Oolite Bulletins

OSX has some great support for speech synthesis - this might be an easy future feature to add vocalisation of all the inflight messages.
Something to Consider if debugging is boring the devlopers....

say -v Victoria "Yehuh, I'll maybe turn that on."

But I'm I'm not bored yet!

EDIT: Okay, I got bored and added it.

It has to do a few translations (Cr into credits s. into seconds, that sort of thing) but works reasonably well and certainly makes stepping away from the keyboard during long fly-ins easier. It uses by default the voice you choose in System Preferences.

Question:

Should this be a game option ('Speech Synthesis ON/OFF') or an extra piece of equipment ('Speech Synthesiser 250 credits'). I presume most people will want it turned OFF by default.

Definitely need the on/off choice
Possibly wants to be a purchase. Depends whether it adds a dimension to the gameplay. If it doesn't, why would you spend hard earned space credits on it? If it does, how much is it worth?

Spoken Text ON/OFF now in the options screen.

Surprisingly that took about twice as much code as getting the spoken messages working in the first place, about 20 lines of code in all.

Gotta love Apple's APIs!

Excellent work! It's nice to see elite developers interested in what the fans have to say, for a change (yes this means you mr braben).

Thanks a million.

OK, me again dragging up OLD threads, please bear with me!

In the PC version of Oolite there is no On/Off option, or indeed and synth speech!

Was it removed or just never there in the PC version? OXP anyone?

There's no speech synthesis in the PC or Linux versions. I've looked into it, and there seem to be no easy to incorporate text-to-speech libs we can easily use.

Hmmm, annoying.

I do remember seeing a possible one we could use a while back, I will hunt it down and let you know.

aegidian wrote:

There's no speech synthesis in the PC or Linux versions. I've looked into it, and there seem to be no easy to incorporate text-to-speech libs we can easily use.

For the Linux version, what about flite ? (Flite = Festival runtime). Of course, one could probably use Festival but that would be overkill IMHO.
Documentation : http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/doc/index.html

For WindowsXP there is the included MS Speech available, which can be used to synthesize speech. Dev API description and tools downloadable free of charge from Microsoft.

Dutch

Milinks's custom sounds.oxp gives speach for the PC.

I don't think the speach is native on the PC, but Milinks OXP is pretty cool (in part uses the female computer voice from Star Treck Voyger).

Although wonderfull, that OXP needs some work.

Specifically
the long samples that continue running after a cancelation. (hyperspace)
and the fuelscoop. (containercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainercontainer)

which could be a nice soundbite if it sounded only if a container is succesfully scooped, but currently it loops when tractor-ing and also when scooping fuel from a sun.
Is it not possible to link these soundsamples to the yellow console messages?

Arexack, the problems you mention are known limitations of the sound customisation mechanism, i.e. nothing that can easily be fixed on the OXP.

I know it had been mentioned before. Just couldnt resist.

The 'container' sample could be easilly replaced by a 'whoo-whoo' sound. IMO

Digging up an old thread…

I've thrown together a quick patch which adds speech when running on (at least) Linux. It currently only works with English text: I fully expect that it will mispronounce translations.

The phonemes which espeak uses differ somewhat from what Apple's speech synth uses, so I've added support for files named "espeak_pronunciation_guide.plist".

To make use of the patch, you'll need libespeak and you'll need to append "libespeak=yes" to the make command; on Debian(-like) systems, install libespeak-dev then build and install the Oolite .debs as normal.

espeak's licensing is GPL v3 or later.

Download link.

Speech support is standard with all versions of Vista (and windows 7).

If I remember the MSD article correctly it's uses the bell labs phonic system as standard and can be accessed directly in the os layer with out the need of a additional library. I think for XP systems there is a free library that can be installed that uses the same commands.