Topic: Speech/Text Management Interest

[SpeechCenter]

Greetings,

I recently started an editor plugin that manages the text and speech aspect for AGS editor. It allows scanning the code, viewing in a single screen the various text message, checking whether the text line has a corresponding speech file and playback of course within AGS itself and there's more.

Apart from a few touch-ups and maybe some follow-up features it's not too far from being ready for first release, but is that of any interest to this community?

I'm asking mainly to see if this is not a waste of your time as well as mine, I would like to know whether it's something of value.

Please let me know, I promise not to be offended if you flame this idea. Your opinion is appreciated.

Many thanks.

[SpeechCenter]

Here are a couple of images to show what I had in mind.
If someone wants to try it, let me know soon and I'll post the plugin in a few days.
BTW, the intent is to have it free of course

Thanks

An example of how speech can be managed. There are intentional errors to present that this is simple to detect and manage. Check-boxes assist in marking lines in case they cannot be corrected immediately.



Demo Quest: it doesn't have speech, but you can still easily traverse through the text, filter based on various fields, sort and navigate to the actual script. It's build to scale, so performance should be good even when thousands of speech lines are involved.

[Scavenger]

This looks amazing! I was missing an in-ags way of handling speech. I like that it tells you whether a file is there or not, and what to name it. Can you edit the lines from this menu, or do you need to go into the script itself to do that?

In all, this looks very snazzy. I'd certainly find use for it!

[SpeechCenter]

This looks amazing! I was missing an in-ags way of handling speech. I like that it tells you whether a file is there or not, and what to name it. Can you edit the lines from this menu, or do you need to go into the script itself to do that?

If you double click a row in the table, it opens the script and focuses on the corresponding script line, and then you can edit it. I preferred not to have build-in edit features at first just a a precaution, since it requires extensive testing on my part making sure the plugin doesn't break anything, but it's technically feasible. I have a list additional features which I prefer to implement based on user requirements rather than my own invented priorities, so it's important feedback for me.

In all, this looks very snazzy. I'd certainly find use for it!

Great! In that case I'll make sure to post it soon.

[Khris]

Looks great, and I'm sure lots of people are interested in this.

I guess there aren't that much people who browse the technical forum on a regular basis, so don't get discouraged by low number of replies.

[Snarky]

Looks quite interesting. I've been thinking about how AGS could be adapted to better handle translations, and my idea was to extract all strings into a resource file that you could view - and edit... but one thing at a time - like this, and have multiple ones for different languages. While this apparently only covers dialogue, it's a great start!

(In my mind there would also be a "comment" field so you could annotate the string with more context information - e.g. VA direction, or notes for the translator - and it would be structured so you could expand and collapse e.g. one particular conversation, or all the lines by one particular character. If your plug-in allows you to sort by any column, that gets you a lot of the way to that second part. I also think that ultimately the strings  should be in a standalone resource file, in some sort of text/XML format, so that you could edit it separately from the rest of the game project, and that when you edit the strings in-line in the code, the AGS editor should just pull it from there.)

I feel like there is something like this already, though? Didn't someone post a plug-in or standalone app to handle voice files?

[SpeechCenter]

Looks quite interesting. I've been thinking about how AGS could be adapted to better handle translations, and my idea was to extract all strings into a resource file that you could view - and edit... but one thing at a time - like this, and have multiple ones for different languages. While this apparently only covers dialogue, it's a great start!

Yes, my focus was at first on the speech-text correlation part. It should be very easy to add a comment field, maybe there would just be a question of UI here, the text field is designed to take up most of the width, a comment might be long too, so it would need to be convenient. Yes, a VA or translator would need the information separately, it's not likely many of them want or should have access to the game itself. The plugin information is stored in xml and I planned to have an export/import at some point (for a different reason), but we would need to better define the requirement for it to be helpful and effective for that use case. Perhaps it's best in a few days after I submit this.

I feel like there is something like this already, though? Didn't someone post a plug-in or standalone app to handle voice files?

hmmm... yes, I saw something after I have done most of the work. From what I've seen it's external and I think the two tools cover different aspects and needs. I'll gladly discuss this with the author of that tool to coordinate and cooperate.

[straydogstrut]

Wow, this looks fantastic!

I'll admit, I glanced at this when it first came up in Recent Posts the other day and didn't really get it, but looking at your screenshots now I can immediately understand this. I haven't worked on much so I haven't had to cope with lots of dialogue like other people around here, but I can really see the benefit of a tool like this. I know I would definitely use it. What a wonderful piece of work, thank you