Voice speech translations

[LucasFan]

Voice speech

The file name is made up of the first four letters of the character's script name, then an ID number. For example,
ego: &10 "Hi! How are you?"
david: &7 "I'm fine."
This would play EGO10.WAV with the first line, and DAVI7.WAV with the second.

It's maybe a stupid question but how should that work with translations? 

[..]

I presume it would work the same

Well if you were going to translate the text youd have to translate the voice files, so you could record all the translations and then translate the text as normal. I think? But I dont think an AGS Game has been translated yet with voice files.

[Scorpiorus]

Well, since all speech sounds are archived into a speech.vox file you can provide one along with the normal .tra files.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I don't think you can use speech packs with translations.

[Scorpiorus]

What's wrong with them? I see no reason why you can't do it.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Well, KQVGA doesn't work with voice pack and translations...

[Hollister_Man unplugged]

Well, they may have disabled it, cause there isn't a translated speech pak avalable.  Therefore, if you're using a translation, it won't play the voice files.  I could be wrong, though.

[LucasFan]

What's wrong with them? I see no reason why you can't do it.

Hehe… I'm stupid or what? How do you put two different Wavs with the same name into one speech.vox?!?Ã,  :o

[Scorpiorus]

I think it's because there are no voice packs for other languages in KQVGA.
I see that the problem may arise with having more than one speech.vox file in the same folder, since AGS would only check for speech.vox. I don't know if there is a way to tell AGS which one to use but a workaround would be to have speech.eng and speech.ger and copy one or another to speech.vox before launching AGS game. I appreciate it requires some additional work (like writing a setup or maybe a simple batch file) but it can be accomplished.

EDIT:
LucasFan: I didn't see your post, so you don't need to put them into a single vox. You can have two .vox files. There only issue, as I said above, is to how let AGS know which one to use.

[LucasFan]

Ok, so it's not possible yet. That's what I wanted to know. Thx. :-)

[Scorpiorus]

Hehe, in fact it's possible, just not something AGS handles completely by itself.

[ilSilente]

I don't know if there is a way to tell AGS which one to use but a workaround would be to have speech.eng and speech.ger and copy one or another to speech.vox before launching AGS game. I appreciate it requires some additional work (like writing a setup or maybe a simple batch file) but it can be accomplished.

Two simple solutions:
1) Downloadable speech packs. Of course players need to install the wanted language pack. In this way spoken dialogs aren't influenced(*) by translation selected in setup.
2) One huge SPEECH.VOX file containing every spoken dialog. For example, for each character number from 0 to 999 are english sentences; 1000 to 1999 french; 2000 to 2999 italian, etc... Then, when translating the txt source, for every talked string, translator must point to the number relative to destination language. [maybe this solution is not suitable for download, uh?? ]

Was I clear enough?

influenced: does this word really exists in english vocabulary? Pheeww... excuse me for my poor english

[Scorpiorus]

Yeah, having all the speech in a single vox is not suitable since if I need one particular translation I still have to download a 200Mb vox file just because it contains speech in other languages.

The problem with the 1st is that the vox is not linked with a transaltion (.tra) file, so yes, a user (or some setup) have to overwrite current speech.vox with another one.

Could it be a good idea to have an entry in the .cfg file that specifies what .vox file is currently selected so AGS would use it to play speech?

[ilSilente]

Could it be a good idea to have an entry in the .cfg file that specifies what .vox file is currently selected so AGS would use it to play speech?

A good idea could be having (for example) italian.tra + italian.vox, french.tra + french.vox, japanese.tra + japanese.vox and so on, so that AGS could automatically use the right vox file depending on the translation selected by the user. I think this is a useful suggestion for next AGS' versions. Isn't it?

[Scorpiorus]

Hehe, yep. Maybe it's just me who need having messages in one language but voice speeching in another.

That's a good idea, so we can have a speech.vox as a default language and others depending on the translation=... entry in the cfg.

[Pumaman]

Since nobody has yet made speech packs in multiple languages, I haven't seen a need to implement this. It's a possibility for future though.

[tiagocorreia]

We are going to have this in near future, since we made a portuguese version first, and now we are translate it to english. Almost all the text is translated.
I think the natural way for the voice, is to have for each language it own VOX package. But the solution provided below, it seems nice.

2) One huge SPEECH.VOX file containing every spoken dialog. For example, for each character number from 0 to 999 are english sentences; 1000 to 1999 french; 2000 to 2999 italian, etc... Then, when translating the txt source, for every talked string, translator must point to the number relative to destination language. [maybe this solution is not suitable for download, uh?? ]

[GarageGothic]

It's bad enough that voice packs are often bigger than the game itself but please don't make us download speech packs for languages we don't even understand. It WOULD be nice if AGS supported multiple speech packs, sure but I worry that it would lead to bloated distribution files where you download three times more data than you need.

If you distribute the game on cd-rom or other format that doesn't need download, most install makers such as InnoSetup should make it quite easy to let the player choose his language on install and copy the correct speech.vox file to the game directory. For any web based distribution, separate downloadable speech files is the only sensible thing.

[Pumaman]

This would be possible to implement, so if you really are going to create a game with multiple language speech packs, I can look into it.

[strazer]

Tracker'd: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/tracker.php?action=detail&id=583