Messages

Now it's even more mysterious 
Preprocessing does not do anything with or care about brackets and semicolons.

I think you should post a code snippet, if you can, starting from the command before line 774 up to line 777 (inclusive). Not because of the plugin, but rather to check if there is a bug with the AGS compiler.

Yes, it parses built-in speech functions that have a string as a parameter and I recently added custom functions, but cases like these won't give proper results.
It's not easy to implement with static analysis, I may be able to create an interpreter, but it's more effort and it will never cover all use cases. The editor has similar limitations, probably for the same reasons. So I think we need to either provide best practices with the current capabilities or establish a new, but standard way to cover speech.

EDIT: Actually, when I think about it, one of the reasons I created the plugin is for madradubhcroga's use case - so there won't be a need to chase for bad text in all the scripts 

You could code a substitute.
In a new script, put this in .ash:

Code: ags

import void DisplayRM(int x);

and .asc:

Code: ags

String rm[200];

void game_start() {
  rm[0] = "A sword hangs over the fireplace.";
  rm[1] = "...";
  ...
}

void DisplayRM(int x) {
  DisplayAt(20, rm[x]);
}

Then use

  DisplayRM(0);

Bonus: if you do it that way, you can customize the way the message is displayed as much as you want.

Is this a best current practice? How would one create a voice acting script after the game is all developed? (or is there a feature for this which I missed?)

Khris is right of course, it shouldn't have compiled and the build command should have pointed to more or less the right place.
Since you used the plugin to check this (which is a cool use which I haven't considered) I wonder if the detailed info window gave the bad line. It should print each line number and column which wasn't parsed correctly, but it may print out a lot more information than you need and not necessarily in line order. I added it just for plugin debugging purposes, but still, I'm curious.

Feel free to drop me a line to tell me how it goes.
I assume the txt file contains the commented line and I also assume it's sorted by script file. If that's the case, try sorting/filtering in the plugin per file and see if the txt file reports more lines than the plugin. It might just help find that rogue line.

Do you have any specific editor plugin question? I used the sample as a baseline for the plugin and other than some features that would have made it a bit easier it was quite straightforward (but it's always possible you have a use case I didn't have to cover).

A new version of the plugin has been released. Main changes are the ability to specify the speech line number in a parameter and fix for the parsing of 9-verb module.
Thank you all for using the plugin and for the feedback. I now feel confident enough to call this version 1.0. You can download it here.

Quick question, now that the forum has been upgraded, should this (and similar requests) go to the Editor Development subforum in order to be considered or is this the right place?

I have just downloaded the plugin and I love it! This is very very useful for me. I recently wanted to change the "in-game" name of a certain character and this is perfect for finding all instances where I used it.

The only annoying thing is that it has problems with all sorts of header files. For example, it doesn't accept the gui scripts in my game (LucasArts 9-verb gui template).

Thanks. I found a typo in my code which causes the error in the 9-verb module. I'll have it fixed in the next version, which I plan to release in the coming days.
If you need it sooner, I can send you a pre-release, PM me your email if that's the case.

[Suggestion:]

Been playing with this tonight to do some proof reading and I have to say it's fantastic

Thanks! It's always great to know it helps.

Suggestion: it would be good if the columns could be rearranged

I'll look into it, I used an external component for the grid, I'll see if it has support for this.

Unexpected behaviour: when resizing columns, the table automatically scrolls to the top.

I'll check that, probably also related to the grid, but the grid is open source so worst case I can fix it there. I tried to minimize the need to resize by making sure the text column does word wrapping. 2 questions:
1. What column did you try to resize?
2. Was any line other than the first line selected when you resized the column?

Great! Out of interest can this be used to export all the lines of dialog to a text file or something? I'm not fully competent with speech in AGS games so perhaps there is another way to do that. But for what it is this looks very useful.

Edit: I ask about the export because the data the plugin provides looks like it'd be useful if it could be exported.

Thanks and I already plan to add it in the future, but the feedback certainly helps me knowing this is needed.

I'm focusing at the moment on addressing missing functionality that prevents usage and of course if anyone finds critical bugs. There are already several developers able to use it for their games, but I'd like to see more work with it out-of the-box. Once I see developers are able to work with existing features I'll start implementing additional features.

Thanks for the info and feedback.
Yes, I can add the additional parameter. Once I add it, it will be for all function types, so it would cover both use cases.

I would need some time though, it's not complex, but other unrelated things are stacking up. I'll certainly give it priority the moment I manage to sneak in some time.

I haven't seen any evidence of your stupidity, only the contrary.

Adding a dialog to the internal list should work, I think you need to take care of the ID and name, but it's not difficult. So it should at the very least save your data.

The tree is trickier, I believe each component updates this manually, so I don't think there is an official way to do this. You can try to force a refresh, maybe by creating an event that this component would respond to or hack the tree and add a node, but you'll need to do this exactly the same way the dialog component does and update your plugin if they change it. So for this part it's far from perfect.

Another possible problem may be if the dialog is being edited by the user, you can either tell the user to make sure dialogs are not opened or maybe the same refresh method for the tree can cover this one.

Are there any other dialog editors that have been fully integrated into AGS' user interface?

As I've mentioned earlier in this thread, part of the reason why there's no editor plugin version of this is that AGS editor plugins can't modify dialog scripts. At least I found no way of doing that. Now that the editor is open source, it would be possible to change this but I guess the powers that be must first organize the open source AGS project somehow. So yeah, I don't think there are any dialog editor plugins out there yet.

You probably tried to change Dialog.Text which is read only.
Dialog.script is editable and changes the dialog (just tried it).

Great! I just released another version, fixes a few errors. Just to make things easier (and to refrain from multiple threads for every version) I updated the first entry of the original post, it's going to be easier to follow-up.

For the latest version information, please refer to http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=45622.0

An updated version of Speech Center plugin is available here.

The main change from the last version is that now it supports custom functions, as requested by some members in this forum. You are encouraged to try it out and comment.

Based on previous feedback, I plan to work next on voice actor script or translation, so any input on those or other features that may be useful would be greatly appreciated.

For those who did not follow the previous release, the plugin is aimed towards assisting with validation of the game text and speech. It's an editor plugin, not a game plugin, thus it doesn't break compatibility when porting to multiple platforms.

It has the ability to scan the scripts (dialogs, global scripts and room scripts), and display all the speech line it finds in those scripts (such as the text used in the character Say function). You can double click the line to go directly to the corresponding script line.
You can sort, filter and search through the lines using the interface.

If the lines are numbered then it offers additional functionality:
The Speech directory is scanned for each line and provides info on the file status. You can playback the speech from the editor itself. You can also mark whether those lines are correct (there are 2 checkboxes for each line, one for the voice file and the other text).

To make sure the plugin is non-intrusive as possible, it only loads the data if you click on the refresh button, thus it should not affect something you do, unless you are actually doing something at the plugin screen. It should also have the capacity to handle thousands of lines, which should cover even text-heavy games.

Adding another row might not be that easy, I'll check. I'm thinking perhaps the text should appear when the row is selected. Something similar to auto-play, or perhaps even the same window, by changing the text that appears in the playback to the translated one.
Playback today is enabled even if there is no actual speech, it displays the text, the character talk view and if you playback more than a single line, it progresses based on the length of the sentence. Thus adding the translation there would be very consistent with the existing gui as well as in-line with AGS' implementation of translation (where the script has one language and translations are matched with the original text).

I'll have to check if any of this makes sense when I get to the actual development, sometimes it's easier to know if these things work out after actually trying them.

Sounds interesting. I took a quick look at AGS' plugin interface and it should be possible to add this.
So the basic idea is to display the text per line and add another column for the selected translation, correct?
One question - is the speech file relevant in that mode? I did not see support in AGS for multiple languages for voice recording, but maybe I missed it.

Thanks for the info, I see the problem with the module and will fix it. You can ignore this error (as you did) since this specific module doesn't include any text lines anyway.

You can get a better view of the icon at the about dialog (right click on the tree). It's just a public domain icon I used, I'm a programmer, not much of an artist to draw my own icons
(well, I did the filter icon, but it was actually created using code)

EDIT: fixed it and uploaded a new version, in case the error annoys you

right now I have no idea what the plugin is supposed to be doing (I haven't downloaded it and it doesn't become clear from reading this thread).

The plugin is aimed towards assisting with validation of the game text and speech. It's only an editor plugin, not a game plugin.
It has the ability to scan the scripts (dialogs, global scripts and room scripts), and display all the speech line it finds in those scripts (such as the text used in the character Say function). You can double click the line to go directly to the corresponding script line.
You can sort, filter and search through the lines using the interface.

If the lines are numbered then it offers additional functionality:
The Speech directory is scanned for each line and provides info on the file status. You can playback the speech from the editor itself. You can also mark whether those lines are correct (there are 2 checkboxes for each line, one for the voice file and the other text).

To make sure the plugin is non-intrusive as possible, it only loads the data if you click on the refresh button, thus it should not affect something you do, unless you are actually doing something at the plugin screen. It should also have the capacity to handle thousands of lines, which should cover even text-heavy games.

Here are 2 screenshots I provided in a previous thread, which would hopefully make my explanation clearer, and if there are additional questions I'll be happy to answer them.