Let's see: You're going to cut the cost, cut the size, improve the
performance, make it more to the gamer's liking as far as speech is
concerned, and decrease the development time. No complaint from this end,
anyway. (grin)
---
Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Ward" <thomasward1...@gmail.com>
To: "Gamers Discussion list" <gamers@audyssey.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 10:07 AM
Subject: [Audyssey] Why SAPI Output is Superior
Hi everyone,
This morning I had some time on my hands so I began really working on
Mysteries of the Ancients, the new version, and decided to add SAPI 5
support to help expedite the development process. What I discovered
when I compiled and ran this very early prototype is that the SAPI
support works far better than any release before, and I realized to my
amazement it really is the best solution for speaking menus, status
messages, etc for a number of reasons.
1. It takes less development time to call a single function to pass a
string of text to a SAPI speak function than it does to record, edit,
load, and play a speech clip. Basically, if you got a game idea in
mind you can really speed up the process just by using the SAPI voices
installed on the machine.
2. It saves drive space, takes up less CPU power, and less memory. In
the last beta of Mysteries of the Ancients,beta 22, the Speech
directory was 36 MB. Now, of course, using SAPI it will take up less
drive space as well as be a smaller download. I also noticed looking
at the over all system performance that it uses less memory so that's
another reason to use SAPI.
3. Its customizable. This probably goes without saying, but using SAPI
voices you can change the voice, pitch, rate, and volume of the
default voice in the Control Panel meaning if you don't like the
default voice you can always switch to a different one or buy a better
one.
This was always a bit of a problem in prior test releases. The voice
was too fast, too slow, it had an accent, or whatever and I was going
crazy trying to find a voice that everyone liked. So using SAPI you,
the end user, can set it up anyway you like in the Windows Control
Panel.
4. Its very inexpensive. If you hire voice actors to read the menus,
status messages, items, etc that can cost lots of money not to mention
require time to edit and use. Even if a developer uses Acapela Heather
or Nuance Tom legally the developer is suppose to pay royalties for
the use of that voice in a commercial product. This way the developer
isn't using the voices directly and the customer fits the bill for any
high quality voices like Ivona, Nuance TTS, Cepstral, etc.
5. Its very dynamic and flexible. With prerecorded speech there is
always the problem of speaking dynamic content like a player's name or
speaking a message with a number of variables involved. Here you just
create a message string using the dynamic content, give it to sAPI,
and forget about it.
For example, in my wrestling game there are a number of messages of
play by play action like this. "John Cena quickly moves forward, picks
up the Rock, and slams him to the mat." In a case like this the speech
output has to be flexible enough to use the same message from match to
match only substituting the name of the performers in the match. You
can't really do that easily with prerecorded speech clips, but you can
easily do it with SAPI just by using a couple of string variables in
place of the performers name. Therefore it doesn't matter who is in
the match it will always speak the information no matter what, and the
developer doesn't have to spend a month writing a bunch of if
statements to load this or that speech clip on demand. :D
So I think after seeing the results in person I think I am going to be
using SAPI output from now on in my Windows games. I only regret I
didn't do this earlier. I could have saved myself a lot of wasted time
and energy trying to make prerecorded speech clips.
Cheers!
---
Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org
If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to
gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org.
You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at
http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org.
All messages are archived and can be searched and read at
http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the
list,
please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
---
Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org
If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org.
You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at
http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org.
All messages are archived and can be searched and read at
http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list,
please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
