Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 9/7/2013
Hi Tom, I am glad your starting to feel better! Bathrooms I think were supposed to be one of the most dangerous rooms in the house, next to the kitchen. I am shocked, but pleased you decided to flaunt your evolution thing with the new and improved wrestling game! I would have played the other one too, but I got to admit, I am super excited to hear this! al -Original Message- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Ward Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2013 6:04 PM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: [Audyssey] USA Games News 9/7/2013 USA Games News Sep. 7, 2013 Introduction Welcome gamers to the USA Games News. We know that it has been a very long time since our last news letter, and we felt it was a good time to send out a new one. So here we are with news and information about USA Games and our products. First, we would like to thank all of you who participated in our informal survey regarding the USA Games Evolution Engine a few days ago. We really valued your comments and suggestions, and your responses really helped give us some direction regarding our engine. More on that later. Second, I would like to state that I am personally doing a lot better than I have been for a long time. Just to recap last year I had a number of health related issues from the common cold to a more serious situation where I fell down while getting out of the bathtub and seriously injured my neck. After many months of rest and therapy I am now doing better than I have been in months. Although, I am not 100% back to normal I am able to get up and do some programming, and am slowly but surely getting our development back on some sort of schedule. I can not say for sure when any of our products will be ready for release, but it should be enough to know I am once again working on them. Evolution 3D A couple of days ago I sent out an informal survey regarding the future of the Evolution Engine. The basic point of the survey was to figure out if potential third-party game developers wanted it to remain primarily a C++ based engine as it is now, or if they wanted us to branch out into .NET or Python. The majority of you felt keeping it as a C++ library was the best option, and that it was not really in our best interests to put out a .NET or Python based engine at this time. This has really helped us feel satisfied that the direction we are heading is a good one for us and our customers, and for the foreseeable future we will continue to keep the Evolution Engine as a C++ library and will likely license it more as a C++ API rather than an engine as such. There are of course many good reasons to keep it as a C++ based library rather than rewrite it as a .NET library or as a Python module. The main one is we have already put more than two years into development, the engine library is stable, and rewriting it would only delay its release. For that reason alone it makes sense to keep what we have and license that. The other reasons include easier access to libraries and APIs for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Most libraries out there are designed for C or C++, and while there are usually wrappers for .NET or Python that is not always the case. In cases where there aren't available wrappers we would have to spend time writing them to make them available to our .NET or Python engine when they are instantly available to an engine written in C++. Factor in better performance, better security, and less dependencies need to be installed we are pretty sure the community is right. Keeping our engine written in C++ has many advantages and few disadvantages. The only downside to this is that it has a higher learning curve for new developers, but that could be overcome with some decent guides and documentation. After all, one of the purposes of writing the Evolution Engine was to simplify access to things like speech, input, sound, and so forth. All of those things are wrapped using wrapper classes that make it simple to get a basic game up and running in a few ours in C++ as all the low-level code for things like DirectInput, DirectSound, Sapi, etc is wrapped up in quick and easy to use classes. While not quite as easy as BGT, for example, it still would not be nearly as hard as doing it all from scratch. As many of you probably know all of our commercial games like Tomb Hunter and Raceway are written using the Evolution Engine, and it is fairly stable. So I think once we figure out a few things we may begin licensing it to potential third-parties sometime in the not too distant future. Tomb Hunter It has been several months since we have released a beta or any news on the progress of this game, and we decided to just give everyone a quick update on the progress of this game. We are in the process of updating the games story line, adding some new levels, but we would prefer to keep certain aspects quiet until we have something final for everyone to download and play. What we can say right
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 9/7/2013
hI The same here. I'm always happy to hear when someone is back up and running. I almost fell in the shower the other day but my wife was there to catch me, but I'll save that story for a nother site l o l. bfn James -- From: Allan Thompson allan1.thomp...@cox.net Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2013 5:43 PM To: 'Gamers Discussion list' gamers@audyssey.org Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 9/7/2013 Hi Tom, I am glad your starting to feel better! Bathrooms I think were supposed to be one of the most dangerous rooms in the house, next to the kitchen. I am shocked, but pleased you decided to flaunt your evolution thing with the new and improved wrestling game! I would have played the other one too, but I got to admit, I am super excited to hear this! al -Original Message- From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Ward Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2013 6:04 PM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: [Audyssey] USA Games News 9/7/2013 USA Games News Sep. 7, 2013 Introduction Welcome gamers to the USA Games News. We know that it has been a very long time since our last news letter, and we felt it was a good time to send out a new one. So here we are with news and information about USA Games and our products. First, we would like to thank all of you who participated in our informal survey regarding the USA Games Evolution Engine a few days ago. We really valued your comments and suggestions, and your responses really helped give us some direction regarding our engine. More on that later. Second, I would like to state that I am personally doing a lot better than I have been for a long time. Just to recap last year I had a number of health related issues from the common cold to a more serious situation where I fell down while getting out of the bathtub and seriously injured my neck. After many months of rest and therapy I am now doing better than I have been in months. Although, I am not 100% back to normal I am able to get up and do some programming, and am slowly but surely getting our development back on some sort of schedule. I can not say for sure when any of our products will be ready for release, but it should be enough to know I am once again working on them. Evolution 3D A couple of days ago I sent out an informal survey regarding the future of the Evolution Engine. The basic point of the survey was to figure out if potential third-party game developers wanted it to remain primarily a C++ based engine as it is now, or if they wanted us to branch out into .NET or Python. The majority of you felt keeping it as a C++ library was the best option, and that it was not really in our best interests to put out a .NET or Python based engine at this time. This has really helped us feel satisfied that the direction we are heading is a good one for us and our customers, and for the foreseeable future we will continue to keep the Evolution Engine as a C++ library and will likely license it more as a C++ API rather than an engine as such. There are of course many good reasons to keep it as a C++ based library rather than rewrite it as a .NET library or as a Python module. The main one is we have already put more than two years into development, the engine library is stable, and rewriting it would only delay its release. For that reason alone it makes sense to keep what we have and license that. The other reasons include easier access to libraries and APIs for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Most libraries out there are designed for C or C++, and while there are usually wrappers for .NET or Python that is not always the case. In cases where there aren't available wrappers we would have to spend time writing them to make them available to our .NET or Python engine when they are instantly available to an engine written in C++. Factor in better performance, better security, and less dependencies need to be installed we are pretty sure the community is right. Keeping our engine written in C++ has many advantages and few disadvantages. The only downside to this is that it has a higher learning curve for new developers, but that could be overcome with some decent guides and documentation. After all, one of the purposes of writing the Evolution Engine was to simplify access to things like speech, input, sound, and so forth. All of those things are wrapped using wrapper classes that make it simple to get a basic game up and running in a few ours in C++ as all the low-level code for things like DirectInput, DirectSound, Sapi, etc is wrapped up in quick and easy to use classes. While not quite as easy as BGT, for example, it still would not be nearly as hard as doing it all from scratch. As many of you probably know all of our commercial games like Tomb Hunter and Raceway are written using the Evolution Engine, and it is fairly stable. So I think once we figure out a few things we may begin
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 9/7/2013
Hi Al, Well, you are welcome. Switching Slam over to a C++ based game using the Evolution Engine was really the best choice. After you and others brought up the issues with Piledriver and Wrestling League Simulator I started to reconsider how relevant a text based interface is in today's gaming environment. Sure, it is simpler to make, but leaves a lot to be desired as we are talking about ignoring all kinds of modern features just for that simplicity such as using DirectInput for key pressed events, SAPI for speech output, and so on. It doesn't make sense to ignore all that when the way I am designing it now is better all around. Cheers! On 9/7/13, Allan Thompson allan1.thomp...@cox.net wrote: Hi Tom, I am glad your starting to feel better! Bathrooms I think were supposed to be one of the most dangerous rooms in the house, next to the kitchen. I am shocked, but pleased you decided to flaunt your evolution thing with the new and improved wrestling game! I would have played the other one too, but I got to admit, I am super excited to hear this! al --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Charles, Yeah, really. I wrote that news letter to keep everyone apprised of the situation, explain where we are, and there is always a few people who want to know why the game isn't available yet. Its certainly irritating having to explain the same thing over and over again. Cheers! On 4/6/2012 9:21 PM, Charles Rivard wrote: It's having to answer messages like this one, after already having explained what's holding up the availability of an awaited game that make developers want to either pull their hair out, quit, or both. --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Charles, Interesting. Well, right now developing software for smart phones isn't high on my list just because I'm so tied up with other projects. Although, eventually I'll probably look at marketing some games for the iPhone because its a huge market. On 4/6/2012 9:30 PM, Charles Rivard wrote: If you develop games for the iPhone, I'll gladly be a tester when the time comes. I currently have a 64 Gig iPhone 4S. --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
well, it looks like from some elements that there is a compitition going on against bgt... - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Audyssey Mailing List gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 8:57 AM Subject: [Audyssey] USA Games News USA Games News Mar. 29, 2012 Introduction Hello, gamers. Welcome to another edition of the USA Games News. As it has been quite a while since we've written one of these news letters and there have been several questions as to the fate of Mysteries of the Ancients over the last few months we only thought it was fair to bring you up to speed as to what we are doing and what you can expect from us in the future. However, it must be said up front that Mysteries of the Ancients is only one of several products currently in development. While we are continuing work on Mysteries of the Ancients, which has recently been renamed for reasons explained later in this news letter, we are also moving forward with a few other projects we've wanted to develop for a long time, but have been delayed time after time by Mysteries of the Ancients. So without further introduction here is the news. Ark of Hope Over the last month we have been developing a new game called Tomb Hunter: The Ark of Hope. This game is very similar to Mysteries of the Ancients, but has an all new storyline, new levels, and of course several updates that did not make it into the final beta of Mysteries of the Ancients. In this revised version of the game world re noun archeologist, Dr. Angela Carter, travels to Greece in search of Pandora's Box. Legend has it that when Pandora opened the box she let out all the evil and suffering in the world and closed the box trapping hope inside. Now, Dr Angela Carter is in search of Pandora's Box and intends to open it. However, her quest will not be an easy one. She must explore 12 Erie underground tombs filled with deadly traps including: fire pits, sharp metal spikes, falling rocks, deep chasms, rolling boulders, pits filled with boiling lava, and more. She must fight or flee several unworldly creatures such as: sword wielding skeletons, undead zombie warriors, flying harpies, and mighty centaurs. Along the way she will pick up and collect gold coins, ancient reed torches, precious jewels, and pieces of a long lost scroll that will lead her to Pandora's Box. As I said earlier many of the game play elements will be similar to Mysteries of the Ancients, but there will be differences as well. We've been updating some sounds, music, as well as redesigning all 12 levels from scratch. In addition to those changes we've been adding more traps, expanding the levels, and have been adding some extra features as well. So stay tuned for news as this project develops. Open G3D For the last couple of months we've been working on a project we feel will greatly aid audio game developers called Open G3D. We've actually been working on the project for a couple of years, but were unable to move forward with the project do to technical details. What we wanted was a game engine that met a number of criteria that were difficult to meet, and it took quite a lot of time and research to come up with a workable solution. In short, we wanted an engine that was easy to develop, an engine that was easy to use, and would work on Mac, Linux, Windows, and perhaps other platforms as well. Needless to say meeting this criteria was difficult to do because there is a lot of technical considerations involved in cross-platform game development in addition to the fact we wanted to create a user friendly experience for everyone. For example, the Genesis Engine that we use to develop Mysteries of the Ancients, Raceway, etc is written in C++. While C++ is arguably one of the best languages for professional game development, is considered to be the industry standard, it was never intended to be a language for beginners and therefore isn't very easy to work with. We wanted to eliminate this issue by using an off the shelf language that has a history of being simple and straight forward while not sacrificing the power of a full blown programming language like C++. At the same time we wanted to be able to design a build once run anywhere type engine so we could produce games for non-Windows platforms. As someone who does not regularly use Windows, preferring to use Linux instead, we are well aware of the fact that the desire for more games for Mac OS and Linux is growing. Unfortunately, since most of the accessible games and game development tools are designed for Windows those of us who choose to use Linux, Mac OS, or some other alternative operating system often get ignored. By producing a cross-platform solution we hope that we can make it both easier and less difficult for developers to
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
this is all well and good tom but when will the new MOTA be out? we heard it be out for years now if it iwll support mac go for it, :) On 30 Mar 2012, at 04:27, Thomas Ward wrote: USA Games News Mar. 29, 2012 Introduction Hello, gamers. Welcome to another edition of the USA Games News. As it has been quite a while since we've written one of these news letters and there have been several questions as to the fate of Mysteries of the Ancients over the last few months we only thought it was fair to bring you up to speed as to what we are doing and what you can expect from us in the future. However, it must be said up front that Mysteries of the Ancients is only one of several products currently in development. While we are continuing work on Mysteries of the Ancients, which has recently been renamed for reasons explained later in this news letter, we are also moving forward with a few other projects we've wanted to develop for a long time, but have been delayed time after time by Mysteries of the Ancients. So without further introduction here is the news. Ark of Hope Over the last month we have been developing a new game called Tomb Hunter: The Ark of Hope. This game is very similar to Mysteries of the Ancients, but has an all new storyline, new levels, and of course several updates that did not make it into the final beta of Mysteries of the Ancients. In this revised version of the game world re noun archeologist, Dr. Angela Carter, travels to Greece in search of Pandora's Box. Legend has it that when Pandora opened the box she let out all the evil and suffering in the world and closed the box trapping hope inside. Now, Dr Angela Carter is in search of Pandora's Box and intends to open it. However, her quest will not be an easy one. She must explore 12 Erie underground tombs filled with deadly traps including: fire pits, sharp metal spikes, falling rocks, deep chasms, rolling boulders, pits filled with boiling lava, and more. She must fight or flee several unworldly creatures such as: sword wielding skeletons, undead zombie warriors, flying harpies, and mighty centaurs. Along the way she will pick up and collect gold coins, ancient reed torches, precious jewels, and pieces of a long lost scroll that will lead her to Pandora's Box. As I said earlier many of the game play elements will be similar to Mysteries of the Ancients, but there will be differences as well. We've been updating some sounds, music, as well as redesigning all 12 levels from scratch. In addition to those changes we've been adding more traps, expanding the levels, and have been adding some extra features as well. So stay tuned for news as this project develops. Open G3D For the last couple of months we've been working on a project we feel will greatly aid audio game developers called Open G3D. We've actually been working on the project for a couple of years, but were unable to move forward with the project do to technical details. What we wanted was a game engine that met a number of criteria that were difficult to meet, and it took quite a lot of time and research to come up with a workable solution. In short, we wanted an engine that was easy to develop, an engine that was easy to use, and would work on Mac, Linux, Windows, and perhaps other platforms as well. Needless to say meeting this criteria was difficult to do because there is a lot of technical considerations involved in cross-platform game development in addition to the fact we wanted to create a user friendly experience for everyone. For example, the Genesis Engine that we use to develop Mysteries of the Ancients, Raceway, etc is written in C++. While C++ is arguably one of the best languages for professional game development, is considered to be the industry standard, it was never intended to be a language for beginners and therefore isn't very easy to work with. We wanted to eliminate this issue by using an off the shelf language that has a history of being simple and straight forward while not sacrificing the power of a full blown programming language like C++. At the same time we wanted to be able to design a build once run anywhere type engine so we could produce games for non-Windows platforms. As someone who does not regularly use Windows, preferring to use Linux instead, we are well aware of the fact that the desire for more games for Mac OS and Linux is growing. Unfortunately, since most of the accessible games and game development tools are designed for Windows those of us who choose to use Linux, Mac OS, or some other alternative operating system often get ignored. By producing a cross-platform solution we hope that we can make it both easier and less difficult for developers to produce more cross-platform games. In
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi, Hmmm...Well, I guess you could say that. However, the purpose of the engine I am working on is to enable developers to design free and open source games for other platforms like Linux and Mac OS that unfortunately do not get much attention from game developers. I suppose the engine could be used for commercial games as well, but I don't claim that the open source engine I'm working on will be as good as BGT. There are limitations in cross-platform development that make it difficult to get a feature by feature comparison on all platforms involved. Especially, when we are dealing with a generic game programming API like Pygame. For example, the mixer that comes with Pygame, SDL Mixer, is capable of basic 2d stereo panning and controling the volume of sounds, but there isn't any kind of true 3d virtualization and you can't set the pitch. Both of these are serious limitations in my book and require a more professional sound mixer like FMOD or perhaps OpenAL. Which are preferable for a game engine like this. So although I'm excited to see what can be done with the new engine its sadly not quite on par with BGT given the fact I'm using several open source APIs that are stable but not as feature filled as those available in commercial APIs. Cheers! On 4/3/2012 8:17 AM, Sid wrote: well, it looks like from some elements that there is a compitition going on against bgt... --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
I'm happy to get what was replied to here, as it updated me as to what's been going on for the last month or so since I've been totally offline due to circumstances beyond my control. --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. - Original Message - From: Sid siddhan...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2012 7:17 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News well, it looks like from some elements that there is a compitition going on against bgt... - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Audyssey Mailing List gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 8:57 AM Subject: [Audyssey] USA Games News USA Games News Mar. 29, 2012 Introduction Hello, gamers. Welcome to another edition of the USA Games News. As it has been quite a while since we've written one of these news letters and there have been several questions as to the fate of Mysteries of the Ancients over the last few months we only thought it was fair to bring you up to speed as to what we are doing and what you can expect from us in the future. However, it must be said up front that Mysteries of the Ancients is only one of several products currently in development. While we are continuing work on Mysteries of the Ancients, which has recently been renamed for reasons explained later in this news letter, we are also moving forward with a few other projects we've wanted to develop for a long time, but have been delayed time after time by Mysteries of the Ancients. So without further introduction here is the news. Ark of Hope Over the last month we have been developing a new game called Tomb Hunter: The Ark of Hope. This game is very similar to Mysteries of the Ancients, but has an all new storyline, new levels, and of course several updates that did not make it into the final beta of Mysteries of the Ancients. In this revised version of the game world re noun archeologist, Dr. Angela Carter, travels to Greece in search of Pandora's Box. Legend has it that when Pandora opened the box she let out all the evil and suffering in the world and closed the box trapping hope inside. Now, Dr Angela Carter is in search of Pandora's Box and intends to open it. However, her quest will not be an easy one. She must explore 12 Erie underground tombs filled with deadly traps including: fire pits, sharp metal spikes, falling rocks, deep chasms, rolling boulders, pits filled with boiling lava, and more. She must fight or flee several unworldly creatures such as: sword wielding skeletons, undead zombie warriors, flying harpies, and mighty centaurs. Along the way she will pick up and collect gold coins, ancient reed torches, precious jewels, and pieces of a long lost scroll that will lead her to Pandora's Box. As I said earlier many of the game play elements will be similar to Mysteries of the Ancients, but there will be differences as well. We've been updating some sounds, music, as well as redesigning all 12 levels from scratch. In addition to those changes we've been adding more traps, expanding the levels, and have been adding some extra features as well. So stay tuned for news as this project develops. Open G3D For the last couple of months we've been working on a project we feel will greatly aid audio game developers called Open G3D. We've actually been working on the project for a couple of years, but were unable to move forward with the project do to technical details. What we wanted was a game engine that met a number of criteria that were difficult to meet, and it took quite a lot of time and research to come up with a workable solution. In short, we wanted an engine that was easy to develop, an engine that was easy to use, and would work on Mac, Linux, Windows, and perhaps other platforms as well. Needless to say meeting this criteria was difficult to do because there is a lot of technical considerations involved in cross-platform game development in addition to the fact we wanted to create a user friendly experience for everyone. For example, the Genesis Engine that we use to develop Mysteries of the Ancients, Raceway, etc is written in C++. While C++ is arguably one of the best languages for professional game development, is considered to be the industry standard, it was never intended to be a language for beginners and therefore isn't very easy to work with. We wanted to eliminate this issue by using an off the shelf language that has a history of being simple and straight forward while not sacrificing the power of a full blown programming language like C++. At the same time we wanted to be able to design a build once run anywhere type engine so we could produce games for non-Windows platforms. As someone who does not regularly use Windows, preferring to use Linux
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
I think this was touched on in the news update from Thomas? What he has been doing and why it is not out was the first topic of discussion. --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. - Original Message - From: william lomas will.d.lo...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 4:45 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News this is all well and good tom but when will the new MOTA be out? we heard it be out for years now if it iwll support mac go for it, :) On 30 Mar 2012, at 04:27, Thomas Ward wrote: USA Games News Mar. 29, 2012 Introduction Hello, gamers. Welcome to another edition of the USA Games News. As it has been quite a while since we've written one of these news letters and there have been several questions as to the fate of Mysteries of the Ancients over the last few months we only thought it was fair to bring you up to speed as to what we are doing and what you can expect from us in the future. However, it must be said up front that Mysteries of the Ancients is only one of several products currently in development. While we are continuing work on Mysteries of the Ancients, which has recently been renamed for reasons explained later in this news letter, we are also moving forward with a few other projects we've wanted to develop for a long time, but have been delayed time after time by Mysteries of the Ancients. So without further introduction here is the news. Ark of Hope Over the last month we have been developing a new game called Tomb Hunter: The Ark of Hope. This game is very similar to Mysteries of the Ancients, but has an all new storyline, new levels, and of course several updates that did not make it into the final beta of Mysteries of the Ancients. In this revised version of the game world re noun archeologist, Dr. Angela Carter, travels to Greece in search of Pandora's Box. Legend has it that when Pandora opened the box she let out all the evil and suffering in the world and closed the box trapping hope inside. Now, Dr Angela Carter is in search of Pandora's Box and intends to open it. However, her quest will not be an easy one. She must explore 12 Erie underground tombs filled with deadly traps including: fire pits, sharp metal spikes, falling rocks, deep chasms, rolling boulders, pits filled with boiling lava, and more. She must fight or flee several unworldly creatures such as: sword wielding skeletons, undead zombie warriors, flying harpies, and mighty centaurs. Along the way she will pick up and collect gold coins, ancient reed torches, precious jewels, and pieces of a long lost scroll that will lead her to Pandora's Box. As I said earlier many of the game play elements will be similar to Mysteries of the Ancients, but there will be differences as well. We've been updating some sounds, music, as well as redesigning all 12 levels from scratch. In addition to those changes we've been adding more traps, expanding the levels, and have been adding some extra features as well. So stay tuned for news as this project develops. Open G3D For the last couple of months we've been working on a project we feel will greatly aid audio game developers called Open G3D. We've actually been working on the project for a couple of years, but were unable to move forward with the project do to technical details. What we wanted was a game engine that met a number of criteria that were difficult to meet, and it took quite a lot of time and research to come up with a workable solution. In short, we wanted an engine that was easy to develop, an engine that was easy to use, and would work on Mac, Linux, Windows, and perhaps other platforms as well. Needless to say meeting this criteria was difficult to do because there is a lot of technical considerations involved in cross-platform game development in addition to the fact we wanted to create a user friendly experience for everyone. For example, the Genesis Engine that we use to develop Mysteries of the Ancients, Raceway, etc is written in C++. While C++ is arguably one of the best languages for professional game development, is considered to be the industry standard, it was never intended to be a language for beginners and therefore isn't very easy to work with. We wanted to eliminate this issue by using an off the shelf language that has a history of being simple and straight forward while not sacrificing the power of a full blown programming language like C++. At the same time we wanted to be able to design a build once run anywhere type engine so we could produce games for non-Windows platforms. As someone who does not regularly use Windows, preferring to use Linux instead, we are well aware of the fact that the desire for more games for Mac OS and Linux is growing. Unfortunately, since most
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
It'll be out when it's ready. Are you threatening me? I am the great Cornholio! I come from Lake Titicaca! -Original Message- From: william lomas Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 3:45 AM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News this is all well and good tom but when will the new MOTA be out? we heard it be out for years now if it iwll support mac go for it, :) On 30 Mar 2012, at 04:27, Thomas Ward wrote: USA Games News Mar. 29, 2012 Introduction Hello, gamers. Welcome to another edition of the USA Games News. As it has been quite a while since we've written one of these news letters and there have been several questions as to the fate of Mysteries of the Ancients over the last few months we only thought it was fair to bring you up to speed as to what we are doing and what you can expect from us in the future. However, it must be said up front that Mysteries of the Ancients is only one of several products currently in development. While we are continuing work on Mysteries of the Ancients, which has recently been renamed for reasons explained later in this news letter, we are also moving forward with a few other projects we've wanted to develop for a long time, but have been delayed time after time by Mysteries of the Ancients. So without further introduction here is the news. Ark of Hope Over the last month we have been developing a new game called Tomb Hunter: The Ark of Hope. This game is very similar to Mysteries of the Ancients, but has an all new storyline, new levels, and of course several updates that did not make it into the final beta of Mysteries of the Ancients. In this revised version of the game world re noun archeologist, Dr. Angela Carter, travels to Greece in search of Pandora's Box. Legend has it that when Pandora opened the box she let out all the evil and suffering in the world and closed the box trapping hope inside. Now, Dr Angela Carter is in search of Pandora's Box and intends to open it. However, her quest will not be an easy one. She must explore 12 Erie underground tombs filled with deadly traps including: fire pits, sharp metal spikes, falling rocks, deep chasms, rolling boulders, pits filled with boiling lava, and more. She must fight or flee several unworldly creatures such as: sword wielding skeletons, undead zombie warriors, flying harpies, and mighty centaurs. Along the way she will pick up and collect gold coins, ancient reed torches, precious jewels, and pieces of a long lost scroll that will lead her to Pandora's Box. As I said earlier many of the game play elements will be similar to Mysteries of the Ancients, but there will be differences as well. We've been updating some sounds, music, as well as redesigning all 12 levels from scratch. In addition to those changes we've been adding more traps, expanding the levels, and have been adding some extra features as well. So stay tuned for news as this project develops. Open G3D For the last couple of months we've been working on a project we feel will greatly aid audio game developers called Open G3D. We've actually been working on the project for a couple of years, but were unable to move forward with the project do to technical details. What we wanted was a game engine that met a number of criteria that were difficult to meet, and it took quite a lot of time and research to come up with a workable solution. In short, we wanted an engine that was easy to develop, an engine that was easy to use, and would work on Mac, Linux, Windows, and perhaps other platforms as well. Needless to say meeting this criteria was difficult to do because there is a lot of technical considerations involved in cross-platform game development in addition to the fact we wanted to create a user friendly experience for everyone. For example, the Genesis Engine that we use to develop Mysteries of the Ancients, Raceway, etc is written in C++. While C++ is arguably one of the best languages for professional game development, is considered to be the industry standard, it was never intended to be a language for beginners and therefore isn't very easy to work with. We wanted to eliminate this issue by using an off the shelf language that has a history of being simple and straight forward while not sacrificing the power of a full blown programming language like C++. At the same time we wanted to be able to design a build once run anywhere type engine so we could produce games for non-Windows platforms. As someone who does not regularly use Windows, preferring to use Linux instead, we are well aware of the fact that the desire for more games for Mac OS and Linux is growing. Unfortunately, since most of the accessible games and game development tools are designed for Windows those of us who choose to use Linux, Mac OS, or some other alternative
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
My first thought about the new engine you are working on was the rapidly growing market of gaming for I devices. Think that will be feasible? --- 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: Friday, April 06, 2012 7:36 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi, Hmmm...Well, I guess you could say that. However, the purpose of the engine I am working on is to enable developers to design free and open source games for other platforms like Linux and Mac OS that unfortunately do not get much attention from game developers. I suppose the engine could be used for commercial games as well, but I don't claim that the open source engine I'm working on will be as good as BGT. There are limitations in cross-platform development that make it difficult to get a feature by feature comparison on all platforms involved. Especially, when we are dealing with a generic game programming API like Pygame. For example, the mixer that comes with Pygame, SDL Mixer, is capable of basic 2d stereo panning and controling the volume of sounds, but there isn't any kind of true 3d virtualization and you can't set the pitch. Both of these are serious limitations in my book and require a more professional sound mixer like FMOD or perhaps OpenAL. Which are preferable for a game engine like this. So although I'm excited to see what can be done with the new engine its sadly not quite on par with BGT given the fact I'm using several open source APIs that are stable but not as feature filled as those available in commercial APIs. Cheers! On 4/3/2012 8:17 AM, Sid wrote: well, it looks like from some elements that there is a compitition going on against bgt... --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi will, I think you have confused two different projects. The game that used to be MOTA, Ark of Hope, currently is not being written using the cross-platform engine. It is using the Windows game engine written in C++ with various Windows components like DirectX. That said, I've already explained the reason for the delays. Between the time MOTA beta 22 came out and the time I began working on Ark of Hope I had added a number of changes to the Windows game engine which means the MOTA beta 22 source code is no longer compatible with said engine. I've been revising the game, fixing technical issues, as well as redesigning the levels, adding new sound effects, music, etc. I know you and others are tired of waiting, but rushing me seriously won't help the situation. Cheers! - Original Message - From: william lomas will.d.lo...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 4:45 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News this is all well and good tom but when will the new MOTA be out? we heard it be out for years now if it iwll support mac go for it. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Bryan, Well said. The game is done when its done and not a minute before. On 4/6/2012 8:20 PM, bpeterson2...@cableone.net wrote: It'll be out when it's ready. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Charles, Perhaps. I'm still not too sure of how Python apps will run on iOS devices like iPhones and iPads although Cara assures me its possible, and pointed me to a Python interpreter for iOS on the Apple store. I still have to see if there is a version of Pygame for iOS, but it seems as though it might be possible. I've also seen versions of Python floating around for Windows Mobile devices which is another possibility for game development. Python appears to be fairly flexable when it comes to supporting a wide range of hardware and operating systems without too many changes in source. So perhaps just perhaps once this engine is ready for prime time I'll be able to put out some very basic games like Jim Kitchen develops for non-Windows operating systems and various handheld devices. Cheers! On 4/6/2012 8:46 PM, Charles Rivard wrote: My first thought about the new engine you are working on was the rapidly growing market of gaming for iOS devices. Think that will be feasible? --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
It's having to answer messages like this one, after already having explained what's holding up the availability of an awaited game that make developers want to either pull their hair out, quit, or both. --- 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: Friday, April 06, 2012 8:10 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi will, I think you have confused two different projects. The game that used to be MOTA, Ark of Hope, currently is not being written using the cross-platform engine. It is using the Windows game engine written in C++ with various Windows components like DirectX. That said, I've already explained the reason for the delays. Between the time MOTA beta 22 came out and the time I began working on Ark of Hope I had added a number of changes to the Windows game engine which means the MOTA beta 22 source code is no longer compatible with said engine. I've been revising the game, fixing technical issues, as well as redesigning the levels, adding new sound effects, music, etc. I know you and others are tired of waiting, but rushing me seriously won't help the situation. Cheers! - Original Message - From: william lomas will.d.lo...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 4:45 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News this is all well and good tom but when will the new MOTA be out? we heard it be out for years now if it iwll support mac go for it. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
If you develop games for the iPhone, I'll gladly be a tester when the time comes. I currently have a 64 Gig iPhone 4S. --- 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: Friday, April 06, 2012 8:19 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Charles, Perhaps. I'm still not too sure of how Python apps will run on iOS devices like iPhones and iPads although Cara assures me its possible, and pointed me to a Python interpreter for iOS on the Apple store. I still have to see if there is a version of Pygame for iOS, but it seems as though it might be possible. I've also seen versions of Python floating around for Windows Mobile devices which is another possibility for game development. Python appears to be fairly flexable when it comes to supporting a wide range of hardware and operating systems without too many changes in source. So perhaps just perhaps once this engine is ready for prime time I'll be able to put out some very basic games like Jim Kitchen develops for non-Windows operating systems and various handheld devices. Cheers! On 4/6/2012 8:46 PM, Charles Rivard wrote: My first thought about the new engine you are working on was the rapidly growing market of gaming for iOS devices. Think that will be feasible? --- Shepherds are the best beasts, but Labs are a close second. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
All this sounds excellent, though I'm far more interested in the open engine than either of the specific games. I hope that you will provide documentation of the quality and ease of use that Philip has provided for BGT, which is one reason I've recommended his dev kit to folk starting out. Christopher Bartlett --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Christopher, I certainly have plans to do that. Its part of the reason I am writing the engine. At first I initially was going to write up general Python tutorials for the USA Games developer site and then realized I could ease the new game developer into Python by building some common modules for sound, music, input, etc. It would simplify a language that is already fairly simple to begin with. Basically, what I'll be doing in terms of documentation is a two part tutorial. One part will deal with the basics of the Python language. The second part will give specific documentation on the Open G3D engine and how to use the class modules for this, that, and the other thing. For instance, here is a quick source example of initializing and using sound in Open G3D. #Import the audio class module import audio #Declare a mixer object mixer = audio.Audio() def main(): #Load a sound and asign it to channel 1 mixer.SoundOpen(1, my_sound.wav) #Play the sound mixer.SoundPlay(1, False) #Position the sound to the left mixer.SoundPosition(1, -90, 0) #Position the sound to the right mixer.SoundPosition(1, 90, 0) #Stop the sound mixer.SoundStop() Obviously, something like this would be explained in more depth in the actual documentation, but there really isn't much complication to this simple example. We import the audio module, declare an audio mixer object, and then in the main function we load a sound, start it playing, and move it around a bit. Very simple stuff here. However simple it might be I think it is a great intro to programming without a lot of overhead involved. Cheers! On 3/30/2012 11:55 AM, Christopher Bartlett wrote: All this sounds excellent, though I'm far more interested in the open engine than either of the specific games. I hope that you will provide documentation of the quality and ease of use that Philip has provided for BGT, which is one reason I've recommended his dev kit to folk starting out. Christopher Bartlett --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
will the engine have screen reader api support and if not will fc2.0 have it for people who just want to use there readers and not sapi or recorded speech? On Mar 30, 2012, at 3:30 PM, Thomas Ward wrote: Hi Christopher, I certainly have plans to do that. Its part of the reason I am writing the engine. At first I initially was going to write up general Python tutorials for the USA Games developer site and then realized I could ease the new game developer into Python by building some common modules for sound, music, input, etc. It would simplify a language that is already fairly simple to begin with. Basically, what I'll be doing in terms of documentation is a two part tutorial. One part will deal with the basics of the Python language. The second part will give specific documentation on the Open G3D engine and how to use the class modules for this, that, and the other thing. For instance, here is a quick source example of initializing and using sound in Open G3D. #Import the audio class module import audio #Declare a mixer object mixer = audio.Audio() def main(): #Load a sound and asign it to channel 1 mixer.SoundOpen(1, my_sound.wav) #Play the sound mixer.SoundPlay(1, False) #Position the sound to the left mixer.SoundPosition(1, -90, 0) #Position the sound to the right mixer.SoundPosition(1, 90, 0) #Stop the sound mixer.SoundStop() Obviously, something like this would be explained in more depth in the actual documentation, but there really isn't much complication to this simple example. We import the audio module, declare an audio mixer object, and then in the main function we load a sound, start it playing, and move it around a bit. Very simple stuff here. However simple it might be I think it is a great intro to programming without a lot of overhead involved. Cheers! On 3/30/2012 11:55 AM, Christopher Bartlett wrote: All this sounds excellent, though I'm far more interested in the open engine than either of the specific games. I hope that you will provide documentation of the quality and ease of use that Philip has provided for BGT, which is one reason I've recommended his dev kit to folk starting out. Christopher Bartlett --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Brandon, Eventually, I'll probably create a screen reader module for the engine given the fact that is something many game developers and gamers want to have. It shouldn't be too difficult to create as most screen readers expose their APIs via a COM interface. However, its probably not something I will use myself for the simple fact one of the purposes I'm developing this engine is to help promote game development for Mac OS and Linux as well as Windows. If I tie my games to a platform specific screen reader like Jaws, Window-Eyes, etc I've just defeated one of the primary features of writing this engine in the first place. So in answer to your question no I won't be adding direct screen reader support to Final Conflict. At least not initially. I'm rewriting the game in Python primarily so I can play it on my computers which all run Linux as the primary OS, and I wouldn't want to have a bunch of Windows dependencies I'd have to remove just to compile a cross-platform version for Mac and Linux users. So as far as speech output goes I'll probably end up using something like pyttsx which uses Sapi on Windows, Espeak on Linux, and something else on Mac. Cheers! On 3/30/2012 5:03 PM, Brandon Misch wrote: will the engine have screen reader api support and if not will fc2.0 have it for people who just want to use there readers and not sapi or recorded speech? --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Dark, Well, before anyone jumps to conclusions and begins calling them lets see what their developers say. The person I talked to was one of their support representatives and she wasn't clear on all of the details. Just that she thought that I had to sign a NDA agreement, and she wasn't authorized to discuss it. My request has been passed along to someone else, and they'd get back with me. So far nothing, but I realize that perhaps they don't even know how they are going to handle it yet. Its possible the API isn't ready, but she thought it was. So I'm just waiting to see. In the meantime if SuperNova support isn't there you can always fall back on SAPI support until we get that support worked out. As far as access to the material I of course agree with you 100%. Dolphin isn't making it easy to gather competent information regarding the SuperNova API, and if their screen reader isn't directly supported by games and other products its their own fault. All the other screen reader developers including Freedom Scientific have come forward and offered what help they could to add screen reader support to my products. So I'm not exactly sure where Dolphin's head is at, but they are being too secretive and proprietary for my liking. Cheers! On 11/2/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. i'm glad the documentation is actually out, but certainly when i spoke to Dolphin there was none of this business about hiding the api, afterall it's not as if having it would let someone Hack supernova at some point. I'll have to talk to them again, sinse if a developer for a free products such as Aprone can't get easy access to it that would not be a good thing. At least the documentation is actually donewhich is further on than I thought things were. Beware the grue! Dark. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Brandon, To be honest I forgot to contact Serotek. System Access isn't a screen reader I'm familiar with, and from what I can tell not exactly a really popular one. However, I'll try and contact them today and see if I can get a hold of their API documentation. By the way, I had no problems with GW Micro. So please don't say that I did when they were actually quite friendly and helpful about the API documentation. They have an entire section of their website dedicated to development, scripting, and creating stand alone apps that are Window-eyes enabled. So I just wanted to point that out. Cheers! On 11/2/11, Brandon Misch bmisch2...@gmail.com wrote: Hey thomas. i know that you had a hard time getting screen reading apis from gwMicro and dolphin but what about serotek? Did they give you a hard time too or were they open to giving you there api documentation? thought i would ask. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Michael, Not sure what you are getting at here, but the Cereproc voices are rather new, and I think their latest version of the Cereproc engine is 2.1.1. So obviously they have done some updating since they started developing voices. How often or frequently they'll continue to update is anyone's guess. In general Cereproc is a Scottish company and they tend to focus on U.K. voices. That is Scottish, Brittish English,Irish, etc. In fact, they are the only ones who has a decent Irish voice, Kaitlin, which is a fairly decent voice which I own a copy of. They also have American English, French, Spanish, Italian, and I believe German voices available as well. The best way to see what is in their catalog is to go to http://www.cereproc.com and see for yourself what they have available. They offer two methods for using their voices. A developer can access their Windows voices via the SAPI API or a developer can support them directly through the Cereproc SDK. They also have Mac OS X voices available for Mac users so it looks like Cereproc is now going cross-platform with their voice engine as well. As far as pricing goes they are a little on the expensive side. Last I checked they want $41.99, $42 USD, per voice. That's a little more expensive than the Cepstral voices, but not so expensive a person on a fixed income like SSI couldn't afford them. Since they are a little higher than I really want to pay that's why I don't own very many Cereproc voices, but I don't have any complaints with them other than they haven't yet upgraded to support 64-bit versions of Windows. For me that would be a consideration in buying one of their voices now. HTH On 11/2/11, Michael Gauler michael.gau...@gmx.de wrote: I have another question. I have used demo versions of Ivona voices and thus I know what they sound like and how they work. But what can you tell me about Cereproc voices in general, even if they are only 32 bit products? Are there updates to the products and do you get such information or are your voices years old by now? And what do you have to do when you bought one or more voices? --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi, HWell, thanks for the info, but I really don't have any desire to install and demo the voices from Koba. As I've said if I really want to access those voices, at least the ones available from Freedom Scientific, I'll start Jaws and use my new JFW screen reader support to access the RealSpeak voices in my games. It is not a big deal to me. I've got plenty of SAPI voices to fall back on for Jim Kitchens games etc that strictly use SAPI support. From what information you've given me purchasing Vocalizer is not worth my time. As I am primarily an American English speaking person another German or Russian voice really wouldn't apply to me. Plus if the voices sound worse than RealSpeak Direct voices then I'm definitely not trying and buying. The Ivona voices like Kendra, Joey, etc are more important to me than the RealSpeak voices such as Tom, Jill, Samantha, Jennifer, etc because they sound better in my opinion. Why would I buy Vocalizer when I could have all the U.S. and UK. Ivona voices for the price of two Vocalizer voices? Cheers! On 11/2/11, Michael Gauler michael.gau...@gmx.de wrote: Hi Thomas, unfortunately that's not the end of the story. I can give the next piece of information only for German voices, so if you can't understand my language it is of no use to give you any voice samples. There is a site which does extensive voice comparison by recording three sentences with each voice ever created in German. This site offers the MP3 samples for listening and downloading. I am sure that you know that RealSpeak voices cover the German language. Up to now there have been two German voices. One male and one feemale. Both can be bought via nextup.com with a TextAloud license for $45 each. Every RealSpeak voice from nextup.com is a SAPI voice. The only requirement is the TextAloud license. But you might also know that the RealSpeak voices are also available for mobile devices and for Talks and maybe also Mobile Speak. I don't have a smartphone, but what I know is that the male German voice does sound differently in its smartphone version compared to the PC version, and it is not due to a bitrate or other quality setting difference. Furthermore RealSpeak and Vocalizer seem to be two different products. Thus the reason why JAWS doesn't offer the third German voice, or the second Russian one, which also applies to nextup.com. The worst about Vocalizer is not the high price, but the fact that the quality of the voices seems to be worse than the JAWS versions of the same voices. And voices like the Australian English ones and the Indian English voice can't be bought via the Koba online shop, but you have to request them, if you wanted them, while the RealSpeak variant of them is either available for JAWS without SAPI or from nextup.com with SAPI probably in better quality. If you have a computer with a virtual machine running, I'd suggest that you download the demo versions of Koba Speech 2 and listen for yourself, so you can compare one voice at a time without damaging your primary SAPI core when trial time of thirty days runs out or when the base Koba Engine is still unstable (might be still the case). --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi, Yikes! That's crazy. Testing someone if they have the required C/C++ education just to download a SDK is very insulting. Its not that a person couldn't pass the test, I'm sure I could, but for crying out loud most people take a developer at their word. Nobody I know of is quite that anal about their SDKs. For instance, if a person goes to Microsoft's developer network, MSDN, anyone with a desire to can freely download most of their SDKs. There are no tests, forms to fill out, etc. The only annoying requirement is Microsoft's website wants you to use there jenuine advantage tool to make sure you are running a legal copy of windows. That's a bit obsessive security in my opinion, but nowhere as rediculous as testing a developer on the spot if he or she has the skills to use that particular SDK. Cheers! On 11/2/11, pitermach piterm...@gmail.com wrote: This reminds me when I read about Hins releasing an sdk for the sense note takers. To get it though, you first have to send them a message that you want it. Then they'll ask you some questions to check that you have the required C knowledge to program for the device, and if they deem you do, they'll finally send you the sdk and the documentations. Call me crazy, but isn't that a little overkill. Just because they built an overlay on Windows Mobile for their interface and programs doesn't mean you should go through that kind of testing. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Dark, Yeah, so true. In fact, as I have said before Ivona's Bryan and Amy U.K. voices are actually superior to the RealSpeak Daniel and Emily U.K. voices in terms of voice quality. The only complaint I have with Ivona's voices---which is quite common with any high quality voice--is they tend to lag if you are typing really fast. They just simply can't keep up with the input/output. As a result they are good for playing SAPI games like Jim Kitchens games, reading e-books, but suck if it comes to day to day computer opperation. So what I do with NVDA is use ESpeak as my default voice for composing e-mails, writing documents, programming, etc and flip over to one of the Ivona voices to read a document, e-mail, or play a game. That works out well enough. ESpeak isn't my favorite voice, but it keeps up with my high speed of typing where the Ivona voices can't. Cheers! On 11/2/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. It's good to know that if I ever end up with 64 byt windows which would make the freely useable version of scansoft daniel I use for sapi obviously problematic, I won't have to pay the earth to get a decent voice to replace it, sinse I certainly won't! be paying hundreds of dollars to scansoft. Beware the grue! dark. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Tom. This is very true, and in fact the reason I use orphius alan for Hal but realspeak daniel for sapi, even though Hal does have the daniel voice as under voacalizer, it is just too laggy. The only problem is that as far as screen readers go, someone trying a screen reading program for the first time whether that is Hal, Jaws or whatever, will not know that problems with lag or lack of speed are due to the voice and not the program. This came up quite recently. The lady who is training her guide dog at the same time I am worked very seriously in It before losing her site four years ago, so has a pretty major typing speed. she said she'd tried Hal and jaws, but used jaws because she found Hal laggy, yet when I explained this was because Hal runs with the vocalizer daniel voice by default and showed her the speed of Orphius, she was most surprised, - I have in fact informed dolphin of this as well, but they just see the higher voice quality making the difference and ignore the lag issues. I might actually suggest they put a warning somewhere in the setup wizard, just to let people know that the voice reaction speed of Vocalizer isn't the fault of the supernova program but of the voice. I must confess, I stil! don't see why they didn't stick with the orphius natural voices. The orphius synthetic ones are pretty dire, but the natural ones like Alan, Carol, Brad and Lucy are a really nice compromise betwene quality and speed. You can stil download them from Dolphin, but now they don't even ship with supernova by default for some reason. Beware the grue! dark. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Quentin, I have no idea what Dolphin is up to. Like you say the fact they are so proprietary and secretive about the API makes one wonder how much of the core functionality it exposes. With Jaws its API only exposes the functions you absolutely need like JFWSayString(), JFWStopSpeech(), etc. About the other stuff lets take that off list. I think what we should do is share information back and forth on what we've discovered and exchange source code. I've pretty much decided to write my own library/interface given the fact this is part of a commercial product and I want the function names etc to all match the rest of the engine. Plus to have the ability to recompile for 32-bit and 64-bit platforms as needed. However, I don't see why we can't share source code, ideas, etc to have two fully functional libraries available for use. Cheers! On 11/2/11, QuentinC quent...@cfardel.net wrote: Hello Thomas, Do they want to have applications working with their screen reader or not ? Such an API is normally made for being publicly available. Look at twitter and google, they are commercial companies but their respective API are publicly available. Having to pay to use some of the services provided by the API is another problem. The API itself can always be downloaded freely. Dolphin must understand that such an API is made to work with their screen reader and improve existing applications, not to break, decompile, crack it or whatever. Being so protective is suspect, it may proof that their API is bad made and that it allows to do too many things and/or enter too deeply in their proprietary code. That would be a valuable reason to protect it so much, otherwise I don't see what's the problem. To be honnest, I haven't considered potential legality issues. I already use JFW API for ages, and I'm sure FS completely don't care if I use it. Anyway, their API is so made that you are totally unable to break or crack something. You can just be collaborative and tell the API to say something, or run a script. Where I got my information: nothing is really secret there * JFW: it was a long time ago, in a french blind programming mailing-list. The creator of SoundRTS sent me a zip containing jfwapi.dll and corresponding header. Nowadays however, we shouldn't use jfwapi.dll anymore but use the COM interface directly. I got the information about the COM interface by using OLE explorer and my though was confirmed when I read say tools source later. * NVDA: I have nothing else that what is publicly available, and it's sufficient. Something is to mention, the return values of the functions are pretty unclear. I tested myself with my copy of NVDA to exactly clarify how it works exactly. * System access: I don't remember who sent me a zip containing the DLL and the headers, but it was by mail. Only recently I was able to ask somebody to test. * Window eye: I just allmost copied and translated from VB to C the code in say tools package by jamal. I asked somebody else to test it. I was unable to install window eye demo in a XP VM, the install systematically crashes. I'm not a window eye customer and don't want to be unless I'm obliged, so I never contacted them, I think this is rather impolite. I'm sure we can improve that part of the code. One interesting thing about my API is the following: if you quit jaws and start NVDA, then my code notice that jaws was exited and automatically connect to NVDA, without quitting the application using the API. It works also if you do the reverse, quitting NVDA and start jaws. For window eye and sytem access that thing doesn't work because I don't have any info on return values from the say functions. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
hmmm ivona is quite good. I plan to buy the uk and us packages at some point which cost 99 bucks each. They however donate to nvda at the same time, and this can be only good. There is a promo code on nvda site, also those with klango can get a code, so if you know where to go, you can actually get things a bit cheaper. You can buy all voices in each language pack, 100 us is not really that bad when there are 3-5 voices in each pack and this may be what I get when I go 64 bit. At 11:37 a.m. 2/11/2011 +0100, you wrote: I have another question. I have used demo versions of Ivona voices and thus I know what they sound like and how they work. But what can you tell me about Cereproc voices in general, even if they are only 32 bit products? Are there updates to the products and do you get such information or are your voices years old by now? And what do you have to do when you bought one or more voices? --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Dark, That's a very good point. I remember when I began using NVDA I didn't like ESpeak very well so I tried using various SAPI voices. The screen reader was slow, sluggish, and lagged a lot, or so I would have assumed if I hadn't known this is typical behavior for SAPI voices. If I used ESpeak, or the Eloquence update that has been floating around the screen reader works fine. However, my point being it would be all too easy to blame the screen reader for any lag, slowness, etc if I wasn't aware some SAPI voices just are not very responsive to begin with. However, I think we are beginning to drift off topic. :D Cheers! On 11/3/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. This is very true, and in fact the reason I use orphius alan for Hal but realspeak daniel for sapi, even though Hal does have the daniel voice as under voacalizer, it is just too laggy. The only problem is that as far as screen readers go, someone trying a screen reading program for the first time whether that is Hal, Jaws or whatever, will not know that problems with lag or lack of speed are due to the voice and not the program. This came up quite recently. The lady who is training her guide dog at the same time I am worked very seriously in It before losing her site four years ago, so has a pretty major typing speed. she said she'd tried Hal and jaws, but used jaws because she found Hal laggy, yet when I explained this was because Hal runs with the vocalizer daniel voice by default and showed her the speed of Orphius, she was most surprised, - I have in fact informed dolphin of this as well, but they just see the higher voice quality making the difference and ignore the lag issues. I might actually suggest they put a warning somewhere in the setup wizard, just to let people know that the voice reaction speed of Vocalizer isn't the fault of the supernova program but of the voice. I must confess, I stil! don't see why they didn't stick with the orphius natural voices. The orphius synthetic ones are pretty dire, but the natural ones like Alan, Carol, Brad and Lucy are a really nice compromise betwene quality and speed. You can stil download them from Dolphin, but now they don't even ship with supernova by default for some reason. Beware the grue! dark. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Thanks for the info. I'll have to look into them soon. And I'll probably contact them. They do sell German voices and French besides several different English ones. Unfortunately they have a totally inaccessible demo on their site. Yes, you can listen to pre-recorded samples, but their interactive demo doesn't show up on any screen reader I know and thus it is inaccessible and I would like to get a bit more than some thirty seconds of speech as a sample before deciding to buy a voice. But I am aware of them and maybe I'll get one of them later, same goes for Ivona, because their newer voices sound good. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
You are totally right. I just wanted to show that new things are in development. And maybe today it is only a Russian voice. But there are two things you should remember. First one is that no one guarantees that a new British voice might not be developed in the future. And there is this supposed merger between Loquendo TTS and Nuance. So no one knows if this means all voices of both become available in one or both products (e.g. Vocalizer in Loquendo TTS, or all Loquendo voices in Vocalizer). And the second thing is that no one knows if the RealSpeak Direct voices will be maintained indeffinitely or the nextup.com variants. You as a person might have RealSpeak Direct voices for your own use, but what would happen if the next JAWS version removed them and the download capability from their site? We (and I mean developer and end user alike) are totally uninformed in regards to the no merged company. We know less than Microsoft discloses about their upcoming software or their sdks... --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Michael, I see your point, but I don't think it is anything we have to worry about right now. Not to mention there isn't anything we can do about it or control if that happens. All we can do is wait and see what happens regarding those voices. For those of us who have the RealSpeak voices and they currently work on Windows 7 etc we can probably fall back on those older voices for several years to come even if the current RealSpeak voices for Jaws or the ones for the Nextup products aren't updated. If someone is that concerned/worried about it the best thing I can suggest is invest your time and money into a different company like Cepstral or Ivona who is keeping their customers up to date with technology changes and aren't getting all proprietary with their voices. Cheers! On 11/3/11, Michael Gauler michael.gau...@gmx.de wrote: You are totally right. I just wanted to show that new things are in development. And maybe today it is only a Russian voice. But there are two things you should remember. First one is that no one guarantees that a new British voice might not be developed in the future. And there is this supposed merger between Loquendo TTS and Nuance. So no one knows if this means all voices of both become available in one or both products (e.g. Vocalizer in Loquendo TTS, or all Loquendo voices in Vocalizer). And the second thing is that no one knows if the RealSpeak Direct voices will be maintained indeffinitely or the nextup.com variants. You as a person might have RealSpeak Direct voices for your own use, but what would happen if the next JAWS version removed them and the download capability from their site? We (and I mean developer and end user alike) are totally uninformed in regards to the no merged company. We know less than Microsoft discloses about their upcoming software or their sdks... --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Tom. i'm glad the documentation is actually out, but certainly when i spoke to Dolphin there was none of this business about hiding the api, afterall it's not as if having it would let someone Hack supernova at some point. I'll have to talk to them again, sinse if a developer for a free products such as Aprone can't get easy access to it that would not be a good thing. At least the documentation is actually donewhich is further on than I thought things were. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2011 3:21 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Dark, Well, I just talked to Dolphin support today and while they don't have any issue with me using the API it apparently is under a NDA type license. Therefore they are going to send me some forms to fill out including a non-disclosure agreement before I get to see the documentation, headers, and libraries. So, yeah, they are treating this API like top secret information. Personally, I'm not so sure what Dolphin is worried about. So far the APIs for the various screen readers are very very simple. Take the JFW API for exampl here. If I want to send some text to Jaws I need to include jfwapi.h and jfwapi.lib to a Visual C++ application and use the JFWSayString() function. To silence/stop speech use JFWStopSpeech(). There is nothing there to be secretive about. So why is Freedom Sientific treating it like proprietary top secret information? GW Micro on the other hand has been very cooperative and helpful today. They gave me some links to their developer resources, gave me a link to get the Window-Eyes SDK, and pointed me to some source examples. Great! That's exactly the kind of response I expect to get from a screen reader developer. Especially, since its their job to insure Windows applications are A, accessible, and B, works with their screen reader. Being all proprietary and secretive like Dolphin and Freedom Scientific are being is a good reason why a developer might choose not to support their screen reader and customers. NV Access---as I mentioned yesterday--is similarly cooperative and helpful. In fact, NVDA was the first screen reader the G3D Engine fully supported just because the information and help was there from the start. NVDA is open source so there is no NDA agreements to sign, no proprietary information to gard, and nothing to be secretive about. Everything is right there in the open and the developer is available for assistance if needed. No wonder NVDA is becoming the most popular screen reader next to Jaws. Besides being free and open source I'm finding it is very easy to support either directly or via Python modules. That's a totally different approach to what the commercial screen readers are doing which inhibits accessibility through proprietary and exclusive licenses in my opinion. Cheers! On 11/1/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. Well I'm hoping that the supernova api won't be that! secret, sinse I have pointed out to dolphin that it is necessary to get this support going in Supernova as well. Hopefully they'll release it soon, but we'll see. Beware the gRue! Dark. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hello Thomas, Do they want to have applications working with their screen reader or not ? Such an API is normally made for being publicly available. Look at twitter and google, they are commercial companies but their respective API are publicly available. Having to pay to use some of the services provided by the API is another problem. The API itself can always be downloaded freely. Dolphin must understand that such an API is made to work with their screen reader and improve existing applications, not to break, decompile, crack it or whatever. Being so protective is suspect, it may proof that their API is bad made and that it allows to do too many things and/or enter too deeply in their proprietary code. That would be a valuable reason to protect it so much, otherwise I don't see what's the problem. To be honnest, I haven't considered potential legality issues. I already use JFW API for ages, and I'm sure FS completely don't care if I use it. Anyway, their API is so made that you are totally unable to break or crack something. You can just be collaborative and tell the API to say something, or run a script. Where I got my information: nothing is really secret there * JFW: it was a long time ago, in a french blind programming mailing-list. The creator of SoundRTS sent me a zip containing jfwapi.dll and corresponding header. Nowadays however, we shouldn't use jfwapi.dll anymore but use the COM interface directly. I got the information about the COM interface by using OLE explorer and my though was confirmed when I read say tools source later. * NVDA: I have nothing else that what is publicly available, and it's sufficient. Something is to mention, the return values of the functions are pretty unclear. I tested myself with my copy of NVDA to exactly clarify how it works exactly. * System access: I don't remember who sent me a zip containing the DLL and the headers, but it was by mail. Only recently I was able to ask somebody to test. * Window eye: I just allmost copied and translated from VB to C the code in say tools package by jamal. I asked somebody else to test it. I was unable to install window eye demo in a XP VM, the install systematically crashes. I'm not a window eye customer and don't want to be unless I'm obliged, so I never contacted them, I think this is rather impolite. I'm sure we can improve that part of the code. One interesting thing about my API is the following: if you quit jaws and start NVDA, then my code notice that jaws was exited and automatically connect to NVDA, without quitting the application using the API. It works also if you do the reverse, quitting NVDA and start jaws. For window eye and sytem access that thing doesn't work because I don't have any info on return values from the say functions. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Tom. It's good to know that if I ever end up with 64 byt windows which would make the freely useable version of scansoft daniel I use for sapi obviously problematic, I won't have to pay the earth to get a decent voice to replace it, sinse I certainly won't! be paying hundreds of dollars to scansoft. Beware the grue! dark. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
This reminds me when I read about Hins releasing an sdk for the sense note takers. To get it though, you first have to send them a message that you want it. Then they'll ask you some questions to check that you have the required C knowledge to program for the device, and if they deem you do, they'll finally send you the sdk and the documentations. Call me crazy, but isn't that a little overkill. Just because they built an overlay on Windows Mobile for their interface and programs doesn't mean you should go through that kind of testing. On 2011-11-02 04:21, Thomas Ward wrote: Hi Dark, Well, I just talked to Dolphin support today and while they don't have any issue with me using the API it apparently is under a NDA type license. Therefore they are going to send me some forms to fill out including a non-disclosure agreement before I get to see the documentation, headers, and libraries. So, yeah, they are treating this API like top secret information. Personally, I'm not so sure what Dolphin is worried about. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Thomas, unfortunately that's not the end of the story. I can give the next piece of information only for German voices, so if you can't understand my language it is of no use to give you any voice samples. There is a site which does extensive voice comparison by recording three sentences with each voice ever created in German. This site offers the MP3 samples for listening and downloading. I am sure that you know that RealSpeak voices cover the German language. Up to now there have been two German voices. One male and one feemale. Both can be bought via nextup.com with a TextAloud license for $45 each. Every RealSpeak voice from nextup.com is a SAPI voice. The only requirement is the TextAloud license. But you might also know that the RealSpeak voices are also available for mobile devices and for Talks and maybe also Mobile Speak. I don't have a smartphone, but what I know is that the male German voice does sound differently in its smartphone version compared to the PC version, and it is not due to a bitrate or other quality setting difference. Furthermore RealSpeak and Vocalizer seem to be two different products. Thus the reason why JAWS doesn't offer the third German voice, or the second Russian one, which also applies to nextup.com. The worst about Vocalizer is not the high price, but the fact that the quality of the voices seems to be worse than the JAWS versions of the same voices. And voices like the Australian English ones and the Indian English voice can't be bought via the Koba online shop, but you have to request them, if you wanted them, while the RealSpeak variant of them is either available for JAWS without SAPI or from nextup.com with SAPI probably in better quality. If you have a computer with a virtual machine running, I'd suggest that you download the demo versions of Koba Speech 2 and listen for yourself, so you can compare one voice at a time without damaging your primary SAPI core when trial time of thirty days runs out or when the base Koba Engine is still unstable (might be still the case). --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
I have another question. I have used demo versions of Ivona voices and thus I know what they sound like and how they work. But what can you tell me about Cereproc voices in general, even if they are only 32 bit products? Are there updates to the products and do you get such information or are your voices years old by now? And what do you have to do when you bought one or more voices? --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hey thomas. i know that you had a hard time getting screen reading apis from gwMicro and dolphin but what about serotek? Did they give you a hard time too or were they open to giving you there api documentation? thought i would ask. On Nov 2, 2011, at 6:37 AM, Michael Gauler wrote: I have another question. I have used demo versions of Ivona voices and thus I know what they sound like and how they work. But what can you tell me about Cereproc voices in general, even if they are only 32 bit products? Are there updates to the products and do you get such information or are your voices years old by now? And what do you have to do when you bought one or more voices? --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hello Thomas, You may be interested in a small thing I began these last months. I'm making a plain C DLL that automatically select the active screen reader to speak text, or optionally fallback to SAPI if no screen reader is available. It currently supports jaws, NVDA, system access and window eye. I'm also of course open to add other screen readers if someone can give me enough documentation. Tell me if you want a download link with the DLL, the .a linking file, and a commented .h file. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
well since I am a heavy user of nvda on the espeak synth i am quite happy with that. At 05:40 p.m. 31/10/2011 +0100, you wrote: This news article made me curious about something. Have you been able to work around the jaws keyboard trap issue? I guess you understand what I mean. Even then I'm not sure how well you could play a game like MOTA with it running, since it does make the keyboard sort of sluggish in some parts (scraping in a sound editor for instance) Over all though i'm glad things are progressing. Being a NVDA user myself I really like using it as speech output in games. You could argue how Espeak/eloquence fits into a mood of a game, but hey. What ever works for someone just works. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Quentin, Thanks for the offer. What would the license be for using this dll of yours in a commercial engine, and is it possible to get the source code? I'm using Visual C++ so I'd prefer a Visual C++ *.lib rather than a *.a file for MinGW. Also I'd be interested to know where you got your documentation and information. Right now I've got e-mails into Freedom Scientific, GW Micro, Dolphin, etc on more information regarding their APIs. So I'd like to know where you are getting the API headers, libs, and documentation for this stuff. There doesn't seem to be anything on the internet on the Jaws API, System Access API, or the GW Micro Window-Eyes API. On 11/1/11, QuentinC quent...@cfardel.net wrote: Hello Thomas, You may be interested in a small thing I began these last months. I'm making a plain C DLL that automatically select the active screen reader to speak text, or optionally fallback to SAPI if no screen reader is available. It currently supports jaws, NVDA, system access and window eye. I'm also of course open to add other screen readers if someone can give me enough documentation. Tell me if you want a download link with the DLL, the .a linking file, and a commented .h file. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi, Yeah, I know what you mean. I use NVDA so much ESpeak has sort of grown on me. Although, I'd prefer playing games using a better TTS engine/voice I've actually found myself playing USA Blackjack 2.0 using NVDA and ESpeak. I could switch over to Ivona Bryan or Amy but I figure if I can live with ESpeak 12 hours a day for internet, e-mail, word processing, etc I can live with it in games too. :D On 11/1/11, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: well since I am a heavy user of nvda on the espeak synth i am quite happy with that. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Tom. Well I'm hoping that the supernova api won't be that! secret, sinse I have pointed out to dolphin that it is necessary to get this support going in Supernova as well. Hopefully they'll release it soon, but we'll see. Beware the gRue! dArk. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2011 2:30 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Dark, Well, when you find out something about Super Nova's API let me know. This issue of not documenting the API is a common problem with screen readers in general. Its driving me slightly nuts. For instance, if a developer wants to know how to access NVDA via its Controller Client its no biggy. There is a decent amount of free API documentation not to mention source code too look at. Jaws on the other hand is a totally different story. A developer wants to know how to access and use the JFW API the developer has to contact them directly, talk to their technical support, and then they'll e-mail the developer documentation as well as the headers and libs for the API. Why they don't put it up on the website I'll never know. The guys over at Freedom Scientific created the API so applications would support their screen reader, but when a developer asks about it they treat it like top secret information or something. Like go figure. They want third-party developers to support Jaws or not? Cheers! On 10/31/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. I'm sorry the halloween game didn't work out, but hopefully we'll have something good to play from usa games before the end of the year. Just as to the situation with the Supernova Api used for access (Hal has been renamed supernova screen reader for some reason). dolphin actually have it (it's been used in Quitter and supported libraries which is why blockparty outputs to Supernova), however they haven't made a general public release. Why? because they haven't had time to document the api! I did explain to them that this is absolutely ridiculous! I've had people say quite legitimately that they don't choose to use supernova becuase of the lack of support from certain programs, and it is true that when a game or other application is reliant on sending text directly to a screen reader rather than printing it on the screen, it's not really useable with Supernova currently. Dolphin stated they were! going to fix this when they'd finished supernova 12.5, with it's rewrite of internet support, and sinse that's now done, I'm hopeful the Api should be showing up soon, indeed were I not busy guide dog training currently I'd phone them and see where it currently is. Hopefully when it is actually fixed supporting Supernova with directly sent text will be no more difficult than with Window eyes, Jaws or any other program. As regards the review curser though, that really is one of the strengths of Supernova. It for instance automatically reviews columns logically which is why games liek Smugglers are easier, and also has great ways of moving around the screen, my favourite of which is the find feature which can go to any text. This is why I generally myself don't find games that require it such as if titles or old dos games like piledriver or fallthru difficult to play, indeed while the direct output method is fine too (I can always use sapi as I usually do), I wasn't unhappy with usa blackjack for this reason myself. Beware the grue! dark. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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://mail.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
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hello, I don't know much about licensing issues and I'm not sure of what to do in that area. I also dont' really know what to do about giving an access to the source code or not. One thing is sure, the project is very young, nothing for future is really decided, and the source code isn't made to facilitate reading (I don't want to waste time for that). A binary only version is online here: http://vrac.quentinc.net/ScreenReaderAPI.zip if you wish to take a look Since gatehering information about screen readers API is quite hard, it might be nice to be able to collect all we know at the same central point and to start an open source project. I don't know. Maybe we could talk in private to discuss what would the best thing to do. The benefit of associating could be good: for example you are a specialist of window eye, and myself I don't know that scrren reader at all (I was even unable to install a demo version on a XP VM), so you could probably improve the code concerning window eye. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Thomas, I don't know if you are aware of this, but there might be several problems coming the way of all JAWS and RealSpeak Direct users. Unfortunately no one in that the Speech Market except Ivona seems to be willing to give apropriate information about their products. I'll post this here in public, so that all people know of this, since the talk on games and speech engines has already started. First of all Nuance/Scansoft has developed several new voices. Some of them being in new languages and other ones give more choices for existing languages. First of all, the new voices are not named RealSpeak, but Vocalizer 5. The only company who does sell the new voices to end users is Koba Vision. There you have to pay more than $300 for two voices of your liking. However there are two problems with the new product. First of all, It seems that the new engine might not be totally stable, but this might have been fixed by now. But the more important issue is that the new distribution of voices seems to be of lesser quality than the RealSpeak Direct voices. The next thing you should know is that the new Scansoft voices haven't been made available to JAWS users up to now (the reason is unknown). Furthermore, the new voices can't be purchased from nextup.com for TextAloud, either. And the last piece of news is that Nuance and Loquendo are effectively becoming one company now and that again no one knows what this means for the individual products of both companies and for general availability of said products... That's it, more information seems to be unavailable. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Michael. Vocalizer has been an inbuilt option in Supernova (Hal), sinse version 12, and I can't say i've noticed any appreciable difference betwene that version of scansoft daniel and the realspeak one, though I am not sure about other voices. i actually stil use the Dolphin orphius voice alan with hal, because I find any encarnation of the realspeak voices not to respond quickly enough to my typing speed. Only eloquence and orphius can catch up, and the natural sounding English voice alan available from dolphin's site I find far more preferable to eloquence or orphius synths, thus being the perfect compromise betwene understandability and responsiveness. Back to realspeak though, those prices are horrible! considdering seerprock and other freely available voices that run with sapi are only about 30 dollars each, I have to wonder what the company is playing at. Ever sinse they started this proprietorial nonsense I've very rapidly lost any respect I had for them in the first place. All I can see this doing is absolutely insuring that people will go to other companies like seerprock or kepstral for sapi voices, though sinse that's pretty much been happening ever sinse scansoft stopped selling freely useable voices it actually doesn't make as much difference. If they want to shoot their business in the foot, well let them, it's not as if we don't have other options afterall. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Michael Gauler michael.gau...@gmx.de To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2011 1:14 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Thomas, I don't know if you are aware of this, but there might be several problems coming the way of all JAWS and RealSpeak Direct users. Unfortunately no one in that the Speech Market except Ivona seems to be willing to give apropriate information about their products. I'll post this here in public, so that all people know of this, since the talk on games and speech engines has already started. First of all Nuance/Scansoft has developed several new voices. Some of them being in new languages and other ones give more choices for existing languages. First of all, the new voices are not named RealSpeak, but Vocalizer 5. The only company who does sell the new voices to end users is Koba Vision. There you have to pay more than $300 for two voices of your liking. However there are two problems with the new product. First of all, It seems that the new engine might not be totally stable, but this might have been fixed by now. But the more important issue is that the new distribution of voices seems to be of lesser quality than the RealSpeak Direct voices. The next thing you should know is that the new Scansoft voices haven't been made available to JAWS users up to now (the reason is unknown). Furthermore, the new voices can't be purchased from nextup.com for TextAloud, either. And the last piece of news is that Nuance and Loquendo are effectively becoming one company now and that again no one knows what this means for the individual products of both companies and for general availability of said products... That's it, more information seems to be unavailable. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
well supernova 12 has been using vocaliser automitive 5.52 for a while. The quality is good but there are things like stutters and in some places american charicters and such are announced. will pass this on. At 02:14 p.m. 1/11/2011 +0100, you wrote: Hi Thomas, I don't know if you are aware of this, but there might be several problems coming the way of all JAWS and RealSpeak Direct users. Unfortunately no one in that the Speech Market except Ivona seems to be willing to give apropriate information about their products. I'll post this here in public, so that all people know of this, since the talk on games and speech engines has already started. First of all Nuance/Scansoft has developed several new voices. Some of them being in new languages and other ones give more choices for existing languages. First of all, the new voices are not named RealSpeak, but Vocalizer 5. The only company who does sell the new voices to end users is Koba Vision. There you have to pay more than $300 for two voices of your liking. However there are two problems with the new product. First of all, It seems that the new engine might not be totally stable, but this might have been fixed by now. But the more important issue is that the new distribution of voices seems to be of lesser quality than the RealSpeak Direct voices. The next thing you should know is that the new Scansoft voices haven't been made available to JAWS users up to now (the reason is unknown). Furthermore, the new voices can't be purchased from nextup.com for TextAloud, either. And the last piece of news is that Nuance and Loquendo are effectively becoming one company now and that again no one knows what this means for the individual products of both companies and for general availability of said products... That's it, more information seems to be unavailable. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
well I have plans when I upgrade to buy the us and uk versions as one 200 buck package. Eventually. At 03:10 p.m. 1/11/2011 +, you wrote: Hi Michael. Vocalizer has been an inbuilt option in Supernova (Hal), sinse version 12, and I can't say i've noticed any appreciable difference betwene that version of scansoft daniel and the realspeak one, though I am not sure about other voices. i actually stil use the Dolphin orphius voice alan with hal, because I find any encarnation of the realspeak voices not to respond quickly enough to my typing speed. Only eloquence and orphius can catch up, and the natural sounding English voice alan available from dolphin's site I find far more preferable to eloquence or orphius synths, thus being the perfect compromise betwene understandability and responsiveness. Back to realspeak though, those prices are horrible! considdering seerprock and other freely available voices that run with sapi are only about 30 dollars each, I have to wonder what the company is playing at. Ever sinse they started this proprietorial nonsense I've very rapidly lost any respect I had for them in the first place. All I can see this doing is absolutely insuring that people will go to other companies like seerprock or kepstral for sapi voices, though sinse that's pretty much been happening ever sinse scansoft stopped selling freely useable voices it actually doesn't make as much difference. If they want to shoot their business in the foot, well let them, it's not as if we don't have other options afterall. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Michael Gauler michael.gau...@gmx.de To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2011 1:14 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Thomas, I don't know if you are aware of this, but there might be several problems coming the way of all JAWS and RealSpeak Direct users. Unfortunately no one in that the Speech Market except Ivona seems to be willing to give apropriate information about their products. I'll post this here in public, so that all people know of this, since the talk on games and speech engines has already started. First of all Nuance/Scansoft has developed several new voices. Some of them being in new languages and other ones give more choices for existing languages. First of all, the new voices are not named RealSpeak, but Vocalizer 5. The only company who does sell the new voices to end users is Koba Vision. There you have to pay more than $300 for two voices of your liking. However there are two problems with the new product. First of all, It seems that the new engine might not be totally stable, but this might have been fixed by now. But the more important issue is that the new distribution of voices seems to be of lesser quality than the RealSpeak Direct voices. The next thing you should know is that the new Scansoft voices haven't been made available to JAWS users up to now (the reason is unknown). Furthermore, the new voices can't be purchased from nextup.com for TextAloud, either. And the last piece of news is that Nuance and Loquendo are effectively becoming one company now and that again no one knows what this means for the individual products of both companies and for general availability of said products... That's it, more information seems to be unavailable. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Dark, Well, I just talked to Dolphin support today and while they don't have any issue with me using the API it apparently is under a NDA type license. Therefore they are going to send me some forms to fill out including a non-disclosure agreement before I get to see the documentation, headers, and libraries. So, yeah, they are treating this API like top secret information. Personally, I'm not so sure what Dolphin is worried about. So far the APIs for the various screen readers are very very simple. Take the JFW API for exampl here. If I want to send some text to Jaws I need to include jfwapi.h and jfwapi.lib to a Visual C++ application and use the JFWSayString() function. To silence/stop speech use JFWStopSpeech(). There is nothing there to be secretive about. So why is Freedom Sientific treating it like proprietary top secret information? GW Micro on the other hand has been very cooperative and helpful today. They gave me some links to their developer resources, gave me a link to get the Window-Eyes SDK, and pointed me to some source examples. Great! That's exactly the kind of response I expect to get from a screen reader developer. Especially, since its their job to insure Windows applications are A, accessible, and B, works with their screen reader. Being all proprietary and secretive like Dolphin and Freedom Scientific are being is a good reason why a developer might choose not to support their screen reader and customers. NV Access---as I mentioned yesterday--is similarly cooperative and helpful. In fact, NVDA was the first screen reader the G3D Engine fully supported just because the information and help was there from the start. NVDA is open source so there is no NDA agreements to sign, no proprietary information to gard, and nothing to be secretive about. Everything is right there in the open and the developer is available for assistance if needed. No wonder NVDA is becoming the most popular screen reader next to Jaws. Besides being free and open source I'm finding it is very easy to support either directly or via Python modules. That's a totally different approach to what the commercial screen readers are doing which inhibits accessibility through proprietary and exclusive licenses in my opinion. Cheers! On 11/1/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. Well I'm hoping that the supernova api won't be that! secret, sinse I have pointed out to dolphin that it is necessary to get this support going in Supernova as well. Hopefully they'll release it soon, but we'll see. Beware the gRue! Dark. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Dark, Couldn't agree with you more. When I switched to NVDA last year and decided not to upgrade Jaws or window-Eyes I began looking for decent Sapi voices to use with NVDA. As far as I am concerned its hard to go wrong investing in the Cereproc or Cepstral voices. For one thing the prices are pretty low. I've got a few Cepstral voices which only cost me $30 USD which is a good price considering Ivona charges $45 per voice, and they are not proprietary. Cepstral seems to be interested in making money honestly and intentionally keep their prices low so just about anyone can afford their products who wants them. Another reason I like Cepstral is they were one of the first to get their act together and upgraded their Swift 5 engine to 64-bit where ATT, Cereproc, etc are still based on 32-bit engines. Since I owned a couple of Swift 5 voices they didn't even charge me to upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit, and they work with my games. So I'm not complaining about their customer service and support at all. So the way I see it is if RealSpeak,Eloquence, and the other proprietary TTS engines continue to be high priced and continue with this proprietarial non-sense let them blow their foot off. As you say its not like they are the only game in town, and sooner or later they'll get the message we don't need their products. There are equally decent products around for a lot less money and the companies who make them are much more honest in my opinion. Cheers! On 11/1/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Michael. Vocalizer has been an inbuilt option in Supernova (Hal), sinse version 12, and I can't say i've noticed any appreciable difference betwene that version of scansoft daniel and the realspeak one, though I am not sure about other voices. i actually stil use the Dolphin orphius voice alan with hal, because I find any encarnation of the realspeak voices not to respond quickly enough to my typing speed. Only eloquence and orphius can catch up, and the natural sounding English voice alan available from dolphin's site I find far more preferable to eloquence or orphius synths, thus being the perfect compromise betwene understandability and responsiveness. Back to realspeak though, those prices are horrible! considdering seerprock and other freely available voices that run with sapi are only about 30 dollars each, I have to wonder what the company is playing at. Ever sinse they started this proprietorial nonsense I've very rapidly lost any respect I had for them in the first place. All I can see this doing is absolutely insuring that people will go to other companies like seerprock or kepstral for sapi voices, though sinse that's pretty much been happening ever sinse scansoft stopped selling freely useable voices it actually doesn't make as much difference. If they want to shoot their business in the foot, well let them, it's not as if we don't have other options afterall. Beware the grue! Dark. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Michael, Thanks for the info. Yeah, I was aware of the Vocalizer 5 name change, but many of the people on this list are Jaws users. Therefore they would think of those voices as RealSpeak Direct rather than Vocalizer. So that's why I used the older more well known name in my article. I wasn't aware a person could buy the Vocalizer 5 voices, and I'm glad to know there is still a way to get them if a person is willing to buy them. As for myself $300 is way too much money for two voices considering I could have 10 Cepstral voices or 6 Ivona voices for that price. Once again, their shooting themselves in the foot if they think the average person is going to pay that kind of money for TTS output when something like the Ivona voices are just as good--maybe even better---and a lot cheaper. its stupidity on their part. Cheers! On 11/1/11, Michael Gauler michael.gau...@gmx.de wrote: Hi Thomas, I don't know if you are aware of this, but there might be several problems coming the way of all JAWS and RealSpeak Direct users. Unfortunately no one in that the Speech Market except Ivona seems to be willing to give apropriate information about their products. I'll post this here in public, so that all people know of this, since the talk on games and speech engines has already started. First of all Nuance/Scansoft has developed several new voices. Some of them being in new languages and other ones give more choices for existing languages. First of all, the new voices are not named RealSpeak, but Vocalizer 5. The only company who does sell the new voices to end users is Koba Vision. There you have to pay more than $300 for two voices of your liking. However there are two problems with the new product. First of all, It seems that the new engine might not be totally stable, but this might have been fixed by now. But the more important issue is that the new distribution of voices seems to be of lesser quality than the RealSpeak Direct voices. The next thing you should know is that the new Scansoft voices haven't been made available to JAWS users up to now (the reason is unknown). Furthermore, the new voices can't be purchased from nextup.com for TextAloud, either. And the last piece of news is that Nuance and Loquendo are effectively becoming one company now and that again no one knows what this means for the individual products of both companies and for general availability of said products... That's it, more information seems to be unavailable. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Quentin, Thanks. I'll take a look at your API, and let you know what I think. As far as an open source project I think that would be a good idea, but I see one potential problem with that and it deals with proprietary licenses. For instance, I am currently in communication with Dolphin--the makers of SuperNova---and they seem to be overly protective of their screen reader API and documentation. The first thing they said when I asked about it is that I'd have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and fill out some legal forms before they would even discuss it with me. That kind of proprietary and secretive license, prevents anyone of adding support for SuperNova in any kind of open source project. As for Window-Eyes I just got the developer information today and it looks fairly straight forward. Beginning with Window-Eyes 7 GW Micro has deprecated the GWSpeak.dll API in favor of connecting with Window-Eyes through its script interface. It doesn't seem all that complicated, but it does feel like an odd way to send messages to and from a screen reader. In any case I'm sure I can help you with Window-Eyes. I've used Window-Eyes for at least twelve years---ever since Window-Eyes 3.1 came out--so I have the experience to help with it. The last version I got before switching to NVDA was 7.5, and therefore have a fairly current release to do testing with. I hope to have Window-Eyes support added to my engine sometime before the week is out now that I have the end user documentation and Window-Eyes SDK in hand. Cheers! On 11/1/11, QuentinC quent...@cfardel.net wrote: Hello, I don't know much about licensing issues and I'm not sure of what to do in that area. I also dont' really know what to do about giving an access to the source code or not. One thing is sure, the project is very young, nothing for future is really decided, and the source code isn't made to facilitate reading (I don't want to waste time for that). A binary only version is online here: http://vrac.quentinc.net/ScreenReaderAPI.zip if you wish to take a look Since gatehering information about screen readers API is quite hard, it might be nice to be able to collect all we know at the same central point and to start an open source project. I don't know. Maybe we could talk in private to discuss what would the best thing to do. The benefit of associating could be good: for example you are a specialist of window eye, and myself I don't know that scrren reader at all (I was even unable to install a demo version on a XP VM), so you could probably improve the code concerning window eye. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Thomas, That sounds fantastic and was definitely interesting to read. If anyone deserves a decent break and a great time with family, you do. I'm loving the ideas for g3d as it should hopefully bring audiogames up to the next level. also, i'm a huge wrestling fan, so superslam sounds fantastic, especially if you can create wrestlers such as tna or ring of honour guys if they arn't in the game. have a brilliant halloween and I hope you continue to enjoy what you're doing, as it sounds like you are. On 10/31/11, Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com wrote: USA Games News October 31, 2011 Introduction Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of the USA Games News. As we haven't put out a press release in quite some time and today is Halloween we thought now would be a good time to bring the community up to date with the latest changes and news. First, an apology is in order. Late in September we mentioned we were considering putting out a game for Halloween. At the time it was something we could do fairly quickly, and because we weren't going to market the game we were not going to add all the features we could. Which means the game probably would have not been up to our usual standards to begin with. However, early on in production we realized that we did not necessarily have all the music and sound effects necessary to create a game of the type we had in mind. We were looking at investing a few hundred in music and sounds, and since we had just purchased new 64-bit laptops there was no money to speak of for sounds and music for this production. The end result would have been cheaply done without it, and to do the game right we would have to end up charging for it. So that didn't square well with us. The other issue was time. Once October got started my wife and I were constantly busy with one thing or another. Halloween parties, a fall cookout, antique festivals, or just sitting back and watching Halloween movies on TV. Basically, it came down to a choice of working on a game for little to no money, or spending that time with our family and friends. In the end the family/friends won out, and before we had time to really get a serious start on it there was no time left to work on the project before Halloween was upon us. So at this point the Halloween game is not completely abandoned but has been postponed. Since there is only about two months until Christmas we need to get things back on track in terms of our commercial projects. Mysteries of the Ancients is nearing completion---as will be discussed at further length in this news letter---and Raceway still needs a lot of work to be completed before we can have any kind of public beta or demo. So our development schedule is pretty full until the end of the year on our main titles. We would like to apologize for not delivering this game as intended, and we hope next year we will be able to have more time to spend on it for next Halloween. Until then though we have our hands full with other projects. Genesis 3D One of the projects that has been getting a lot of work over the last month or so is our Genesis Engine, G3D, which we think will help improve all of our projects. It will speed up development time in the future as well as add some more flexibility in the kinds of games we can create. For instance, we've been looking at creating an RPG style game for quite some time, but unfortunately with that type of game prerecorded speech is totally impractical. There is no way to add custom names, classes, or weapons to a game without recording the files and having the game load and playback the wav file. Not to mention with that kind of game its easy to have hundreds of weapons, special items, and several characters and places all that would have to be prerecorded. It goes without saying that recording and editing hundreds perhaps thousands of speech clips take a very very long time to do. Finally, the worst part is because all of the speech clips are prerecorded there is no way to change the pitch, rate, volume, or voice on the fly. If that needs to be changed it requires rerecording, editing, and testing everything from scratch. Its such a time consuming process that it is not really ideal for any kind of game let alone a large RPG type game. One thing we briefly looked at was some kind of text-based user interface. We wrote a simple blackjack game, drew a standard window, added a textbox, and printed text to the screen. It worked, but wasn't a good solution to the problem mainly because in order to read the text on the screen the player constantly had to review the screen with the Jaws, Window-Eyes, or NVDA review cursor. If a gamer wanted the text to be spoken automatically they'd have to use frames, user windows, or write scripts to capture the new text and speak it aloud. Needless to say it really wasn't a good option either. This, of course, leaves us with
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Shaun, I suppose. However, I think it is more to do with commercial verses open source development procedures. commercial software companies generally are very private and tight lipped about their products and hate to give any information away that could be potentially used by their competition. For them money is the bottom line and everything tends to be put on a need to know basis. Open source developers are not as worried about financial concerns, not too concerned about their competition, and can afford to be more open and freely helpful when it comes to how their software works. Simply put, open source developers are more concerned about the needs of those who they are writing the software for rather than how much money is going into their individual pockets. For example, the developer of NVDA says he started the project because he was tired of paying hundreds of dollars on screen readers and other adaptive technology. He believes that access to a computer should cost us no more than the average sighted user. I agree, and am glad NVDA exists for those who can't afford Jaws, Window-Eyes, SuperNova, etc. In any case the developer realizes that there are people who can not afford a high priced screen reader, and that equal access to a computer shouldn't cost us hundreds perhaps thousands we don't necessarily have to give. His bottomline is universl accessibility for everyone not thousands of dollars a year on income from the project. Therefore in the long run NVDA has a lot going for it, and may become the screen reader of choice for the majority of blind users who don't get Jaws from their state agency or employer. Plus NVDA is based on an off the shelf language like Python. Adding Python modules to extend specific application support isn't that hard given all the Python 2.7 manuals are online and freely available. Jaws on the other hand uses a proprietary scripting language, and unless you can figure it out by reading the existing source Freedom Scientific expects Jaws scripters to fly to Florida, pay the big bucks, and take their scripting classes. They can go jump in a lake as far as I'm concerned. Nobody should have to take special classes to learn to get the most out of their screen reader. However, it is and always has been just another way to make money off the product as you know. Cheers! On 11/2/11, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: hmmm all the older companies are more warried about their backsides than actually moving foreward. nvda is a opensource modern script based system. It is not owned as such in fact its prity open what you can do, I think its gpl based, so you can hack and slash at it all you want with in reason. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Tom. I'm sorry the halloween game didn't work out, but hopefully we'll have something good to play from usa games before the end of the year. Just as to the situation with the Supernova Api used for access (Hal has been renamed supernova screen reader for some reason). dolphin actually have it (it's been used in Quitter and supported libraries which is why blockparty outputs to Supernova), however they haven't made a general public release. Why? because they haven't had time to document the api! I did explain to them that this is absolutely ridiculous! I've had people say quite legitimately that they don't choose to use supernova becuase of the lack of support from certain programs, and it is true that when a game or other application is reliant on sending text directly to a screen reader rather than printing it on the screen, it's not really useable with Supernova currently. Dolphin stated they were! going to fix this when they'd finished supernova 12.5, with it's rewrite of internet support, and sinse that's now done, I'm hopeful the Api should be showing up soon, indeed were I not busy guide dog training currently I'd phone them and see where it currently is. Hopefully when it is actually fixed supporting Supernova with directly sent text will be no more difficult than with Window eyes, Jaws or any other program. As regards the review curser though, that really is one of the strengths of Supernova. It for instance automatically reviews columns logically which is why games liek Smugglers are easier, and also has great ways of moving around the screen, my favourite of which is the find feature which can go to any text. This is why I generally myself don't find games that require it such as if titles or old dos games like piledriver or fallthru difficult to play, indeed while the direct output method is fine too (I can always use sapi as I usually do), I wasn't unhappy with usa blackjack for this reason myself. Beware the grue! dark. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
This news article made me curious about something. Have you been able to work around the jaws keyboard trap issue? I guess you understand what I mean. Even then I'm not sure how well you could play a game like MOTA with it running, since it does make the keyboard sort of sluggish in some parts (scraping in a sound editor for instance) Over all though i'm glad things are progressing. Being a NVDA user myself I really like using it as speech output in games. You could argue how Espeak/eloquence fits into a mood of a game, but hey. What ever works for someone just works. --- 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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi, Glad to be of some assistance. A lot of what I talked about is personal experience testing, experimenting, and tracking down stability issues with games on my 64-bit copy of Windows 7. For instance, I've got a lot of Jim Kitchens games installed on this box. As you know they use SAPI for speech output. I wanted to know if it was the games themselves or SAPI that were crashing. Turns out through trial and error if I use a true 64-bit voice like Microsoft Anna or Ivona Bryan the games run fine. If I use an older 32-bit voice the games have a tendancy to crash more often than not. That made me a little hesitant to rely on SAPI alone for speech output in my own games because if the user is using the wrong voice there could be stability issues. So what I'm doing to resolve that problem is adding multiple speech services to the engine Jaws, NVDA, SAPI, and probably other screen readers as well. That way if one doesn't work or suit someone they can simply go into the program settings and change the speech service to something more to their needs. So far its working out pretty well. For the past year or so I've become a big NVDA user, and prefer using it over Jaws and Window-Eyes. Its pretty cool to go into one of my games, change the default speech service to NVDA, and have everything spoken using NVDA. Its a lot more seamless and responsive than what we've been doing with STFC, MOTA, etc using prerecorded speech clips. So I'm glad I have helped by sharing my experiences. I've done a lot of testing trying to find a stable way to get spoken feedback to the end user, and there is no one size fits all solution. A combination of solutions is better than sticking to any single solution from what I've seen so far. If you can contact the screen reader through its API like the JFW API, NVDA Controller Client, etc its even better yet. Its pretty likely that there will be a high degree of accessibility out of the box. Cheers! On 10/31/11, Eleanor Robinson elea...@7128.com wrote: Thomas, John and I feel your pain. We've been sitting here reading your latest USA Games News; informative as usual. We use SAPI and JAWS in our games. Both are a pain. SAPI crashes sometimes, not always, on our 64-bit machines; though it works fine on our 32-bit machines. Our examination of the Windows error logs confirms that the crash is in their SAPI DLL. Your information about the 64-32 bit-ness of the voices is helpful to us there. Now we don't have to spend a whole lot of time looking for non-existent bugs in our code. (John says Yea!) Suspect that all of us will just have to endure the occasional crash on a 64-bit machine until our gamers replace their voices. At least our stuff automatically saves at each step, so people don't lose their games. And JAWS won't work at all on a 64-bit machine; but you know all about that. Oddly enough, we're seriously looking into using recorded voices (MP3) for the second release of our Sounds Like game. The first release is in QA right now. Ryan, our chief Beta tester says some of the words are hard to understand. And Kelly commented on sound quality in his recent review of our stuff. So we take this seriously. Since a word game is not nearly as complex as the RPG's you're doing, we think that using sound files might not be too resource intensive. Just gotta get Cyndi in front of the mike. (But she's off doing paying acting gigs right now.) Thanks for your timely information. (John says yea again!) Eleanor and John 7-128 Software --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Dark, Well, when you find out something about Super Nova's API let me know. This issue of not documenting the API is a common problem with screen readers in general. Its driving me slightly nuts. For instance, if a developer wants to know how to access NVDA via its Controller Client its no biggy. There is a decent amount of free API documentation not to mention source code too look at. Jaws on the other hand is a totally different story. A developer wants to know how to access and use the JFW API the developer has to contact them directly, talk to their technical support, and then they'll e-mail the developer documentation as well as the headers and libs for the API. Why they don't put it up on the website I'll never know. The guys over at Freedom Scientific created the API so applications would support their screen reader, but when a developer asks about it they treat it like top secret information or something. Like go figure. They want third-party developers to support Jaws or not? Cheers! On 10/31/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. I'm sorry the halloween game didn't work out, but hopefully we'll have something good to play from usa games before the end of the year. Just as to the situation with the Supernova Api used for access (Hal has been renamed supernova screen reader for some reason). dolphin actually have it (it's been used in Quitter and supported libraries which is why blockparty outputs to Supernova), however they haven't made a general public release. Why? because they haven't had time to document the api! I did explain to them that this is absolutely ridiculous! I've had people say quite legitimately that they don't choose to use supernova becuase of the lack of support from certain programs, and it is true that when a game or other application is reliant on sending text directly to a screen reader rather than printing it on the screen, it's not really useable with Supernova currently. Dolphin stated they were! going to fix this when they'd finished supernova 12.5, with it's rewrite of internet support, and sinse that's now done, I'm hopeful the Api should be showing up soon, indeed were I not busy guide dog training currently I'd phone them and see where it currently is. Hopefully when it is actually fixed supporting Supernova with directly sent text will be no more difficult than with Window eyes, Jaws or any other program. As regards the review curser though, that really is one of the strengths of Supernova. It for instance automatically reviews columns logically which is why games liek Smugglers are easier, and also has great ways of moving around the screen, my favourite of which is the find feature which can go to any text. This is why I generally myself don't find games that require it such as if titles or old dos games like piledriver or fallthru difficult to play, indeed while the direct output method is fine too (I can always use sapi as I usually do), I wasn't unhappy with usa blackjack for this reason myself. Beware the grue! dark. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi, Ah, that's still one of the issues I'm working on. When using Jaws for speech output there is a keyboard trapping issue I've not found a good way around yet. I did put the JFW demo to sleep and that seemed to work, but even though it frees up the keyboard its not as responsive as using say NVDA, because I think Jaws still tries to capture or trap the keyboard in the background. It is pretty problematic right now. I may have to switch over to standard keyboard events rather than using DirectX to fix that issue. However, as for ESpeak and Eloquence I don't think they fit well into a game environment, but its whatever works. With newer versions of Jaws like Jaws 12 there is plenty of RealSpeak Direct voices like Tom, Karen, Jennifer, Daniel, etc so all the user has to do is download and install a RealSpeak direct voice, set Jaws up to use that, and the game will use the RealSpeak voices instead of Eloquence. So hopefully it is things like that which will provide a better solution than just ESpeak or Eloquence. Cheers! On 10/31/11, pitermach piterm...@gmail.com wrote: This news article made me curious about something. Have you been able to work around the jaws keyboard trap issue? I guess you understand what I mean. Even then I'm not sure how well you could play a game like MOTA with it running, since it does make the keyboard sort of sluggish in some parts (scraping in a sound editor for instance) Over all though i'm glad things are progressing. Being a NVDA user myself I really like using it as speech output in games. You could argue how Espeak/eloquence fits into a mood of a game, but hey. What ever works for someone just works. --- 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://mail.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://mail.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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi, On Fr, Jun 17 2011, Thomas Ward wrote: For the short term we have decided to shelve the cross-platform engine and game until we get the Windows release of Mysteries of the Ancients finished. This is really a shame. I was really excited after you announced your cross-platform engine and I enjoyed the MOTA betas that run on linux. Moreover, the fact that the Linux support gained as much atention as Windows was just avesome. Then I've read Thomas' mail about the Linux users which are claimed to want to get everything for free and now the development of the cross-platform game is even suspended. Moreover, after the Windows release, the Mac sems to be the next platform which gets attention, if I haven't got you wrong. This is really sat for me as a Linux user and I actually dont understand what's wrong with the Linux version of MOTA as I found the last betas really awesome and quite playable, also the panning was fine for me. Regarding the money: I'm fine with spending money for a game as long it is natively supported on my platform. If the game is only supported through Wine or - even worse - if I would have been forced to run a virtualized or real Windows to play the game, I most probably would not buy it. Anyway, you're doing a great Job Thomas and I'm looking forward to the cross-platform (and in particular the Linux) release of MOTA. cheers Henning --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Henning, You wrote: This is really a shame. I was really excited after you announced your cross-platform engine and I enjoyed the MOTA betas that run on linux. Moreover, the fact that the Linux support gained as much atention as Windows was just avesome. My reply: i know. As a Linux user myself I am very disappointed in having to do this, but understand I took preorders for this game about two years ago, and many of those users are ready to ring my neck if I don't complete it on time. Since many of those on preorder only use Windows my taking time to create and design a fully operational cross-platform engine for Mac OS or Linux is, in their eyes, a waiste of time better spent on completeing a game they paid for. Therefore my decision to do this was simply to settle those accounts, and then I'll have more freedom to do what I want to with the game. That is to design and produce games using a fully cross-platform engine designed for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You wrote: want to get everything for free and now the development of the cross-platform game is even suspended. Moreover, after the Windows release, the Mac seems to be the next platform which gets attention, if I haven't got you wrong. My reply: Um...You seem to have got it all wrong here. Let me explain. First, I never said that Linux users want everything for free. I know plenty of Linux users like myself who are willing to spend some money on quality products for Linux. I myself have purchased commercial apps for Linux such as some of the Cepstral voices, and know others who would pay for commercial apps like that to as long as the price was fair. At last count there were around 87 Linux users who stated up front they would be willing to purchase games from USA Games if they were written for Linux and the price was fair. So I know there are people willing to pay for Linux specific games and products. So I haven't a clue where you got the notion I said Linux users always want something for free. Second, after we finish work on the Windows release of Mysteries of the Ancients our goal is to complete work on the cross-platform Genesis Engine. once that is done we will be able to produce games for Linux, and most likely Mac OS as well. While I may specifically have mentioned Mac OS in the news letter what I actually meant is that the cross-platform engine which is based on generic cross-platform APIs like SDL will enable to port our games from Windows to other platforms including Linux and Mac OS. I'm a Linux user myself so that is top on my list of things to do. It takes priority over Mac OS as I want to be able to play my games on Linux directly rather than via wine etc. You wrote: I actually dont understand what's wrong with the Linux version of MOTA as I found the last betas really awesome and quite playable, also the panning was fine for me. My reply: Well, technically there are two issues which I intend to correct as soon as I have time to. The first issue is that many of the Windows users who are use to the way DirectSound pans sounds were disappointed and upset at me switching to FMOD Ex because the way it pans sounds and the way Microsoft DirectSound pans sounds are totally different. They wanted me to rip FMOD Ex out and replace with DirectSound. As many users said if this wasn't done they would not pay for the game. So I'm switching back to DirectSound in order to boost sales for the Windows gaming market even though I personally do not want to. The other major issue is I based beta 19 on FMOD Ex which is an extremely expensive audio API for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Now, that i know I won't be able to target the Windows gaming market using FMOD I'm not going to pay for FMOD Ex. What I am likely going to do is drop support for FMOD Ex and replace it with OpenAL which is what I should have done in the first place. That will take me a little while to rewrite the audio portion of my engine to support OpenAL. So to summarize the situation right now. This is a very very temporary solution right now. I have no plans to drop or stop developing the Linux release of Mysteries of the Ancients. I am only pushing back the release date for it a few months until I can swap out FMOD for OpenAL and a few other things like that. HTH --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Yohandy, I bet it would be. Hopefully, I'll have it done by then. No promises though as I've got my hands full upgrading/merging the Windows engine with many changes made to the beta 19 version of MOTA and the cross-platform engine. Cheers! On 6/18/11, Yohandy yohand...@gmail.com wrote: Thomas, My birthday falls at the end of September. it'll be an awesome birthday gift if this game comes out by the end of Sept! grin --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Shaun, Grin. Good point. Although, all terminators aren't bad. Just most of them. Speaking of Skynet, the real Skynet, we got most of the stuff moved and are waiting for DNS etc to update world wide. So hopefully by this afternoon etc USA Games will be back on the web with the first stage of our upgrade. On 6/17/11, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: Justread about your site moving with skynet. I should say be carefull with the machines, terminators, etc. I mean skynet from the movies is not your friend grin --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Charles, Yeah, it is, but for some reason 2d stereo panning isn't widely supported with audio APIs any more. Which means I have to go back to DirectSound for that 2d stereo panning that people want, because OpenAL and other audio APIs simply do not have that functionality. Now, for the 3d version of Mysteries of the Ancients it would be something of a different story. I could use OpenAL which has virtual 3d audio, 5.1 surround sound, etc which is exactly what I want for a 3d FPS game. Which is what OpenAL was designed to do. So perhaps, just perhaps, when I look at releasing the 3d version I might be able to build it using the cross-platform engine as panning won't be a major factor there. the only issue I can think of is getting joysticks and mice working with SDL. So I'm thinking that cross-platform could be possible provided we don't need 2d stereo panning but just 5.1 surround sound which OpenAL does very well, and OpenAL is the default audio library on Mac OS and Linux, and their are versions available for Windows as well. On 6/17/11, Charles Rivard woofer...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Maybe this decision to put out a twentieth beta of MOTA for Windows is the way to go, but I hate to hear that the cross platforming is temporarily shelved, even though I am a Windows user, because I know that's not at all what you want to do. Wile it might be a business decision, I still think it is a bummer. --- Laughter is the best medicine, so look around, find a dose and take it to heart. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Thomas, why do you say 2d panning isn't supported in openAL? As I understand it, 3d audio simply adds forward/backward and up/down movement to the standard left/right panning of 1d sound. So in effect, keeping the forward and up/down coordinates fixed while varying the x should, and does, pan a sound. On 6/18/11, Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Charles, Yeah, it is, but for some reason 2d stereo panning isn't widely supported with audio APIs any more. Which means I have to go back to DirectSound for that 2d stereo panning that people want, because OpenAL and other audio APIs simply do not have that functionality. Now, for the 3d version of Mysteries of the Ancients it would be something of a different story. I could use OpenAL which has virtual 3d audio, 5.1 surround sound, etc which is exactly what I want for a 3d FPS game. Which is what OpenAL was designed to do. So perhaps, just perhaps, when I look at releasing the 3d version I might be able to build it using the cross-platform engine as panning won't be a major factor there. the only issue I can think of is getting joysticks and mice working with SDL. So I'm thinking that cross-platform could be possible provided we don't need 2d stereo panning but just 5.1 surround sound which OpenAL does very well, and OpenAL is the default audio library on Mac OS and Linux, and their are versions available for Windows as well. On 6/17/11, Charles Rivard woofer...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Maybe this decision to put out a twentieth beta of MOTA for Windows is the way to go, but I hate to hear that the cross platforming is temporarily shelved, even though I am a Windows user, because I know that's not at all what you want to do. Wile it might be a business decision, I still think it is a bummer. --- Laughter is the best medicine, so look around, find a dose and take it to heart. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Tom. just one quick question. If you use 3D sound only, will the game stil be playable with headphones? i have a very good set of 5.1 logitech speakers, however even for the first person audio games we have, I always prefer playing on headphones simply because I've found that I simply cannot get the same precision in positioning audio when using speakers, and for fine tasks such as targiting weapons, determining direction of multiple sound sources and the like I would find speakers far harder to play on however good the game audio was. i hope therefore if the 3D engine used 5.1 we could stil use headphones. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2011 10:54 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Charles, Yeah, it is, but for some reason 2d stereo panning isn't widely supported with audio APIs any more. Which means I have to go back to DirectSound for that 2d stereo panning that people want, because OpenAL and other audio APIs simply do not have that functionality. Now, for the 3d version of Mysteries of the Ancients it would be something of a different story. I could use OpenAL which has virtual 3d audio, 5.1 surround sound, etc which is exactly what I want for a 3d FPS game. Which is what OpenAL was designed to do. So perhaps, just perhaps, when I look at releasing the 3d version I might be able to build it using the cross-platform engine as panning won't be a major factor there. the only issue I can think of is getting joysticks and mice working with SDL. So I'm thinking that cross-platform could be possible provided we don't need 2d stereo panning but just 5.1 surround sound which OpenAL does very well, and OpenAL is the default audio library on Mac OS and Linux, and their are versions available for Windows as well. On 6/17/11, Charles Rivard woofer...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Maybe this decision to put out a twentieth beta of MOTA for Windows is the way to go, but I hate to hear that the cross platforming is temporarily shelved, even though I am a Windows user, because I know that's not at all what you want to do. Wile it might be a business decision, I still think it is a bummer. --- Laughter is the best medicine, so look around, find a dose and take it to heart. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Willem, True, but based on my limited experience with OpenAL panning sounds as you described isn't as smooth sounding as DirectSound's 2d stereo pan control. Do you remember beta 14 and beta 15? The game was using SFML-Audio which was a wrapper for OpenAL, and I could never get OpenAL to pan correctly. Oh, I could pan sounds left/right by keeping the y axis and z axis fixed, but it didn't pan smoothly. I don't know if it was just me or OpenAL, but I was just unable to make it pan exactly like DirectX. That said, as I've decided to adopt OpenAL for my cross-platform engine for Linux and Mac this is something I will be looking into further as I'm going to have to make it work somehow. On 6/18/11, Willem Venter dwill...@gmail.com wrote: Thomas, why do you say 2d panning isn't supported in openAL? As I understand it, 3d audio simply adds forward/backward and up/down movement to the standard left/right panning of 1d sound. So in effect, keeping the forward and up/down coordinates fixed while varying the x should, and does, pan a sound. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Thomas, as far as I know, as long as you move the listener according to the right scale of movement, smooth panning is possible and sounds better than directX. On 6/18/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. just one quick question. If you use 3D sound only, will the game stil be playable with headphones? i have a very good set of 5.1 logitech speakers, however even for the first person audio games we have, I always prefer playing on headphones simply because I've found that I simply cannot get the same precision in positioning audio when using speakers, and for fine tasks such as targiting weapons, determining direction of multiple sound sources and the like I would find speakers far harder to play on however good the game audio was. i hope therefore if the 3D engine used 5.1 we could stil use headphones. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2011 10:54 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Charles, Yeah, it is, but for some reason 2d stereo panning isn't widely supported with audio APIs any more. Which means I have to go back to DirectSound for that 2d stereo panning that people want, because OpenAL and other audio APIs simply do not have that functionality. Now, for the 3d version of Mysteries of the Ancients it would be something of a different story. I could use OpenAL which has virtual 3d audio, 5.1 surround sound, etc which is exactly what I want for a 3d FPS game. Which is what OpenAL was designed to do. So perhaps, just perhaps, when I look at releasing the 3d version I might be able to build it using the cross-platform engine as panning won't be a major factor there. the only issue I can think of is getting joysticks and mice working with SDL. So I'm thinking that cross-platform could be possible provided we don't need 2d stereo panning but just 5.1 surround sound which OpenAL does very well, and OpenAL is the default audio library on Mac OS and Linux, and their are versions available for Windows as well. On 6/17/11, Charles Rivard woofer...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Maybe this decision to put out a twentieth beta of MOTA for Windows is the way to go, but I hate to hear that the cross platforming is temporarily shelved, even though I am a Windows user, because I know that's not at all what you want to do. Wile it might be a business decision, I still think it is a bummer. --- Laughter is the best medicine, so look around, find a dose and take it to heart. --- 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. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Dark, Well, that's something of the catch 22. You could certainly use headphones, but if they aren't 5.1 surround sound headphones some of the audio positioning etc would be lost as you don't have 5 channels of audio output and are reduced to 2d stereo. In other words you could do it but the audio quality would suffer, and you might have to relie on other things like a targeting beep to properly aim a weapon, or scan the area with the look command to get a better idea of where things are in relation to you. So I think it is still possible, but might require some other form of feedback besides audio. I don't really see this as a problem though, because as you said the games that do have 3d audio like Shades of Doom can be played with bog standard headphones with full 3d audio enabled. That's because Shades of Doom has a lot of other ways of obtaining the same feedback such as a targeting scope, the ability to get the distance and direction to monsters, examine door ways, etc which gives the player more than one way to figure out his/her environment rather than audio. So I would assume MOTA 3D should be as accessible given the fact I plan to add in most if not all of the same kinds of verbal and audio queues as Shades of Doomm. On 6/18/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. just one quick question. If you use 3D sound only, will the game stil be playable with headphones? i have a very good set of 5.1 logitech speakers, however even for the first person audio games we have, I always prefer playing on headphones simply because I've found that I simply cannot get the same precision in positioning audio when using speakers, and for fine tasks such as targiting weapons, determining direction of multiple sound sources and the like I would find speakers far harder to play on however good the game audio was. i hope therefore if the 3D engine used 5.1 we could stil use headphones. Beware the grue! Dark. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Willem, Well, I'll take your word on that. AS it is when it comes time to working on the Linux and Mac OS ports of the game you can help me get the panning working correctly. In the mean time I'm going to finish the Windows version using DirectX, and worry about cross-platform APIs like OpenAL later. On 6/18/11, Willem Venter dwill...@gmail.com wrote: Thomas, as far as I know, as long as you move the listener according to the right scale of movement, smooth panning is possible and sounds better than directX. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi tom. Good to here your adding in the kews, though this is something we've discussed before. it's odd but I can actually play shades of doom far more effectively and precisely with my headphones than I can on 5.1 speakers, mostly because the audio is far more immediate. Indeed, while I like my 5.1 speakers for watching films, the only games i use them for are specifically though that do not require large amounts of sterrio, like Jim kitchin's golf game, and if I'm listening to audio dramas I always prefer headphones. I must admit though my hadphones are rather monstrous sanheisar ones that actually cost as much as the speakers did, so this might be a factor. Beware the Grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2011 11:40 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Dark, Well, that's something of the catch 22. You could certainly use headphones, but if they aren't 5.1 surround sound headphones some of the audio positioning etc would be lost as you don't have 5 channels of audio output and are reduced to 2d stereo. In other words you could do it but the audio quality would suffer, and you might have to relie on other things like a targeting beep to properly aim a weapon, or scan the area with the look command to get a better idea of where things are in relation to you. So I think it is still possible, but might require some other form of feedback besides audio. I don't really see this as a problem though, because as you said the games that do have 3d audio like Shades of Doom can be played with bog standard headphones with full 3d audio enabled. That's because Shades of Doom has a lot of other ways of obtaining the same feedback such as a targeting scope, the ability to get the distance and direction to monsters, examine door ways, etc which gives the player more than one way to figure out his/her environment rather than audio. So I would assume MOTA 3D should be as accessible given the fact I plan to add in most if not all of the same kinds of verbal and audio queues as Shades of Doomm. On 6/18/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi Tom. just one quick question. If you use 3D sound only, will the game stil be playable with headphones? i have a very good set of 5.1 logitech speakers, however even for the first person audio games we have, I always prefer playing on headphones simply because I've found that I simply cannot get the same precision in positioning audio when using speakers, and for fine tasks such as targiting weapons, determining direction of multiple sound sources and the like I would find speakers far harder to play on however good the game audio was. i hope therefore if the 3D engine used 5.1 we could stil use headphones. Beware the grue! Dark. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Dark, Well, I generally use bog standard stereo headphones myself even though I have 5.1 speakers and headphones etc because these days I generally play games on my laptop and not on my desktop. My laptop has just a basic stereo sound card, and I generally don't want to carry a $125 pair of 5.1 headphones around with me on a jobsite etc as if they get broken or lost I'm up the creek. Besides that these 5.1 headphones I'm talking about hook up to a USB port, and requires special drivers to be installed so they act as another sound device. That's all well and good if I am playing games on Windows, but so far as I know there aren't Mac or Linux drivers available for these headphones. As a result when I am using Linux on my laptop I usually have to settle for bog standard stereo headphones anyway just because I haven't located a sound driver for my 5.1 headphones that will allow me to use them on non-Windows computers. As for the 5.1 speakers I have on my desktop PC they sound really awesome with GMA Tank Commander or Shades of Doom, but after I got married I've started using headphones to keep from disturbing my wife who might be watching television, reading a book to my son, or some other action where blasting my speakers at full volume would be a destraction. So even though I myself own the proper equipment and technology its not very practical for a lot of reasons. For all of those reasons even though I might support 3d audio in my games I'm in the same boat when it comes to being able to play them using standard stereo headphones or speakers. If it wasn't possible I'd have to find a different way to get access to that same information weather by verbalizing it or adding in other indecators like targeting beeps. On 6/18/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi tom. Good to here your adding in the kews, though this is something we've discussed before. it's odd but I can actually play shades of doom far more effectively and precisely with my headphones than I can on 5.1 speakers, mostly because the audio is far more immediate. Indeed, while I like my 5.1 speakers for watching films, the only games i use them for are specifically though that do not require large amounts of sterrio, like Jim kitchin's golf game, and if I'm listening to audio dramas I always prefer headphones. I must admit though my hadphones are rather monstrous sanheisar ones that actually cost as much as the speakers did, so this might be a factor. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hmmm maybe I should call you the cyber emperor or something in stead. At 09:44 p.m. 18/06/2011, you wrote: Hi Shaun, Grin. Good point. Although, all terminators aren't bad. Just most of them. Speaking of Skynet, the real Skynet, we got most of the stuff moved and are waiting for DNS etc to update world wide. So hopefully by this afternoon etc USA Games will be back on the web with the first stage of our upgrade. On 6/17/11, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: Justread about your site moving with skynet. I should say be carefull with the machines, terminators, etc. I mean skynet from the movies is not your friend grin --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Thomas, My birthday falls at the end of September. it'll be an awesome birthday gift if this game comes out by the end of Sept! grin - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 12:54 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Greg, Sorry, you misunderstood what I was saying. I was telling Dark that the Genesis 3D Engine, the Windows version, has MS Sapi 5 support, but I didn't mean to imply that Mysteries of the Ancients itself uses it. The game wasn't written with Sapi support in mind, and in order to add it I'd have to rewrite a fair amount of code to add Sapi support rather than use prerecorded wav files. If the community at large would rather have Sapi 5 support I could add it, but it would have to be a majority of customers asking for that feature. I'm currently on a 90 day release schedule, hoping to having something ready to sell by September, so I'm not going to do something that drastic unless there is popular demand for it. If you guys want Sapi support in MOTA 1.0 let me know, but I am saying upfront I won't do it for two or three people. It would have to be a large majority of people. HTH On 6/17/11, Greg Steel greegste...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Hi Tom I think that this is a great idea does this mean that we can use sapi5 and are you going to delete the prerecorded voice files in the game?How is this going to work. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi tom. I'm really pleased to here about the iminant release of windows mota, sinse i was well impressed with Beta 18 and am really looking forward to playing the rest of the game. while I understand the logic of a fully cross platform engine that works on everything, personally I must confess it has sometimes felt that mota has sacrificed quality for cross platform compatibility in a single version of the game. However, sinse now you are developing separate ports for each platform which, rather than using cross platform components common to all platforms can use the best available components on each platform, I think things will very much improve. The only downer is obviously this will take some extra work, however on the pluss side there will be subsequent versions available which owners of different platforms can buy, obviously starting with the windows release, a fact which, as someone who uses windows I'm quite happy with myself. I'll also be interested to see how this trophy case works and what sorts of challenges we will have in the game for collecting trophies. All the best, Dark. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Dark, Unfortunately, that is so very true. Based on my own research here there really isn't any single high-quality cross-platform solution whenit comes to creating games like Mysteries of the Ancients because often times we end up sacrificing something in the process. Its one thing if it is a relatively simple game like Poker, Blackjack, monopoly, etc that doesn't require precision audio, joysticks, and that sort of thing, and quite another when we are talking something like Mysteries of the Ancients which does. The solution I've decided upon for that problem is to create a engine that targets each specific platform. For Windows the Genesis 3D engine will use DirectX, MS Sapi, the Windows API where my Linux version of the Engine might use SDL, OpenAL, Speech-Dispatcher, and so on. That way if the Linux version of the engine lacks some feature such as force feedback support it would be limited to only that platform, and not to everyone running Windows. This is really the only way to satisfy everyone involved. Not only that in a lot of cases I was having difficulty finding a cross-platform solution for certain things like TTS support anyway. On Windows my speech library wraps Sapi 5, which is fine for Windows, but wouldn't work for Linux or Mac OS. Each of those platforms have alternative TTS APIs such as Speech-Dispatcher on Linux. The only truly cross-platform solution for that problem is to use an open source synth like ESpeak, and to be honest it doesn't sound that good and would drag the quality of the games and my engine down just because I'd have to settle for whatever was cross-platform rather than using any voices present on the machine. That's not ideal for what I'm trying to do here. So this way by creating platform specific game engines I can resolve that problem pretty easily. On Windows by wrapping Sapi the gamer could use Microsoft Anna, one of the ATT voices, the Cepstral voices, or any other voice that has Standard Sapi 5.x support. On Linux by wrapping Speech-Dispatcher I can support ESpeak, Ivona TTS, Cepstral Voices, Eloquence, etc via the Speech-Dispatcher generic TTS API. It works out for everybody in the end. So, yeah, things will definitely improve for everyone. I'll be focussing on the best APIs for each platform from now on, supporting them directly, rather than through layers of middleware that may or may not work as desired. I'm going to kick out a lot of the third-party middleware and my engine will be the middleware between the op and the game rather than sitting on a bunch of cross-platform middleware that clearly doesn't work. You shouldn't have to sacrifice anything in this case since if the feature is supported on your operating system I will do what I can to support it in that version of the engine. So heres three cheers for beta 20. Cheers! On 6/17/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi tom. I'm really pleased to here about the iminant release of windows mota, sinse i was well impressed with Beta 18 and am really looking forward to playing the rest of the game. while I understand the logic of a fully cross platform engine that works on everything, personally I must confess it has sometimes felt that mota has sacrificed quality for cross platform compatibility in a single version of the game. However, sinse now you are developing separate ports for each platform which, rather than using cross platform components common to all platforms can use the best available components on each platform, I think things will very much improve. The only downer is obviously this will take some extra work, however on the pluss side there will be subsequent versions available which owners of different platforms can buy, obviously starting with the windows release, a fact which, as someone who uses windows I'm quite happy with myself. I'll also be interested to see how this trophy case works and what sorts of challenges we will have in the game for collecting trophies. All the best, Dark. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Tom I think that this is a great idea does this mean that we can use sapi5 and are you going to delete the prerecorded voice files in the game?How is this going to work. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 8:14 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Dark, Unfortunately, that is so very true. Based on my own research here there really isn't any single high-quality cross-platform solution whenit comes to creating games like Mysteries of the Ancients because often times we end up sacrificing something in the process. Its one thing if it is a relatively simple game like Poker, Blackjack, monopoly, etc that doesn't require precision audio, joysticks, and that sort of thing, and quite another when we are talking something like Mysteries of the Ancients which does. The solution I've decided upon for that problem is to create a engine that targets each specific platform. For Windows the Genesis 3D engine will use DirectX, MS Sapi, the Windows API where my Linux version of the Engine might use SDL, OpenAL, Speech-Dispatcher, and so on. That way if the Linux version of the engine lacks some feature such as force feedback support it would be limited to only that platform, and not to everyone running Windows. This is really the only way to satisfy everyone involved. Not only that in a lot of cases I was having difficulty finding a cross-platform solution for certain things like TTS support anyway. On Windows my speech library wraps Sapi 5, which is fine for Windows, but wouldn't work for Linux or Mac OS. Each of those platforms have alternative TTS APIs such as Speech-Dispatcher on Linux. The only truly cross-platform solution for that problem is to use an open source synth like ESpeak, and to be honest it doesn't sound that good and would drag the quality of the games and my engine down just because I'd have to settle for whatever was cross-platform rather than using any voices present on the machine. That's not ideal for what I'm trying to do here. So this way by creating platform specific game engines I can resolve that problem pretty easily. On Windows by wrapping Sapi the gamer could use Microsoft Anna, one of the ATT voices, the Cepstral voices, or any other voice that has Standard Sapi 5.x support. On Linux by wrapping Speech-Dispatcher I can support ESpeak, Ivona TTS, Cepstral Voices, Eloquence, etc via the Speech-Dispatcher generic TTS API. It works out for everybody in the end. So, yeah, things will definitely improve for everyone. I'll be focussing on the best APIs for each platform from now on, supporting them directly, rather than through layers of middleware that may or may not work as desired. I'm going to kick out a lot of the third-party middleware and my engine will be the middleware between the op and the game rather than sitting on a bunch of cross-platform middleware that clearly doesn't work. You shouldn't have to sacrifice anything in this case since if the feature is supported on your operating system I will do what I can to support it in that version of the engine. So heres three cheers for beta 20. Cheers! On 6/17/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi tom. I'm really pleased to here about the iminant release of windows mota, sinse i was well impressed with Beta 18 and am really looking forward to playing the rest of the game. while I understand the logic of a fully cross platform engine that works on everything, personally I must confess it has sometimes felt that mota has sacrificed quality for cross platform compatibility in a single version of the game. However, sinse now you are developing separate ports for each platform which, rather than using cross platform components common to all platforms can use the best available components on each platform, I think things will very much improve. The only downer is obviously this will take some extra work, however on the pluss side there will be subsequent versions available which owners of different platforms can buy, obviously starting with the windows release, a fact which, as someone who uses windows I'm quite happy with myself. I'll also be interested to see how this trophy case works and what sorts of challenges we will have in the game for collecting trophies. All the best, Dark. --- 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
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Greg, Sorry, you misunderstood what I was saying. I was telling Dark that the Genesis 3D Engine, the Windows version, has MS Sapi 5 support, but I didn't mean to imply that Mysteries of the Ancients itself uses it. The game wasn't written with Sapi support in mind, and in order to add it I'd have to rewrite a fair amount of code to add Sapi support rather than use prerecorded wav files. If the community at large would rather have Sapi 5 support I could add it, but it would have to be a majority of customers asking for that feature. I'm currently on a 90 day release schedule, hoping to having something ready to sell by September, so I'm not going to do something that drastic unless there is popular demand for it. If you guys want Sapi support in MOTA 1.0 let me know, but I am saying upfront I won't do it for two or three people. It would have to be a large majority of people. HTH On 6/17/11, Greg Steel greegste...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Hi Tom I think that this is a great idea does this mean that we can use sapi5 and are you going to delete the prerecorded voice files in the game?How is this going to work. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Personally tom I'm happy as is. maybe in the planning stages sapi would've been easier to add for menues, speaking of health etc, but now you've got all that done with prerecorded synth files it seems silly to change it. That being said however, I am pleased to here that sapi support is in the genesis engine generally, sinse it's one of these things that comes in useful, for instance people could now write their own driver names in raceway, or, if you make an arcade style game with scoring use sapi to write their names. While I'm very much in favour of human voices being used for human characters, for menues and in game info as I've said synths are fine, and sapi usually has the advantage of being both easy to implement, and able to easily take the users' own in put for anything needed in the game. As I said, sinse Mota has already been done speech wise changing it just seems extra work imho, but this is a good thing for future games I think. Beware the grue! Dark. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
the other option some way down the track is if bgt goes cross platform you could do the games in that, though that would put your engine out the window. Not sure if you could base your engine on bgt eventually though. I am just chucking stuff out there. At 03:14 a.m. 18/06/2011, you wrote: Hi Dark, Unfortunately, that is so very true. Based on my own research here there really isn't any single high-quality cross-platform solution whenit comes to creating games like Mysteries of the Ancients because often times we end up sacrificing something in the process. Its one thing if it is a relatively simple game like Poker, Blackjack, monopoly, etc that doesn't require precision audio, joysticks, and that sort of thing, and quite another when we are talking something like Mysteries of the Ancients which does. The solution I've decided upon for that problem is to create a engine that targets each specific platform. For Windows the Genesis 3D engine will use DirectX, MS Sapi, the Windows API where my Linux version of the Engine might use SDL, OpenAL, Speech-Dispatcher, and so on. That way if the Linux version of the engine lacks some feature such as force feedback support it would be limited to only that platform, and not to everyone running Windows. This is really the only way to satisfy everyone involved. Not only that in a lot of cases I was having difficulty finding a cross-platform solution for certain things like TTS support anyway. On Windows my speech library wraps Sapi 5, which is fine for Windows, but wouldn't work for Linux or Mac OS. Each of those platforms have alternative TTS APIs such as Speech-Dispatcher on Linux. The only truly cross-platform solution for that problem is to use an open source synth like ESpeak, and to be honest it doesn't sound that good and would drag the quality of the games and my engine down just because I'd have to settle for whatever was cross-platform rather than using any voices present on the machine. That's not ideal for what I'm trying to do here. So this way by creating platform specific game engines I can resolve that problem pretty easily. On Windows by wrapping Sapi the gamer could use Microsoft Anna, one of the ATT voices, the Cepstral voices, or any other voice that has Standard Sapi 5.x support. On Linux by wrapping Speech-Dispatcher I can support ESpeak, Ivona TTS, Cepstral Voices, Eloquence, etc via the Speech-Dispatcher generic TTS API. It works out for everybody in the end. So, yeah, things will definitely improve for everyone. I'll be focussing on the best APIs for each platform from now on, supporting them directly, rather than through layers of middleware that may or may not work as desired. I'm going to kick out a lot of the third-party middleware and my engine will be the middleware between the op and the game rather than sitting on a bunch of cross-platform middleware that clearly doesn't work. You shouldn't have to sacrifice anything in this case since if the feature is supported on your operating system I will do what I can to support it in that version of the engine. So heres three cheers for beta 20. Cheers! On 6/17/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi tom. I'm really pleased to here about the iminant release of windows mota, sinse i was well impressed with Beta 18 and am really looking forward to playing the rest of the game. while I understand the logic of a fully cross platform engine that works on everything, personally I must confess it has sometimes felt that mota has sacrificed quality for cross platform compatibility in a single version of the game. However, sinse now you are developing separate ports for each platform which, rather than using cross platform components common to all platforms can use the best available components on each platform, I think things will very much improve. The only downer is obviously this will take some extra work, however on the pluss side there will be subsequent versions available which owners of different platforms can buy, obviously starting with the windows release, a fact which, as someone who uses windows I'm quite happy with myself. I'll also be interested to see how this trophy case works and what sorts of challenges we will have in the game for collecting trophies. All the best, Dark. --- 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,
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
I myself like the recorded voices. I also think that with sapi only you will have to rely on what is in the system for most of us thats probably ms sam or anna or mary. I have from a friends old jaws 8 disk he doesn't want, the solo sapi5 for 32 bit scansoft voices, but thats it really. At 03:50 a.m. 18/06/2011, you wrote: Hi Tom I think that this is a great idea does this mean that we can use sapi5 and are you going to delete the prerecorded voice files in the game?How is this going to work. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 8:14 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Hi Dark, Unfortunately, that is so very true. Based on my own research here there really isn't any single high-quality cross-platform solution whenit comes to creating games like Mysteries of the Ancients because often times we end up sacrificing something in the process. Its one thing if it is a relatively simple game like Poker, Blackjack, monopoly, etc that doesn't require precision audio, joysticks, and that sort of thing, and quite another when we are talking something like Mysteries of the Ancients which does. The solution I've decided upon for that problem is to create a engine that targets each specific platform. For Windows the Genesis 3D engine will use DirectX, MS Sapi, the Windows API where my Linux version of the Engine might use SDL, OpenAL, Speech-Dispatcher, and so on. That way if the Linux version of the engine lacks some feature such as force feedback support it would be limited to only that platform, and not to everyone running Windows. This is really the only way to satisfy everyone involved. Not only that in a lot of cases I was having difficulty finding a cross-platform solution for certain things like TTS support anyway. On Windows my speech library wraps Sapi 5, which is fine for Windows, but wouldn't work for Linux or Mac OS. Each of those platforms have alternative TTS APIs such as Speech-Dispatcher on Linux. The only truly cross-platform solution for that problem is to use an open source synth like ESpeak, and to be honest it doesn't sound that good and would drag the quality of the games and my engine down just because I'd have to settle for whatever was cross-platform rather than using any voices present on the machine. That's not ideal for what I'm trying to do here. So this way by creating platform specific game engines I can resolve that problem pretty easily. On Windows by wrapping Sapi the gamer could use Microsoft Anna, one of the ATT voices, the Cepstral voices, or any other voice that has Standard Sapi 5.x support. On Linux by wrapping Speech-Dispatcher I can support ESpeak, Ivona TTS, Cepstral Voices, Eloquence, etc via the Speech-Dispatcher generic TTS API. It works out for everybody in the end. So, yeah, things will definitely improve for everyone. I'll be focussing on the best APIs for each platform from now on, supporting them directly, rather than through layers of middleware that may or may not work as desired. I'm going to kick out a lot of the third-party middleware and my engine will be the middleware between the op and the game rather than sitting on a bunch of cross-platform middleware that clearly doesn't work. You shouldn't have to sacrifice anything in this case since if the feature is supported on your operating system I will do what I can to support it in that version of the engine. So heres three cheers for beta 20. Cheers! On 6/17/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Hi tom. I'm really pleased to here about the iminant release of windows mota, sinse i was well impressed with Beta 18 and am really looking forward to playing the rest of the game. while I understand the logic of a fully cross platform engine that works on everything, personally I must confess it has sometimes felt that mota has sacrificed quality for cross platform compatibility in a single version of the game. However, sinse now you are developing separate ports for each platform which, rather than using cross platform components common to all platforms can use the best available components on each platform, I think things will very much improve. The only downer is obviously this will take some extra work, however on the pluss side there will be subsequent versions available which owners of different platforms can buy, obviously starting with the windows release, a fact which, as someone who uses windows I'm quite happy with myself. I'll also be interested to see how this trophy case works and what sorts of challenges we will have in the game for collecting trophies. All the best, Dark. --- 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
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Dark, That's pretty much my thoughts as well. It seems pretty senseless to go back and spend all that time adding Sapi support when the game works just as well using the prerecorded voice clips. Especially, in light of where we are right now in development. Basically, unless something major comes up I've got beta 20 all mapped out, and have a handful of things to tidy up or fix before release. I can pretty much sum it up right here. * Merge changes in MOTA beta 19 with beta 18. * Recompile game with the Windows version of the engine. * Tidy up the code some, correct formatting errors, etc. * Remove test code or no longer used code for a faster cleaner executable. * Update end user documentation. In a nutshell its not anything the end user will likely notice between beta 18 and beta 20 other than I've fixed a few bugs here and there, and have cleaned out a lot of unnecessary test code etc. When I start house cleaning, tidying up the code, you can pretty much figure the game, at least the main coding, is done. Which is where we are. Once I put out beta 20 I am going to be adding levels, adding the registration system, and there isn't anything else to do that I know of. So with that in mind taking time to add Sapi support is at the very least not something that has to be done right away. It could be added, if at at all, sometime after 1.0 is out. Cheers! On 6/17/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Personally tom I'm happy as is. maybe in the planning stages sapi would've been easier to add for menues, speaking of health etc, but now you've got all that done with prerecorded synth files it seems silly to change it. That being said however, I am pleased to here that sapi support is in the genesis engine generally, sinse it's one of these things that comes in useful, for instance people could now write their own driver names in raceway, or, if you make an arcade style game with scoring use sapi to write their names. While I'm very much in favour of human voices being used for human characters, for menues and in game info as I've said synths are fine, and sapi usually has the advantage of being both easy to implement, and able to easily take the users' own in put for anything needed in the game. As I said, sinse Mota has already been done speech wise changing it just seems extra work imho, but this is a good thing for future games I think. Beware the grue! Dark. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Shaun, That would be a bit pointless to switch to BGT after I spent two years or so developing my own game engine. Its not an issue of not being able to create a cross-platform game engine, but using the best libraries for each platform. Each platform has its own APIs and libraries that are best suited for that platform. All I personally need is a little bit of time to actually redesign my engine so that it will run on different platforms by using platform specific libraries and APIs. Instead of a single engine I will end up with two or three engines one for each target platform. On 6/17/11, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: the other option some way down the track is if bgt goes cross platform you could do the games in that, though that would put your engine out the window. Not sure if you could base your engine on bgt eventually though. I am just chucking stuff out there. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Hi Shaun, That's actually one of the reasons I decided to use prerecorded speech in the first place. A lot of people don't own many Sapi voices, and usually are stuck with Anna, Mike, Mary, or Sam, and that detracts from the game when you have to put up with something like Sam by default. This way you get a high quality voice as part of the game. Maybe it isn't your favorite Sapi voice, but something like Tom is decent, and a hundred times better than listening to Sam. On 6/17/11, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: I myself like the recorded voices. I also think that with sapi only you will have to rely on what is in the system for most of us thats probably ms sam or anna or mary. I have from a friends old jaws 8 disk he doesn't want, the solo sapi5 for 32 bit scansoft voices, but thats it really. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Justread about your site moving with skynet. I should say be carefull with the machines, terminators, etc. I mean skynet from the movies is not your friend grin At 08:18 a.m. 18/06/2011, you wrote: Hi Dark, That's pretty much my thoughts as well. It seems pretty senseless to go back and spend all that time adding Sapi support when the game works just as well using the prerecorded voice clips. Especially, in light of where we are right now in development. Basically, unless something major comes up I've got beta 20 all mapped out, and have a handful of things to tidy up or fix before release. I can pretty much sum it up right here. * Merge changes in MOTA beta 19 with beta 18. * Recompile game with the Windows version of the engine. * Tidy up the code some, correct formatting errors, etc. * Remove test code or no longer used code for a faster cleaner executable. * Update end user documentation. In a nutshell its not anything the end user will likely notice between beta 18 and beta 20 other than I've fixed a few bugs here and there, and have cleaned out a lot of unnecessary test code etc. When I start house cleaning, tidying up the code, you can pretty much figure the game, at least the main coding, is done. Which is where we are. Once I put out beta 20 I am going to be adding levels, adding the registration system, and there isn't anything else to do that I know of. So with that in mind taking time to add Sapi support is at the very least not something that has to be done right away. It could be added, if at at all, sometime after 1.0 is out. Cheers! On 6/17/11, dark d...@xgam.org wrote: Personally tom I'm happy as is. maybe in the planning stages sapi would've been easier to add for menues, speaking of health etc, but now you've got all that done with prerecorded synth files it seems silly to change it. That being said however, I am pleased to here that sapi support is in the genesis engine generally, sinse it's one of these things that comes in useful, for instance people could now write their own driver names in raceway, or, if you make an arcade style game with scoring use sapi to write their names. While I'm very much in favour of human voices being used for human characters, for menues and in game info as I've said synths are fine, and sapi usually has the advantage of being both easy to implement, and able to easily take the users' own in put for anything needed in the game. As I said, sinse Mota has already been done speech wise changing it just seems extra work imho, but this is a good thing for future games I think. Beware the grue! Dark. --- 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. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Believe it or not I actually know someone who sounds like microsoft sam! hahahah At 06:30 AM 6/18/2011, you wrote: Hi Shaun, That's actually one of the reasons I decided to use prerecorded speech in the first place. A lot of people don't own many Sapi voices, and usually are stuck with Anna, Mike, Mary, or Sam, and that detracts from the game when you have to put up with something like Sam by default. This way you get a high quality voice as part of the game. Maybe it isn't your favorite Sapi voice, but something like Tom is decent, and a hundred times better than listening to Sam. On 6/17/11, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: I myself like the recorded voices. I also think that with sapi only you will have to rely on what is in the system for most of us thats probably ms sam or anna or mary. I have from a friends old jaws 8 disk he doesn't want, the solo sapi5 for 32 bit scansoft voices, but thats it really. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Maybe this decision to put out a twentieth beta of MOTA for Windows is the way to go, but I hate to hear that the cross platforming is temporarily shelved, even though I am a Windows user, because I know that's not at all what you want to do. Wile it might be a business decision, I still think it is a bummer. --- Laughter is the best medicine, so look around, find a dose and take it to heart. - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 7:15 AM Subject: [Audyssey] USA Games News USA Games News June 2011 Greetings gamers, Welcome to another edition of the USA Games news letter. At the time of this writing we have some late breaking news we thought you should know about as well as our short term and long term plans for Mysteries of the Ancients and our other products. The USA Games website and web server may be inaccessible between Friday June 17 and Friday June 24 as our web host, Skynet Communications, performs some upgrades to their web servers, moves web accounts from one server to another, and USA Games performs some updates to our website. We apologize for any disruption of service this may cause as we perform some necessary upgrades and make changes to better serve the audio gaming community. Last month on May 24 USA Games released Mysteries of the Ancients beta 19, using an early beta of our cross-platform Genesis Engine, which caused some confusion and discontent with our customers as we did not make it clear as to the objectives or purpose of this recent beta. We knew that the audio wasn’t up to our usual standards using DirectX, and we had to temporarily remove joystick and mouse support because those devices were not yet fully supported in the cross-platform engine. Our actual aim or goal beta 19 was to see how well the cross-platform engine ran on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 as well as various Linux distributions based on a common engine and cross-platform APIs like SDL. Unfortunately, as we did not identify exactly what we were looking for the community at large began sending in bug reports on the obvious issues such as substandard audio, no analog jumping, lack of joystick support, etc. In hindsight we should have been upfront with the community that these issues existed, and that we already had plans to fix them in a later cross-platform beta. That way the community could have reported any potential problems with the cross-platform game and engine besides the ones we already knew about. That isn’t the communities fault, but ours for not stating upfront what we were actually trying to test. As a result we have decided to give you a clear idea of what you can expect regarding Mysteries of the Ancients as we wind down development and approach 1.0 final. For the short term we have decided to shelve the cross-platform engine and game until we get the Windows release of Mysteries of the Ancients finished. As we write this news letter we will be recompiling Mysteries of the Ancients beta 19 using the Windows version of the Genesis Engine, and will restore the audio, joystick/mouse support, and the analog jumping to the way it was in beta 18. Since the Windows version of the engine, built on Windows technologies like DirectX, is very stable this is the ideal way to produce a stable 1.0 release for our Windows customers. This build will be released as beta 20, and will be the final beta for the game before 1.0 is released. Following beta 20 we will finish adding the registration system, add the trophy case, and finish adding the levels for Mysteries of the Ancients release candidate 1. Once we release Mysteries of the Ancients release candidate 1we will be able to begin shipping keys to our prepaid customers, and they will be able to unlock and test the game before we move to 1.0 final. In the event there are any bugs or problems that need to be fixed we will put out a second release candidate to correct and address any bugs or problems with the game before we make any kind of official final 1.0 release. Once we have released Mysteries of the Ancients 1.0 for Windows that will free us up to work on other projects. One of those projects will be for us to upgrade and develop the Linux version of the Genesis Engine so we can port Mysteries of the Ancients to Linux and perhaps at some point to Mac OS X as well. Since the majority of our customers are Windows only users it does make sense to finish the game for Windows first, sell it, raise some cash, and then use the money to invest in a MacBook to do Mac OS ports of our titles. Another project on our agenda is Mysteries of the Ancients 3D. As has been stated before it is the same game as classic Mysteries of the Ancients, but from a full 3d first-person perspective. It will have larger levels, 3d movement, and we will be adding in some other extras to set it apart from classic Mysteries of the Ancients. The one game we have not
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News
Is that due to unfortunately having to have undergone an operation? (grin) --- Laughter is the best medicine, so look around, find a dose and take it to heart. - Original Message - From: Stephen whocr...@internode.on.net To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 6:11 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News Believe it or not I actually know someone who sounds like microsoft sam! hahahah At 06:30 AM 6/18/2011, you wrote: Hi Shaun, That's actually one of the reasons I decided to use prerecorded speech in the first place. A lot of people don't own many Sapi voices, and usually are stuck with Anna, Mike, Mary, or Sam, and that detracts from the game when you have to put up with something like Sam by default. This way you get a high quality voice as part of the game. Maybe it isn't your favorite Sapi voice, but something like Tom is decent, and a hundred times better than listening to Sam. On 6/17/11, shaun everiss sm.ever...@gmail.com wrote: I myself like the recorded voices. I also think that with sapi only you will have to rely on what is in the system for most of us thats probably ms sam or anna or mary. I have from a friends old jaws 8 disk he doesn't want, the solo sapi5 for 32 bit scansoft voices, but thats it really. --- 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. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011
Hi Thomas, Yes, I thought that Mach 1 and you say Raceway are first person type games because it is as if you are looking through the windshield of the race car. And as I said, I believe that the Top Speed game is a third person type game. At least to me the point of view is that of from above and behind the car just like in Pole Position. If I am wrong, someone could correct me. BFN Jim Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand? j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011
Hi Thomas, Don't know if this is actually a third person, but to me the point of view in Mach 1 and Mach 1 tts is that of through the windshield and to me the point of view in Top Speed is that of from above and behind your car just like in Pole Position. BFN Jim So what if I'm a bit behind. I like the view from here. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011
Hi Jim, Well, if you take the position of actually sitting behind the wheel, I.E. looking out the windshield, that would be classified first-person as the game is from the perspective of physically sitting inside the car. This is how USA Raceway works, and is in the first-person as it tries to emulate the feeling of actually driving the car while sitting in it. With games like Poll Position they are third person because visually it is from the perspective of looking down at the track from above. You can see most of the track and all or most of the cars from that angle. HTH On 4/3/11, Jim Kitchen j...@kitchensinc.net wrote: Hi Thomas, Don't know if this is actually a third person, but to me the point of view in Mach 1 and Mach 1 tts is that of through the windshield and to me the point of view in Top Speed is that of from above and behind your car just like in Pole Position. BFN Jim So what if I'm a bit behind. I like the view from here. j...@kitchensinc.net http://www.kitchensinc.net (440) 286-6920 Chardon Ohio USA --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011
Hi Thomas, I don't know how I'm going to play the game. I mean, I do not have any speakers. Also, with the Three D features, when we select our fists and feet, could we a just that so we could hit better? I mean if its at the leg, could we get our aim even higher and punch or kick to the head? o- Original Message - From: dark d...@xgam.org To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, April 01, 2011 8:31 AM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011 Hi tom. Having spent the week betwene boxing day and new years day of Christmas prostrated with the flue myself, very irritating sinse I had such a bad sore throat I didn't even want to speak for fear of damaging my voice, so had to resort to a combination of Typing stuff on my laptop and sign language. Eitherway I actually really sympathize at the moment, and am glad you, Mrs. Ward and your son are now all recovered. on to games. Well funnily enough Scansoft Daniel is my default sapi voice for precisely the same reason, and that also counts using winfrotz tts and playing muds as well as games like lone wolf or Jim's. Daniel is of course Tom's british brother, and in fact to me sounds very bbc news (I did find your description of Tom as a newcaster rather amusing), so I do understand the reasoning here. in fact my only problem with daniel is it has preset speaking of abbreviations which (unlike with orphius), you can't alter. So I do have to get used to being told I've selected manuscript sapi as my default voice or that my character has 13 hp 12 mana and two street (for staminer points noted as st on the display). All this aside I do understand your use of Tom in most games, however there is one title where I would beg to disagree. Startrek final conflict, sinse Crystal while not actually! the startrek computer voice, does sound similar enough to it imho to actually contribute to the atmosphere of the game. usually I wouldn't mind a synth voice in games so long as it is a good one and so long as it's just speaking menues and not playing a character, but to me playing stfc, crystal actually seemed to be a character, and made the games' immersion far more complete. If Switching to Tom for the next version of stfc is a must, fair enough, but if (sinse you already have some startrek voice clips recorded), you might considder keeping Crystal just for the startrek games because of the happy accident of her resembling the computer, --- that would imho be a good thing. As you know I'll be looking forward to seeing analogue movement finally! make it into an audio game, and I'm a big exploration fan so will be very much looking forward to both mota games. Also as per my ambience artical, it'll be great to have more music, imho a wonderful way of showing different environments and parts of the underground without having to worry about inserting lots of background details. Beware the grue! dark. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011
Hi Burak, I don't think Thomas would add a life system. It would be unrealistic for the game. Basically, mota is like a real life, but having two three lives wouldn't give you a real feeling. The game has to be challenging, and two three lives wouldn't make it challenging. - Original Message - From: burakyuksek burakyuksek...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, April 01, 2011 11:04 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011 Hi, I have a suggestion. Can you add a life system if it's possible? sevgiler saygilar - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, April 01, 2011 8:59 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011 Hi Phil, AhemPlease tell me you are joking. Smile. On 4/1/11, Phil Vlasak p...@pcsgames.net wrote: Hi Thomas, I object to your pricing. If 2 d and 3 d are both $35 then the 2d is over priced as you get one less d for the same price. It would be better if you charged for each dimension. The 2d could be $35 while the 3d $52.50. or the 3d could be 35 while the 2d is $23.34 Then you could even put out a 1d version for 11.66 smiles Phil --- 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. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011
ironically tom i feel the same way in the other direction, one reason I use orphius Alan for my Hal voice (which has great reaction speed), and scansoft daniel for my gaming sapi voice. Hereing something with Zee just doesn't sound right to me either, as far as I, and my synths are concerned, Inform games are written in zed code, Zero from the mega man x series uses a zed saber as his weapon etc. While I wouldn't kick up a real stink about it, I learnt at the age of four when watching sessimy street that zee and zed were the same thing, I know which I prefer when generically reading text. When a character is American or I'm hereing an audio book set in America that is different, (I can't imagine for instance books by a writer like Steven King read in Uk english), but for something fairly passive like menue reading I'd always go for the Uk voice, which rather makes sense given that is the way I speak myself and what I'm used to hereing. For menues in your games, I personally would be happy with an American voice, --- though actually i've been happy with the australian one too ;D. Btw, one rather amusing use I've found for Hal's ability to speak other languages recently is with singing. Last summer I was set something to learn in German, I found the words but obviously, reading them with the Orphius Alan uk voice didn't work sinse it pronounced german spellings in a Uk accent which didn't tell me how to pronounce stuff when singing. So, I switched orphius to German and Vuala! Instant Pronunciation guide! I have done the same thing for Italian as well, which is actually a rather good use for a screen reader. Beware the grue! Dark. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011
Hi Tom. That is true regarding what has happened in audio 3D thus far, sinse being strictly logical Shades, Sarah, monkey business etc are first person 2D titles rather like the original doom itself not 3D ones, though I admit due to the analogue movement both styles have we have sometimes confused the two. It'll be good to see how the 3D works. In fact I would guess that sinse you here the environment around angela change and directions are relative to your movement, it would actually literally be a 3D first person game, rather like metroid prime, though as i'm not even sure if 3D third person is possible in audio this is really me just being exacting about deffinitions ;D. There may be some issues with look commands and my sense of space, but that's what betas are for, though I am hoping your engine is precise enough to make things easily understandable for me. but heck that's what betas are for. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011
Only problem with that Phil, is sinse all games are temporal and played over linear time, your actually already getting a 4Th dimention (or in the case of the 2D game a 3Rd), for free! If we're charging by the demention, then the 3D game should be 42.75 usd. This would be a problem for hyperspacial pan dimentional beings though, goodness knows how much they'd have to pay for a copy ;D. Beware the grue! Dark. - Original Message - From: Phil Vlasak p...@pcsgames.net To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, April 01, 2011 6:48 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011 Hi Thomas, I object to your pricing. If 2 d and 3 d are both $35 then the 2d is over priced as you get one less d for the same price. It would be better if you charged for each dimension. The 2d could be $35 while the 3d $52.50. or the 3d could be 35 while the 2d is $23.34 Then you could even put out a 1d version for 11.66 smiles Phil - Original Message - From: Thomas Ward thomasward1...@gmail.com To: Gamers Discussion list gamers@audyssey.org Sent: Friday, April 01, 2011 1:11 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011 Hi Tim, The price for the 3d version will be $35.00 USD. Same as the 2d version. Although, I may run a special or something around the time it is released. I'm not sure. I just know that the final price will be $35.00. Cheers! On 3/31/11, Tim Kilgore tim8...@cox.net wrote: What's the price of the 3d version. Thanks Tim --- 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. - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1209 / Virus Database: 1500/3544 - Release Date: 04/01/11 --- 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.
Re: [Audyssey] USA Games News 3/31/2011
Hi Tom. Glad to here Crystal potentially gets to keep her part after her rather good performance ;D. Actually this is about the only occasion i can think of where a synth would be better than a human for contributing characterization to the game ;D. About the only other instance I can think of is if someone wanted to make a game featuring the original 1960's cybermen from Dr. who, --- who sound almost exactly like Synthetic dave, synthetic andy or any of the other very bad quality synth voices set on monotone ;D. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- 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.
