[Scummvm-devel] Displaying subtitles in voice-only games

BeleG beleg.mrv at gmail.com
Tue Dec 21 23:24:26 CET 2010


I hope you don't mind if I answer myself to the request made by sev at the
forum <http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?p=63993#63993>.

I'm conscious of what a hard work it would be to implement such a feature,
and I already give good value to the sole fact of you considering it as a
possibility (even for ScummVM's future plans). I realize this wouldn't be
just a cutscene captioning system (as already performed in Broken Sword 1),
but a much deeper and more complicated job. I must also say that, the way I
see it, it would be a major feature in the already brilliant ScummVM list of
enhancements. Introducing a way of displaying text in those games that
didn't have any text displayed in their original form would mean a huge step
forward in terms of accessibility and availability for international
translations of all those games, thus increasing considerably their interest
and reach among the public.

So, here is a list of voice-only games taken out of the engine compatibility
list. I've based it on my experience and a little research, though I don't
personally own many of the ScummVM supported games, so there could be more.


Currently supported engines:

· Groovie
  - The 7th Guest
  - The 11th Hour

· MADE
  - Return to Zork (descriptions are text only, while spoken dialogs lack
any text)

· SCI 1
  - King's Quest V (CD Version). In this case, just enabling voice and text
simultanously would allow a 3rd party to create a set of MSG files
containing the voice transcription/translation, as it happened with Gabriel
Knight II.


Future engines:

· SCI 21
  - Gabriel Knight II: The Beast Within (Already a fan patch available in
order to enable the text display feature)
  - Phantasmagoria
  - Rama
  - Shivers
  - Phantasmagoria II: A Puzzle Of Flesh

· SCI 3
  - Lighthouse: The Dark Being

· M4/MADS
  - Orion Burger

· Mohawk
   - Myst
   - Riven: The Sequel to Myst


I'm considering as already noted those SCI games which originally included
voice and text, though these were considered as alternative, non-cumulative
choices (Space Quest IV CD, Laura Bow 2 CD, Freddy Pharkas CD and Police
Quest IV), as I understand there's already an effort towards enabling both
text and speech at the same time on those games. In fact, I believe both
SQIV and PQIV had this feature present though disabled in the original
scripts.

I hope this list will serve its purpose, which would be to open a debate on
the potential relevance and feasibility of this feature.

My regards
BeleG
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