hi guys,<br clear="all"><br><div>I've been thinking that now that the Dragon History code is stable and plays well the original game files, the time has come to add support for decoding compressed dubbing, so that one can decrease the length of the game archives that need to be downloaded. the game uses 8-bit mono uncompressed audio recorded in 22 kHz, and it takes 144 MB uncompressed, 66 MB as a ZIP file, and 46 MB as a RAR file. compressed in a lossy audio format, one could hopefully achieve 1/8 of that.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I already have a trivial C-program that reads that dubbing archive and produces a few thousand of raw audio files. it won't be too hard to write a shell script that iterates through all of them and runs a codec on each of them. I could possibly even use one of the ScummVM tools to do this recoding (which one?).</div>
<div><br></div><div>I have a few questions targeted at minimizing the time I'd have to spend experimenting with things to achieve an acceptable outcome. I hope some of you is experienced in this area.</div><div><br>
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<div>1. what is the best known codec and its settings for audio with the parameters above? I'm not sure whether MP3 or OGG is better in this range, what's the desired bit-rate, and which one format is generally preferred (considering the cpu needed to decode it).</div>
<div><br></div><div>2. is there a nice library in ScummVM implementing reading an archive of compressed sound files? ideally this library would be general enough so that one can store anything in it in any format, and the game engine doesn't need to bother about it. in that case it would be easy in the future to recode the files to a higher bit-rate or change the codec without recompilation of the game player. the sound archive format used in Dragon History is absolutely idiotic and must not be used for anything but reading the original sound archives for compatibility reasons, and I also don't wanna reinvent the wheel.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I'd like to modify the game engine such that it would accept whichever dubbing is available.</div><div><br></div><div>by the way, I have been contacted by someone from Internet who sent me about 80%-corrected English scripts. soon we will hopefully be able to announce a new version that the original authors don't need to be ashamed about ;-) I've just started thinking that if I make a new package, why don't I merge this change with the recode of the dubbing so that the complete game archive would fit into, say, 20 MB or whatever appropriate. if you are interested in looking at the corrected scripts, they are already uploaded on the web-page of the game (only the source scripts and not the compiled game, because the latter will only be updated after proofreading has been done).</div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.ucw.cz/draci-historie/src/game-scripts/en/">http://www.ucw.cz/draci-historie/src/game-scripts/en/</a></div><div><a href="http://www.ucw.cz/draci-historie/source/new-sources-2.zip">http://www.ucw.cz/draci-historie/source/new-sources-2.zip</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>kind regards!<br>-- <br>Robert Špalek <<a href="mailto:rspalek@gmail.com">rspalek@gmail.com</a>><br>
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