Blade Runner WIP

[Praetorian]

For my side-project, I've pretty much finished with the subtitles transcripts.

Someone could try compiling ScummVM from my Pull Request (and get the SUBTITLES.MIX from there), if they'd like to see how that works in-game and provide feedback to improve the transcript or the subtitles mechanism, but I admit that is a cumbersome process right now for anyone who doesn't want to bother with how that's done.

I also compiled ScummVM for Android (7.1) with support for Blade Runner and subtitles, and that worked surprisingly well -- but there are a few bugs with KIA clues selection and there's a random crash that happens after you've played for a few minutes. I haven't debugged it yet, though so I don't know what causes it.

I am now also shifting my focus to enabling translations of the in-game texts (menus, dialogue options, help etc). That shouldn't be hard, because I've already got greek subtitles to work, but it requires some additional code and a certain issue with some letter symbols needs to be resolved.

[sawyer700]

WOW. Man I truly am greatful you sprung up. I would check from time to time to see if any progress has been made. . I wish that was me playing on the go. Maybe soon I hope

[sawyer700]

So.......Does Blade Runner work on android scummvm or what.

[Raziel]

So.......Does Blade Runner work on android scummvm or what.

It doesn't work on scummvm et al...it's a WIP engine which hasn't made it into the main tree yet.

[criezy]

Raziel, I think you will find that it is in the main tree now
But you are otherwise right that the engine is still a work in progress and is not supported or included in any ScummVM release yet. Although I understand from sev’s comment above that it is quite playable if you compile ScummVM with the engine enabled.

[Raziel]

Uuuuuh, nice, progress

[legluondunet]

For my side-project, I've pretty much finished with the subtitles transcripts.

I have the french version,there is no subtitles feature in the native game. What about the english one?
With your subtitles transcript feature we could add subtitles to others games that doesn't have one?

[Praetorian]

For my side-project, I've pretty much finished with the subtitles transcripts.

I have the french version,there is no subtitles feature in the native game. What about the english one?
With your subtitles transcript feature we could add subtitles to others games that doesn't have one?

To my knowledge, none of the official Blade Runner versions (English, French, Italian, German or other) natively supports subtitles.

My transcript was based off the English version of Blade Runner, and I have tested it to work in-game using ScummVM with my additional code in the related (mentioned above) Pull Request.

That method also supports replacing the English subtitles (and text in general) with translated text in another language (I tested with Greek) so you can have the original English audio, but eg. Greek subtitles. But this requires some extra work from the translator, mainly altering the main fonts to support extra characters for the particular target language -- sometimes this might not be needed, but for Greek there are several character glyphs that are not in the Latin alphabet or the additional characters that Blade Runner English version natively supports. I have some python tools that simplify this process, somewhat. Those will probably be submitted with the Pull Request to the ScummVM codebase.

That is just my approach to the issue of adding subtitles support to Blade Runner. There's no guarantee that it's going to be the one that ScummVM will eventually adopt. And there are suggestions for doing it another way (...).

Still, all this is tested (and works) with the official English version. I have no access to the other versions, and while in theory I expect them to work in a similar way, I can't guarantee that no extra adjustments will be needed to support those.

So, in theory, and if the French version kept a one-to-one correspondence with the English audio cues, then my English transcript and Scummvm with "Blade Runner Subtitles Support" would enable English subtitles in the French version (French audio).

Someone would have to translate the English transcript to French and then pack it in a resource file (there is a tool for that) in order to have French subtitles in-game.

Finally, just to clarify; my transcript and related work on the ScummVM code (pull request) is only for the Blade Runner game. It's not for every game that does not have subtitles.

Sample screenshots
English:


Greek:

[XperiaPlayDude]

Is there any chance some nice fellow could compile this for android ics/kitkat, i'm dying to try this on the olde Xperia Play.

[sev]

It is not going to help as there is still no save support.


Eugene

[XperiaPlayDude]

It is not going to help as there is still no save support.


Eugene

It's ok i'm still so excited about it so I just want to try how it performs on my Xperia Play even if I can't save (I am playing it right now through Windows 95 in dosbox

[digitall]

XPeriaPlayDude: If you are technically capable, you can always try installing the Android nightly auto-generated development build which would include the WIP Blade Runner engine:
https://buildbot.scummvm.org/builds.html

Please note the instructions here:
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Android#Daily_Builds

Also, fairly obviously these builds are untested and thus "your mileage may vary" i.e. performance issues, missing functionality and crashes are possible.

It should also be noted that these builds are currently from the older Android backend code, rather than the newer Android-SDL code ... so again, the exact "final" performance could be very at variant with what you test.

[XperiaPlayDude]

XPeriaPlayDude: If you are technically capable, you can always try installing the Android nightly auto-generated development build which would include the WIP Blade Runner engine:
https://buildbot.scummvm.org/builds.html

Please note the instructions here:
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Android#Daily_Builds

Also, fairly obviously these builds are untested and thus "your mileage may vary" i.e. performance issues, missing functionality and crashes are possible.

It should also be noted that these builds are currently from the older Android backend code, rather than the newer Android-SDL code ... so again, the exact "final" performance could be very at variant with what you test.

Thanks, tried it on scummvm on pc and it works great, totally black screen on my Xperia Play but the sound works and the game runs, guess there's so many different cellphone graphic cards that have to be implemented.

[sawyer700]

Thank you very much in this matter
Have a wonderful Holiday

[trilby]

Now that we've reached the year that the game (and film) are set in, it reminded me to check in on progress
As of the latest development build, saving/loading and the gun range appear to be working but there are still pathfinding problems (e.g. Ray walking through scenery in the police station foyer). Is it at a point where you'd like people to try playing through the game and report bugs?