SAP5 Support?

[60fpshacksrock]

Was wondering if anyone had thought about adding SAP5 voices support. For those that
don't know, it's for a voice synthesizer, or text to speech for Windows. Microsoft Anna
is pretty bad though, I would recommend the Ivona voices.

It would be neat to have voices in games that didn't originally have it.

[Praetorian]

Was wondering if anyone had thought about adding SAP5 voices support. For those that
don't know, it's for a voice synthesizer, or text to speech for Windows. Microsoft Anna
is pretty bad though, I would recommend the Ivona voices.

It would be neat to have voices in games that didn't originally have it.

As far as I know, there is work towards that.
It's basically using the ScummVM's text to speech feature (see Accessibility tab in ScummVM "Options..." to enable this), which in turn is using the Operating System's API for voices (supported platforms include Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX).
Details mentioned in the pertinent PR (which has since been merged with the main branch code) may be deprecated, since it's been a while since it was integrated and some stuff may have been updated/improved/changed.
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/1808

There have been efforts and PRs to enable TTS at least for some text in text only games (eg. narrator's voice)
See:
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/1983
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/1977
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/1953
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/2343

Obviously, we always welcome any additional implementations, extensions or improvements from the community and fellow developers!

[60fpshacksrock]

I noticed on one of those links there was a mention of Lure of the Temptress.
Is there a way to enable TTS for it? I see no options other than the accessibility you mentioned.

[Praetorian]

I noticed on one of those links there was a mention of Lure of the Temptress.
Is there a way to enable TTS for it? I see no options other than the accessibility you mentioned.

I just tested this with ScummVM 2.2.0 stable on Windows 10.

Step #1. I added the game to the ScummVM launcher (by the "Add Game..." functionality). I have the Lure of the Tempress GOG version, so I pointed ScummVM to the game folder where GOG installed the game.

Edit: As I found out by later testing, you can actually skip the following step (Step #2), as long as your ScummVM version has built-in TTS support. You don't have to activate it from the Accessibility tab.
Step #2. I enabled TTS from the Accessibility Tab . From "Options..." -> "Accessibility" -> Check the checkbox "Use Text to speech" -> Select a voice from the dropdown menu that becomes enabled -- I choose "Microsoft Susan" (in Windows 10) -> Click on OK. This will result to the TTS voice reading every text on the ScummVM launcher.

Step #3. I selected the "Lure of the Tempress" entry from my ScummVM games list, and clicked on "Edit Game...".
There is a tab here called "Engine". This tab offers the checkbox option "TTS Narrator", which I enabled and pressed on OK.

Step #4. Finally I launched the game. The narrator has the TTS voice when you reach the game proper, but NOT for the large font texts that appear during the intro cutscene.

I did NOT have to set "Speech" as enabled, from the "Options..." -> "Audio" tab-> Text and Speech form radio buttons -- which would be either the "Speech" radio button or "both". This option does not seem to affect the narrator TTS speech.

[60fpshacksrock]

Thank you for the info. I got it to work (had to update from 2.1.2) but unfortunately for me even though I select an Ivona voice, which works in the menu, it defaults to Anna, the default Windows 7 voice when playing LOTT.

[Praetorian]

Thank you for the info. I got it to work (had to update from 2.1.2) but unfortunately for me even though I select an Ivona voice, which works in the menu, it defaults to Anna, the default Windows 7 voice when playing LOTT.

Yes, it seems that the current option and implementation for TTS in the game engine is separate from the option on the main (ScummVM launcher) GUI, so the voice you choose from the ScummVM GUI only affects the GUI text but not the in-game text.

Some other developer may know the reasoning behind this.
It could be because the feature just needs further work and polishing and no one had the time to do it yet.
Or perhaps the idea is that multiple voices could be supported in a game to address "different" characters, so the in-game TTS should not be bound to one voice.

I am unsure. I just have the impression that the feature needs more tweaking and also broader adoption and implementation on other text based games.

[criezy]

It is indeed up to the engines to tweak which voice to use. For example in Mortville Manor we used different voices for each characters, and the voices are primarily selected based on the character gender. I have not looked at the code in Lure of the Temptress but it probably use the default voice. You could open a bug report to suggest using the voice selected in the GUI options, and/or having its own options.