Disabling text-to-speech

[St_Eddie]

Is there any way to disable the text-to-speech within Mortville Manor? It sounds horrible and I would much rather just have the text. I've tried selecting just the subtitles (no speech) under the game options and text-to-speech is disabled under General Options.

Thank you.

[dreammaster]

Maybe try setting the volume to zero? I can't remember that Morteville Manor has any sound effects, so even if there's no separate speech volume slider, just setting the general volume to zero should be sufficient.

[St_Eddie]

That's a bit of a pity, as there are (sparingly used) sound effects and music tracks within the game. The weird thing is that the ScummVM Wiki states the following...

"No speech support (because they are terrible)"

EDIT: Considering that the above quote came from the ScummVM Wiki and said Wiki also states that Mortville Manor was first supported with the release of ScummVM 1.7.0, I tried running the game through that version instead and indeed it now works without the text-to-speech (whilst retaining sound effects and music). I'm just letting people know this in case they too would like to play the game without Stephen Hawking acting as the narrator

[eriktorbjorn]

"No speech support (because they are terrible)"

I think that may refer to the original text-to-speech feature the game apparently came with? I think ScummVM only uses the operating system's text-to-speech library. (I never build ScummVM with that myself, so I don't know much about it.)

[dreammaster]

Yes indeed. The original used the PC Speaker to simulate voice, and pretty poorly as mentioned in the notes. We wouldn't have been able to support it at the necessary rate using the existing PC Speaker codebase.. It would have needed someone to understand the waveforms being generated for the speaker, and maybe create a raw audio stream that could simulate the same thing. Simpler just to ignore it.

[criezy]

I have added an option for the game to disable TTS, and it is actually disabled by default (to be consistent with other games where we have such an option). This option will be present in daily builds from tomorrow, and in the next ScummVM release.

Note: TTS support for the Manor of Mortevielle was added in ScummVM 2.1.2. So any version older than that will indeed not have speech.