Re: VGStorm Presents Manamon, a new fully featured RPG!
Hello Jayde,
Well the reason I've been vague is because its a fundamental underlying issue.
But I'll try and explain some of the problems now.
1: You cannot check to see if the voice is speaking.
This means you lose many synamatics. You can't fix this merely by adding a delay, even a configurable delay. Take theses to sentences.
Hello, My name is bob.
We'll rendezvous at the metropolitan city next to the large fountain.
As you can see, these sentences take vastly different amounts of time. Fare enough, lets use a multiplier.
Well, that still doesn't work, because of silent letters and other grammatical factors.
There are many reasons why a delay is not plausible.
So the only option left is forcing you to press enter to continue every single time there's blocking speech.
This is what Paladin does.
It was OK in Paladin because the main time this changed things was when you were being attacked
by an enemy.
Enemies in Paladin usually do about the same damage each time, so skipping that wasn't a big deal.
Here, though, it would be all to easy to just guess how much damage a move is going to do, and then skip the message when it actually did, say, 3 times the damage.
The argument for this that I've heard is, "well that's there problem", but as a developer, it is my job to insure that things like that don't happen.
I have to make sure that the player being foolish doesn't cause problems with presentation, only with difficulty of the actual game mechanics.
That's why I let you skip some things, and not others.
Some players aren't going to be as good at the game as others, and this could easily add to the learning curve as I've mentioned above. People are already missing things even with SAPI, just imagine how much worse it would be if there skipping text everywhere.
More importantly, they may
not even skip it intensionally, bringing me to my next point.
2: Pressing any key is enough to stop any screen reader I'm aware of from speaking.
In cases where your not able to repeat this, you can easily miss what the speech had to say, just because you accidentally pressed tab, q, control, whatever it may be.
Granted Manamon is not an action game, but in an action game context, this especially can cause problems. In several games I've played, I've missed what the speech was saying because I pressed up to jump. No way, at that point, could I find out what the speech had been saying.
Though this is not as prominant of an issue in Manamon, I do believe it exists.
We do, later on, have a count down sequence which would be broken as well, though granted this isn't a huge problem.
I cannot speak for all screen readers, but I'd imagine even external factors like tweats or windows balloon notifications would also cause problems here,
because the screen reader might interrupt.
Granted, I think NVDA handles that well, but I'm not an NVDA user.
3: Conclusion
There are many SAPI5 voices, many free and many paid.
Just because Anna and similar voices aren't the greatest by no means mean they're the only SAPI5 options.
SAPI5 is really just an interface to another program. We all know there are some good programs which are optimized and fast, and bad programs which are sluggish. The same is true for SAPI5 voices.
I know it seems to many that I'm close minded on this issue, but I'm really not. I considered screen reader support long before release, weighing each pro and con, and am listening to all of these posts regarding it intently.
To make games that try to be equal with their video game counterparts, it takes control. And screen reader just do not offer that control.
I made the illusion earlier to a game where the programmer cannot tell when sounds en
d. That would make the game unplayable.
Though this would not affect the game as much as this hypathetical scenario, they are different intensities of the same evil as it were.
Once again, I'm not close minded on this issue. I am taking everything into account.
I hope I've clarified a few things, and if you do want further reading, perhaps re-reading my prior posts with this context might help.
Best regards,
Aaron
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