Hi Shaun, On a whole using Sapi 5 voices is a good thing. It makes development move faster and it is way more flexable than using pre-recorded speech. Even i am sort of growning at going back to pre-recorded speech. However, using Sapi tts engines has a dark side I wasn't aware of back then. One, Sapi 5 tends to be a rather unstable technology. While it seams to work for most people I have had around 10 to 20 users where Sapi wasn't working, and trying to get it working again was difficult and time consuming. Usually, it was do to uninstalling or installing some Sapi engine that broke the entire Sapi 5 architecture. Second, I am going multiplatform and Java. Java currently doesn't have a good way to handle Sapi 5 tts, and I don't want to have to pay extra to support Sapi 5 in Java currently. I think the cost is unnecessary to design a reasonably good game. Third, since Raceway, Tomb Raider, and other games are scheduled to go multiplatform adding things like Sapi would be catering totally to the Windows market, and leave other operating systems in the dark on what to use for tts. Probably FreeTTS something like that which is much lower quality than say Scansoft. The thing to do which is both multiplatform and can sound good is packing my own speech with the game. Larger game size, but not to bad since they will be packed and compressed in the games jar file.
shaun everiss wrote: > I think that there should be sound packs for those that wants them and sapi > for those that it works with. > I also like the current way things are being done, call me sellfish or > whatever but everyting works here, but maybe its because I have realspeak on > here rather than anything else. > If I hadn't got rs loaded I'd be pushing for speech voices. > Besides tom you were touting sapi as a really good thing when we did have > voice packs and I was against that, now just when I am getting used to the > small filesizes its like um, voice files again. > --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]