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I'm very happy to announce a new version of the Speech Center plugin. This release includes major changes:

• Edit mode, now there's support for in-place text editing
• Ability to add missing speech line numbers for the displayed lines
• Display the script and highlight the line within the script of the current selected speech line
• VA Scripts


• Export only displayed lines
• Option to group VA script lines by code block rather than by function
• index.html is now created together with the voice scripts
• Significantly improved refresh performance
• Line info is displayed in the AGS properties window when selecting the line in the grid
• New icons

It took a lot of effort to test this and to provide the best experience possible. Please let me know if you encounter any trouble. I also took many precautions in the edit feature and tested it with any source I could find. I still recommend you backup your game before editing, especially when using the feature for the first time.

The plugin is available here

As usual, please provide any feedback you'd like. Many of the features here are the direct result of the posts in this forum.

Enjoy!

No pressure or anything, but this will come very useful in about two weeks when I get back from vacation to finish the rest of the VO acting on my game.

I think it will be sooner than that, but worst case drop me a note and I'll find a solution.

Hello everyone,

I've been busy with changes to the plugin and while I'm still testing these changes, I wanted to share with you a screenshot of what's coming up. Most of the feature requests that came up here are going to be implemented. Of course, comments and questions are more than welcomed.

I basically meant a function to dump all found dialog into a txt -file, for easier grammar/spell check or printing or whatever.
VA scripts is a bit above my level of expertise.

It's not complex to add export functionality in a different format, but I would like to understand what one would get from this on top of existing capability (The VA scripts are meant to be human readable). Perhaps an example output could make this clearer.

Furthermore, is grammar/spell checking your main use case or is it just a theoretical example?

Hi all.
Any progress on adding an 'export to text file' function?
Or is this a feature already?

Do you mean VA scripts or something else?

There's a feature to export VA scripts to HTML files (one per character). I'm going to improve it a bit to cover Dave Gilbert's request and a few other improvements I have in the backlog.

Also, AGS already supports exporting VA scripts in text format.

One other addition that would be useful to me (and perhaps others) is to have the plugin automatically number lines that are not numbered.  The auto script generator that is built into AGS will redo all numbered lines when it is run.  This can destroy work that was done previously.  It would be a great help if we could have lines that lack numbers get numbered by Speech Center while leaving all other previously numbered lines unchanged.

Yes, this was requested before. I'll try to get to it once I add full editing support.

I'm very happy to announce a new version with the ability to view translations per speech line.

Download here

In order to view existing translations, make sure to refresh the data and you should have all your translations listed. All features available for original text apply to translations, with the addition that once you select a line, you will see the original text at the bottom.

There's also an option to edit translation files with the same interface. To do this you must explicitly enable this from the preferences. I've used AGS functions to store the files, so it should be quite safe, but still, to be on the safer side it's best to backup your translation files before trying this.

Additional changes:

• Added last refresh time to make it clearer whether the information is up to date
• Added speech function column, so you can now know if Display, Say or a custom function was used (note that refresh is required to populate info)

Edit: Combined double-post (difference between posts was 18 minutes, so there was no need for a bump-post)

Hey! We started using this in a major way on our most recent project, and it's the best thing ever! I do have one more request, if you'll indulge me.

Being able to generate voice acting scripts is a HUGE boon, but right now it generates every line for every character at one time. Would it be possible to generate specific reports, based on what is on screen? For example, right now we have a character that is mostly voiced. I want to generate a voice acting script based on whichever lines are still missing. I can get that up on screen easily enough, but it would be nice to generate the nicely formatted voice acting script as well. Would that be possible?

I have the exact same request.  This feature would be an amazing addition!

I'm finishing testing the plugin translation support. Once I release it this feature is the next things I plan to add.

New version available with a new feature - export voice acting scripts
Here's a sample output.


It also includes settings to control the output format. As always, please let me know if you run into any trouble.

The output format is similar to the one used by the sqvsb guys, I found it very readable and useful.

A new version of the plugin has been released. Main changes are the ability to specify the speech line number in a parameter and fix for the parsing of 9-verb module.
Thank you all for using the plugin and for the feedback. I now feel confident enough to call this version 1.0. You can download it here.

I have just downloaded the plugin and I love it! This is very very useful for me. I recently wanted to change the "in-game" name of a certain character and this is perfect for finding all instances where I used it.

The only annoying thing is that it has problems with all sorts of header files. For example, it doesn't accept the gui scripts in my game (LucasArts 9-verb gui template).

Thanks. I found a typo in my code which causes the error in the 9-verb module. I'll have it fixed in the next version, which I plan to release in the coming days.
If you need it sooner, I can send you a pre-release, PM me your email if that's the case.

[Suggestion:]

Been playing with this tonight to do some proof reading and I have to say it's fantastic

Thanks! It's always great to know it helps.

Suggestion: it would be good if the columns could be rearranged

I'll look into it, I used an external component for the grid, I'll see if it has support for this.

Unexpected behaviour: when resizing columns, the table automatically scrolls to the top.

I'll check that, probably also related to the grid, but the grid is open source so worst case I can fix it there. I tried to minimize the need to resize by making sure the text column does word wrapping. 2 questions:
1. What column did you try to resize?
2. Was any line other than the first line selected when you resized the column?

Great! Out of interest can this be used to export all the lines of dialog to a text file or something? I'm not fully competent with speech in AGS games so perhaps there is another way to do that. But for what it is this looks very useful.

Edit: I ask about the export because the data the plugin provides looks like it'd be useful if it could be exported.

Thanks and I already plan to add it in the future, but the feedback certainly helps me knowing this is needed.

I'm focusing at the moment on addressing missing functionality that prevents usage and of course if anyone finds critical bugs. There are already several developers able to use it for their games, but I'd like to see more work with it out-of the-box. Once I see developers are able to work with existing features I'll start implementing additional features.

Thanks for the info and feedback.
Yes, I can add the additional parameter. Once I add it, it will be for all function types, so it would cover both use cases.

I would need some time though, it's not complex, but other unrelated things are stacking up. I'll certainly give it priority the moment I manage to sneak in some time.

Adding another row might not be that easy, I'll check. I'm thinking perhaps the text should appear when the row is selected. Something similar to auto-play, or perhaps even the same window, by changing the text that appears in the playback to the translated one.
Playback today is enabled even if there is no actual speech, it displays the text, the character talk view and if you playback more than a single line, it progresses based on the length of the sentence. Thus adding the translation there would be very consistent with the existing gui as well as in-line with AGS' implementation of translation (where the script has one language and translations are matched with the original text).

I'll have to check if any of this makes sense when I get to the actual development, sometimes it's easier to know if these things work out after actually trying them.

Sounds interesting. I took a quick look at AGS' plugin interface and it should be possible to add this.
So the basic idea is to display the text per line and add another column for the selected translation, correct?
One question - is the speech file relevant in that mode? I did not see support in AGS for multiple languages for voice recording, but maybe I missed it.

Thanks for the info, I see the problem with the module and will fix it. You can ignore this error (as you did) since this specific module doesn't include any text lines anyway.

You can get a better view of the icon at the about dialog (right click on the tree). It's just a public domain icon I used, I'm a programmer, not much of an artist to draw my own icons
(well, I did the filter icon, but it was actually created using code)

EDIT: fixed it and uploaded a new version, in case the error annoys you

right now I have no idea what the plugin is supposed to be doing (I haven't downloaded it and it doesn't become clear from reading this thread).

The plugin is aimed towards assisting with validation of the game text and speech. It's only an editor plugin, not a game plugin.
It has the ability to scan the scripts (dialogs, global scripts and room scripts), and display all the speech line it finds in those scripts (such as the text used in the character Say function). You can double click the line to go directly to the corresponding script line.
You can sort, filter and search through the lines using the interface.

If the lines are numbered then it offers additional functionality:
The Speech directory is scanned for each line and provides info on the file status. You can playback the speech from the editor itself. You can also mark whether those lines are correct (there are 2 checkboxes for each line, one for the voice file and the other text).

To make sure the plugin is non-intrusive as possible, it only loads the data if you click on the refresh button, thus it should not affect something you do, unless you are actually doing something at the plugin screen. It should also have the capacity to handle thousands of lines, which should cover even text-heavy games.

Here are 2 screenshots I provided in a previous thread, which would hopefully make my explanation clearer, and if there are additional questions I'll be happy to answer them.

I started working on this, it's on my spare time (which was very nonexistent this week) so I cannot state exactly when it'll be ready, but hopefully not too long since this is not complex.
TheMagician: if your game source loads with AGS 3.2.1 it would be great if you let me know whether the current version works for you. There aren't that many open source games out there for me to test it on my own.

void iSay(this Character*, String what);

function SayBox(this Character*, String text, (optional)int color);
function ThinkBox(this Character*, String text);

Thanks, in that case I'll pay extra attention to extender functions

A function to generate voice acting scripts and number lines for custom say commands would also be invaluable.

Regarding voice acting script, the easiest way for me to do this is to add an export function, but there are 2 things to consider:
1. There may be some extra information needed (Snarky mentioned that there should be a comments field for that purpose)
2. Snarky also a mentioned a tool that already handles voice acting scripts. I prefer not to recreate features already done by others, especially if the tool is built for that purpose. However, the author of that tool hasn't responded to this subject so I have no idea whether the tool is defunct, the author doesn't read this, or simply ignores it all.

As for renumbering, it was a conscious decision to refrain from script manipulation features for first release to make sure the plugin does its job without the chance of introducing bugs into the game itself. That's the reason I'm looking for feedback on what is already provided, to verify it works before opening a new type of feature.

But, if I don't hear anything about whether the plugin works with Say or Display, I'll have to assume it does and start earlier with manipulation features. It's best if people could verify this with standard functions, if possible, so I'll know I'm not dealing with basic functionality bugs. Makes debugging later releases MUCH easier.