How To :: Wintermute String tables (speech & audio) to A.C.

Diego

Hey, I need to port wintermute finished game into AC, and so far so good with most of the features. I've been able to reconstruct almost everything, but there's one thing that might be a major pain. I saw the videos on how dialogs and descriptions are done and how you put audio to it and it's fine, but seems to me that for the sake of a port we would need to do each line one by one and assign an audio file by hand, and I don't get how to do multiple languages with it. 

Is there a way to load an entire string table from wintermute engine into AC that I don't know about? 

Attached is a fragment of how WME string tables are done. Any guidance with this would be helpful because we're still deciding if we should do this port or not depending on this kind of over-head. 

Thanks. 

WME String Table Example

ChrisIceBox

The example shows nothing related to audio, but AC uses a similar identifier system to match an internal line of text with a translation / audio file.  Whereas WME uses a syntax of the form "TXT0008", AC uses a simple numeric system: so "43" might be a similar ID number.

Game text, including dialogue, must be listed in the Speech Manager before it can be translated or voiced.  This is done by clicking Gather text in the Speech Manager.  The Speech Manager will assign a unique ID number to each line of text.

Once that's done, translations can be assigned to a line via two ways: either selecting a line's entry in the Speech Manager and entering it manually, or by exporting, updating and re-importing translation files (see the written tutorials on this topic for more).  Translation CSV files can be generated either for all translations (one in each column), or one file for each.

If you already have your own translations in a separate spreadsheet, I would recommend writing a macro
or shell script that takes an AC translation file and compares it to the WME
string table.  When it finds a match in text between the two,
have it transfer the WME translation cells over to the AC translation cells for that given row.

A similar trick could do the same for audio.  Speech audio can be assigned to a speech line via two ways: either by selecting each dialogue line in the Speech Manager in turn, and assigning the appropriate AudioClip; or by naming your AudioClips according to a given syntax and having AC detect them automatically.  The expected filename of each clip will also be shown in the Speech Manager - e.g. "Garry03" will by a typical filename for the ID #3 line for character Garry.  A full list of expected filenames can be generated by clicking Create script sheet..., again in the Speech Manager.

Diego

Thanks, I have to dig in because I don't know AC that well yet. But this is encouraging. A macro script that can convert WME strings into AC strings would be fantastic.