Topic: Voice for the story missions

Just for starters is there a documentation of all available commands in the LUA dialect for WL? I was looking into it the other day and I couldn't find anything there.

Looki, Looki: https://wl.widelands.org/docs/wl/

About your implementation idea: yes, that is the hacky way of implementing this feature. The sound files would be a resource of the scenario though and would therefore need to go into the map.

However, I repeat again: This is not a good idea - it adds maintenance burden for little value (or a feature that might even be negative for some people). Whenever we add a mission, we need new voicing, whenever we change semantics of a mission or just strings around, we need new voices. This is a feature that will take too many resources to maintain - so I am really not keen on getting it into the engine.

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Worst that can happen is that I push on the barbarian campaign, finish it up and then get bored and leave. If that happens you still have one campaign with voice and a way to put voice into other maps.

Then what? The next time the code needs refactoring you will be gone and somebody else (me?) will need to do it. The next time we change a string, we will delete your outdated voice snippet or search for somebody to redo it? I admire your enthusiasm, but what you want to implement is costly for the project in the long run and adds little - so I oppose it.

Your commitment is very much appreciated and I can point you to task of all sizes and variety (literally: five minutes cleanups to week long task reaching from Lua, to the website, to the campaigns, network, ui, c++, Lua, Java, Python. Pick your poison) that I would love to see done. But this is not the right thing for Widelands, I don't think.

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Well lets get a few things sorted out then so there are no misunderstandings. First off, I'm talking about the story parts of the messages, not the "do this, build this there and then go here" parts.

yes, I understood that.

Secondly I'll go ahead and get me a development environment set up. Thirdly I'll start going over the campaigns, once I've done this. Fourth(ly? ^^) I'll get started implementing an optional way to add soundbytes from campaigns (the proper way that is, with a separate Sound_Handler::play_speech() and Sound_Handler::stop_speech(). I do NOT think this is a bad idea, quite the opposite, it's better to have that option than to not have that option. And yes, if worst comes to pass you can just go ahead and delete those soundbytes from the campaigns if they're really incompatible with what you envision for changing those. As Brian tells us: You've come from nothing. You've gone back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!

that is not quite correct. That way we got a battle code that is buggy and really hard to change, a tree spreading feature that is even hard to remove, a random map generator that reinvented the wheel and needs to be redone now that class World changes, a i18n feature for sounds that was implemented years ago (it never got used and as I ripped it out last week, I realized that it never would have actually worked). Adding features that aren't a good idea in the first place is feature creep and a bad idea for the project health - We were neglecting in the past, but Widelands will be around for a few more years, so we try to do better now.

So, see you in a few days when I have my dev-environment running (I'll probably do a step by step tutorial for windows users since I'll have to find out anyway), can you give me the contact information for the people who originally designed those campaigns?

A step by step for Windows users would be awesome! There is a building page in the Wiki - I think also one for Windows. Updating that would be great. As for the authors: that would be me (except for the empire campaign which Nasenbaer did originally but which I ported to Lua, so I know more about the implementation. Iirc we also collaborated on the story).

I don't really have a grasp of what they were aiming for, especially the barbarian campaign. The Atlantean campaign is completely up for grabs or did I miss something story wise in the wiki?

The story is not in the wiki, but is outlined for the next few missions. The author there would also be me :). If you want to continue on those though, I suggest we skype or something and I tell you what I had in mind and we can develop it further - you are free to put your own twist on it of course.

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SirVer wrote:

Adding features that aren't a good idea in the first place is feature creep and a bad idea for the project health - We were neglecting in the past, but Widelands will be around for a few more years, so we try to do better now.

Well, let's discuss this when I have a proposition for an actual implementation

The story is not in the wiki, but is outlined for the next few missions. The author there would also be me :). If you want to continue on those though, I suggest we skype or something and I tell you what I had in mind and we can develop it further - you are free to put your own twist on it of course.

That sounds promising, I have a DSA play tomorrow, but I think I'll get back to you on wednesday, if that is alright with you. (You'll get a PN with my Skypename.) You're german, right? If that is the case then the timing should be trivial

Tibor wrote:

My opinion: This is typical problem when there is too many feature ideas/requests vs. too little core developers. I also has some ideas and requests but I have to be patient.

But technical question - current size of a single map is about 100 KB. How much would the size grow when there will be some sound files? F.e. what could be the size of one minute of a speach?

Yes and no, I can implement it, it's a question of wether it'll be let through ;) With ogg vorbis and good compression we're talking about a significant up, but not more than a couple of hundred KB.

Regards, Justus

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