APOCALYX is a...

free Game Engine based on OpenGL (MAIL) (SITE) (FORUM) (BLOG)

Saturday, July 26, 2008

eSpeak: bug solved

Thanks to Nout (the author of NsEditor), I discovered that the current APOCALYX implementation of eSpeak had a design flaw. eSpeak is an open source library useful to convert text in several languages is fluent audible speech. Since the output of the library is a sound, I had to interface the output to a sound source and, because of their versatility, I had chosen a 3D sound source. This way the sound of the spoken text can be attached to a object in movement, a NPC for example.
This idea had a flaw, in fact what happens when the 3D sound is not attached to an object and the camera is moved around in the scene? The 3D sound remains stationary in the origin, while the camera (and the ears of the player) move away, thus the sound may become too far to be heard. A 3D sound is versatile, but its default behavior is not intuitive.
To solve the problem, it's now available a new preview of the next release of engine (alpha3). The solution is simple, when the speaker is static, the programmer can use an old good 2D Sound instead of a 3D sound located at the origin. This preview includes also the MySQL and SQLite support, so the users that need those database interfaces can download it without fear of losing them.

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