Sci-Fi Techno-Babble Generator

[SirCrow]

. . . I'm glad you found a voice solution with eSpeak. That should add some punch to your game. If text to speech was available in the 1980's, I would have had a field day using it.

Please keep us posted n how the project is coming along.

I'll gladly keep you guys posted.  Currently, I've enabled the voice only for messages from Central Command;  otherwise, there's just too much of that robot-like chatter going on.  I've tried both the British and American accents, and they're both hard to take seriously.  Ha-ha.

[SirCrow]

If you're not willing to muck around with that, there's a program called festival that does TTS on Linux. "sudo apt-get install festival" then "festival --tts file.txt".

Yes, I've seen mention of Festival.  I forget, is it supposed to be superior to eSpeak?  I'm trying to install Festival right now...

UPDATE: I've managed to get Festival working in the game.  I think I like it a little more than eSpeak.  Now if I could just get it to not pronounce AG and SR as ag and senior (without inserting hyphens), I'd like it even more!  I do like that it says 054-mark-093 as zero-5-4 mark zero-9-3, while eSpeak says zero-54-mark-zero-93. However, eSpeak lets me adjust the volume, while Festival doesn't appear to have that ability.

Thanks for the Terminal command lines to install Festival;  it made the process quite easy.

[Pete]

You can add the hyphen as an invisible character.

Let's say a$ = "This is a te-st"
Send that to Festival and then use a screen printer like...

FOR i = 1 to len(A$)
IF MID$(a$, i, 1) <> "-" the print a$;
NEXT

That would give you the best of both.

Pete

[SirCrow]

You can add the hyphen as an invisible character.

Let's say a$ = "This is a te-st"
Send that to Festival and then use a screen printer like...

FOR i = 1 to len(A$)
IF MID$(a$, i, 1) <> "-" the print a$;
NEXT

That would give you the best of both.

Pete

Possibly, I can make that work.  Thanks.  But first, I want to teach it to randomly generate those Star Trek-like bearing numbers.

[luke]

use a screen printer like...

FOR i = 1 to len(A$)
IF MID$(a$, i, 1) <> "-" the print a$;
NEXT

Even better, you can stick a _DELAY in the and get the universally-annoying teletype printing effect. Bonus points if you can find a corny sound effect to go with it.

[Pete]

Been there, done that some 20 years ago. Used QBasic SOUND to make clicks that sounded like a typewriter. I had to use TIMER to make a delay loop that was less than SLEEP 1, so I'm definitely a fan of the _DEAY keyword.

Pete

[SirCrow]

use a screen printer like...

FOR i = 1 to len(A$)
IF MID$(a$, i, 1) <> "-" the print a$;
NEXT

Even better, you can stick a _DELAY in the and get the universally-annoying teletype printing effect. Bonus points if you can find a corny sound effect to go with it.

Yep, I'd actually thought of doing that.  Perhaps I'll make it an option that can be turned ON/OFF, just as the whole text thing already is now.
Thanks for the input!