Subtitles Revisited [BETA]

Well, it has passed about 2 months and 270+ views.

It can be interested to know some opinions about the subtitles, if they work or are useful for anybody.

Anyone has tested (and enjoyed) them?

Sure! Your opinion is welcome!

Everything works fine. But you MUST recompile the subtitles before using.

What problems I found:
1. Tried to use it inside my mod. Works well too. But have conflict with MP3codec.dll
2. Why your mod have decoded mission files? It’s very dangerous to use. Better to leave them not touched
3. Black screen for cinematic subtitles is… bad. Can you make it transparent? Like the ingame subtitles
4. Ingame subtitles have not beautiful placement. May better place it on the bottom side of the comm window?
5. Multiple config files… it’s not useful. Can you load config files automatically according to current resolution?
6. Using of d3d8 makes conflicts with the ENB or Reshade. One of my friends want to use your subtitles, but he don’t want remove the Reshade. So, your mod isn’t useful for him.

Anyway - I think this mod useful and you must publish it on Moddb or other more popular place than the-starport.net.

But overlay problems… I thinking about using of you subtitles in my mod. But my players (in future) must think “I want for using reshade or I want for subtitiles? Better graphics or understanding of story?” Very difficult question. And still not got answer for myself.

Sorry for my bad english. Your tool is cool. And now well working with my custom voices.

Edited:

May be that’s solution about multiple d3d8.dll
https://reshade.me/forum/troubleshooting/3755-two-d3d9-dll-files-in-same-directory

Thanks a lot for the testing and comment.

I played the game (Mission Story) completely and worked (for Spanish translation). So I assume they will work with English subtitles.

About your questions, I can give some answers, but maybe they didn’t like:

• Subtitles must be recompiled everytime you add more subtitles or the in-game resolution changes. This is how the tool works. This mod is not of my own, I followed the work of Larosh with it’s own .DLL. The link is at first post.

1.) I think I didn’t used MP3codec.dll as far as I know, I played/used the tool AS IS. Somehow the tool must “read” some bytes from the beggining of the audio file to know which subtitle must display, so it should be independant from the coded used.
I don’t know another methor of doing so.

2.) I needed to decode some missions because of synchronicity of dialogues. Some appearing from full cinematic to in-game, so I must adjust them (there are a few, maybe 10 or so) to appear before going in-game or after full screen cinematic. I have only changed timings in appear things, not the rest of the scripts. Also, sometimes there were 2 or more people talking or talking so fast that some subtitles join with the previous/next subtitle. Displaying subtitles for two differents sources (Juni and Trent, for example at the same time) was displayed incorrectly.

3.) As told in readme.txt, the black band for cinematic subtitles can not be made transparent (at least I don’t know how to do it). I tryed to use the same code that with the in-game subtitles but sometimes the subtitles do not appear in display. So it is the unique solution, and Larosh commented it also.

4.) You can change position coordinates, background box size, text color, background transparent gradient for in-game dialogues, in subtitles.cfg.

5.) The config file is not used in runtime, it is used only for compilation. So, you can have various config files and use them at your convenience. I assume that when you use a resolution, you will use it always, you will not be changing it all the time. This is how the tool works. I added various config files for different screen resolutions, that’s all.

6.) Yes, I advertise about that also. You can mod Reshade d3d8.dll with the source code of this d3d8.dll subtitles code or viceversa. I don’t know another method of doing this. In fact I think that this d3d8.dll for subtitles is hooking the real d3d8.dll, I don’t know how to hook a .dll that is hooking at the same time another .dll. xD

It is obvious you can improve it by far, but my expectation was to see the subtitles for Story Mission (for Spanish translation of Freelancer), not for new texts or mods, although it is a resource that anyone can use for its own mods. I decided to post the tool for English speaking people, I’ve seen some people requesting subtitles for Story Mission. And I decided to add also an English version. It is obvious you can use this tool for other languages.

Thanks a lot for your comments. I said before that my DirectX programming is very bad/ultralimited, and I don’t know at all how to implement some things, but I think that my expectation to play the story mission with this mod is achieved. I hope you understand that.

Hi Jeider,

thanks for letting me know. But if JFLP is changing something graphically, I assume that it may not be avoidable with FLSubs. The tool works as is, with the version that the readme specifies of JFLP.

I’m not in disposition of change the tool every time that JFLP is changed. I didn’t even remember the screenshot you are posting in-game. Maybe this is an addon or a new component. And I only made the tool for the vanilla game.

Furthermore, how is that you have 2 subtitles? Maybe JFLP is adding some subtitle feature?

Sorry.

Regads.

What I’m thinking is that you must use the cinematic type of subtitles for the black background. The dynamic subtitles has not the black background. Check this.

As I can see, the cinematic subtitles has the black background, right? The subtitles you are using (on top) do not have it because you probably are using another type of subtitles.

In the readme I explain the types of subtitles you can use.

Jeider,

As far as I know, subtitles.xml is not deleted by converter.exe tool. It only reads the file, and outputs new files (.dat), never changing or updating subtitles.xml. So, it is very odd for me to see that converter.exe has deleted subtitles.xml.

Apart of this, I did this mod because I wanted to see subtitles in the vanilla version of the game, and see the subtitles of the cinematics for my specific project to translate them into Spanish. I do not give support to the tool. The tool needs DirectX11. I’m not sure if you could use it well in Windows XP.

I recommend you update the tool for your purposes. I’m not the real author of the tool either, you can check another posts, although I added more features than the original one. So, this is why I posted here, if anyone wanted to use it for its own transaltion of the vanilla cinematic subtitles of the game.

I tested the link to MEGA with the tool and it works (with Firefox at least).