Unfortunately I had to remove the project link from here due to reasons beyond my control. To prevent any speculation, this had nothing to do with a cease&desist or anything like that.

Please see https://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?post_id=64608#forumpost64608 which is a superior solution for subtitles.

No updates, just wanted to keep you posted on current developments. Right now I’m in the middle of a minor revamp of text rendering.

All the versions I’ve posted here so far assemble the final subtitle text comprising multiple lines by essentially adding a line break and redrawing the entire text (while trying to be smart about it) based on what audio sources are currently active (or in the case of dynamic captions, changing text while audio is playing).

This has two drawbacks: firstly, this can cause rapid transitions when a new line of text starts before the previous one ends. This can be observed in the first Manhattan bar scene after Trent rather politely joins Juni’s conversation. While this could be hidden by cutting short or delaying certain captions, it’s not ideal, so I’m looking to make each line’s position fixed for their lifetimes. This has some quirks to work out, like what happens if you have a three-line text area with the middle line occupied and a large two-liner caption is about to appear.

The second drawback is that this setup makes it hard to assign multiple audio sources to the same line (which is exactly what happens when you’re being hailed), or one audio source to multiple lines at the same time (as long as they’re not overlapping, which is exactly what dynamic captions were doing). I was trying to implement some kind of hand-over, whereby these audio chunks would contribute text to a special 0th line reserved for this, but this ended up being too hacky.

Thank you!

Is there any data I could get from the game files regarding the “automated speech” you often get when landing for instance? I’d like to know the possible patterns the game could use when stitching together sound clips to form a complete sentence.

For example, “Acknowledged.”+“Your request to”+“dock”+“is granted.”+“Proceed”+“to dock”+“two” is a valid sentence, but it’s impossible to get “two” right after “Your request to”.

Danko78, Totya: I think your language doesn’t use . as the decimal separator. I’ve fixed that, this Converter.exe should to the trick for you.

dRaiser wrote:
I’ll test this in few days. I’m actually not sure if it’s standard Freelancer font because I started playing for the 1st time with your mod.

Do you see text in menus (for instance, the options menu)?

New version is in the first post.

Highlights of this release:

• Converter.exe now uses all of your CPU cores for MP3 decoding, resulting in a massive speedup.
• Configuration! You can disable, resize, move, and customize the font inside each text area. Check out subtitles.cfg and don’t forget to rerun Converter to apply your changes made to it.
• Subtitles.dat is no more (you can delete yours if you have one), and has been replaced with flsd.dat and flsc.dat. These have a binary format which is no longer documented. Don’t forget to rerun Converter after you update to generate these.
• Because of this change, the admittedly weird restriction is gone from dynamic subtitles and they can now contain colons.
• I’ve made captions for about half of King’s lines spoken in-game (in the order they appear in king.utf, so I have stuff from the beginning of the game as well as some lines mentioning Nomads). Some of them are just radio spam he says during combat; I’ll have to do something with those, as right now they’re kind of annoying.

dRaiser wrote:
Hi, thanks for excellent modification. Works almost fine for me, but I’m using it with Jason’s Freelancer Patch for widescreen resolution and have a ugly black box with random (debug?) characters on the right side of screen. Is there some way to fix it? thanks!

Screen: http://draiser.net/gfx/screen2-low.jpg

I’m more worried about the font. Does Freelancer use its usual font in-game for you?
It should look like this:
http://www.fontriver.com/i/fonts/agency_fb/agency_fb_specimen.jpg

I’ve not had much time to work on this lately, but I did manage to add a hack that appears to fix MIXES. I’ve updated the first post with the latest version, without the debug bar this time.

I haven’t tested it on widescreen. I guess when I get to making the text areas configurable this problem will solve itself.

Whew, that’s one less mysterious bug to worry about.

About 4.5.1: I don’t actually use any of the new features, but for some reason VS doesn’t let me target 4.0 or 4.5 (I forgot which one I need). I’ll fix it for an actual release. Error reporting is something that could be improved as well, but it’s not trivial because I do my stuff after Freelancer has switched to exclusive fullscreen.

Thanks for the feedback!

Could you please retry with this d3d8.dll? It opens a console window when it’s loaded; I’d like to see what was printed before the crash.

I’ve managed to (almost, there’s a bug still) recreate Freelancer’s audio decoding, which means that in theory the keys should match any codec.
Could you please test the FP7 intro with the new version inside converttest.zip?

Thanks for pointing this out, I didn’t even know the professional codec existed.

With tooling in place, the subtitles will be attached to particular files / UTF entries (much easier to reach 100% coverage this way). I’ll just have to come up with the subtitle keys on the user’s computer before the first run, it seems.

Preview release! \ o /

I’ve done most of the “core” work, and I can reliably display subtitles by “listening in” to what Freelancer is currently playing.

Notably missing is the ability to display multi-part subtitles (the ones you usually get when you dock) and tools for working with the actual sound files instead of Freelancer’s raw audio buffers.

I’ve attached the .zip file to the first post, let me know your opinions Refer to the readme.txt file in the .zip for instructions.

If you’re missing either msvcr120.dll or msvcp120.dll, download and run vcredist_x86.exe from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40784

Obsolete, please see https://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?post_id=64608#forumpost64608 instead.