Open JesseTG opened 1 year ago
While the feature might sound redundant at first when there is actual mic support, I can see reasons why it could make sense to have a way to simply load a WAV. Some games require actual talking rather than simple sounds, so here some examples where I think it would be useful to have such a feature:
1) To teach a dog a word in Nintendogs, you need to perform the action multiple times and everytime you need to say the sound it should be connected to. Nintendo DS' voice recognition is not the best which sometimes results into the game recognizing it different, but being able to just replay a sound file over and over should result in a ~100% match everytime making it easier for the system to understand. 2) Love Plus is usually a Japanese-only game which luckly has an English translation. However, do to limitations if you want to use the voice-only commands, you need to actually say Japanese words which for non-speakers is incredible annoying since they always need to have a list of words and how to spell them next to them. If you could simply load a WAV file you could just record saying them once and then rename the file with the translation like "Hello" and "Nice weather today". Then you can just select them as needed without needing to check everytime how to see it. 3) I am not sure if I am the only one, but I really dislike talking while playing, especially when I know others can hear me. So for me, playing games that require talking is hard since I am not living alone. and can only do so when others are out This feature once again would allow to simply record voice once and then replaying it whenever needed without feeling weird. Also - if prepared before - people can use voice-related features in games even if they can't talk for some reason like the mic broke or simply being sick.
I don't say a sound file feature would be as good as actual mic support which already exists, but I can definitely see reasons for having it and why an alternative method should exist. Also there is a fourth reason I can think of, but I am unsure if the sound file feature would help in this case or not.
4) In case the sound file mic input does not require the Libretro Mic API it would help Libretro instances that simply don't have it integrated. As example RALibretro - the development tool for RetroAchievements developers - doesn't currently have the API integrated and it's unclear if it will ever and if so when. Therefore, they can't develop achievements for games / game features that need actual talking. If the WAV file alternative wouldn't need an extra API, this would be a good alternative method.
Love Plus is usually a Japanese-only game which luckly has an English translation. However, do to limitations if you want to use the voice-only commands, you need to actually say Japanese words which for non-speakers is incredible annoying since they always need to have a list of words and how to spell them next to them. If you could simply load a WAV file you could just record saying them once and then rename the file with the translation like "Hello" and "Nice weather today". Then you can just select them as needed without needing to check everytime how to see it.
For this use case, I'd most likely need to implement the following to ensure a good player experience:
m3u
playlist file instead. Ought to make things simpler.Doable, but it'll take time.
In case the sound file mic input does not require the Libretro Mic API it would help Libretro instances that simply don't have it integrated.
It would not need the microphone API to be implemented. Everything I need (resampling, audio mixing, WAV loading) is already available in libretro-common
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As example RALibretro - the development tool for RetroAchievements developers - doesn't currently have the API integrated and it's unclear if it will ever and if so when. Therefore, they can't develop achievements for games / game features that need actual talking. If the WAV file alternative wouldn't need an extra API, this would be a good alternative method.
Are there any discussions or forum threads you can point to indicating the kinds of achievements that people want to implement?
Given that RALibretro recently got mic support, is functionality still important to you? I'm not gonna take it off the table entirely, but I will likely put this lower on my list.
In theory the mic support does the job and this is not necessarily needed. However, it would still be a QoL improvement in my opinion for the reasons mentioned above. I would leave this up to you if you think it's worth the time or not. From my side it would not necessarily be needed.
In that case I'll rank this lower on my list, but the other use cases you describe still hold. So I'm not gonna rule this out. And I'd accept a PR that adds support for this.
Upstream melonDS allows you to simulate microphone input by looping a custom WAV file. I don't see a reason for this, but if there's sufficient demand then I may reconsider it.