Missing icon identifying the speaker of a voice line in the animatic cutscenes

[SuperSajuuk]

Not sure if this one is fixable, but I'm writing a bug report about it anyway. Some context:

In HW1 Classic, during the cutscenes between missions, a graphical icon would be used to represent the person who is speaking (excluding the opening and ending sequence, due to it being the narrator with no icon). For example, an icon of the Mothership would be used for Fleet Command, the Kushan logo for Fleet Intelligence, then various icons for different ships and races you meet during the story. These graphical icons are used every time there is a speech line, which is designed to visually identify who is speaking.

In Cataclysm, all of the animatics cutscenes lack icons, making it relatively difficult to visualise who is talking (although you can guess over time). This is strange because icons are used during missions themselves (although some of them have stupid errors), and I can't imagine that it would be hard to put them into the animatics, unless someone redid the animatics code in some way that meant icons wouldn't load there.

Again, no idea if this is fixable, but its such a minor issue that it feels like the kind of thing worth fixing. At the same time, it may be worth fixing some of the "oddities" with the in-mission speech lines as well (dumb typos, missing punctuation, wrong icons used), but I don't know how all of that is handled in-game. I had thought all of this would be in Cataclysm.big, but for some reason, none of the top-of-screen subtitle texts are stored there (or if they are, I couldn't find the file as it wasn't in english.script).

[SuperSajuuk]

@Talthos I think you might be able to enlighten me as to how this works in Cata, as it may aid in trying to fix this relatively minor issue: I'm not particularly certain myself!!

[Talthos]

I haven't done much digging in this regard, so I don't know off-hand as to how the animatic icons work in Cataclysm, let alone HW1 Classic.

I might attempt to dig through the extracted assets to learn more, once I'm finished with getting some of the more serious bugs tested and resolved (such as that massive audio glitch that doesn't affect everyone equally, even on Windows 10).

[ncblakely]

There was some discussion in the Discord channel today about either creating a separate "unofficial patch" that fixes bugs that can be fixed via traditional .big file modding, and/or bundling it with CET.

I don't have a ton of experience with traditional HW1/C modding. If folks want to contribute some fixes to this repo for these sorts of issues I'd be happy to accept them, and build in any engine-level support necessary for them.

[SuperSajuuk]

There was some discussion in the Discord channel today about either creating a separate "unofficial patch" that fixes bugs that can be fixed via traditional .big file modding, and/or bundling it with CET.

I don't have a ton of experience with traditional HW1/C modding. If folks want to contribute some fixes to this repo for these sorts of issues I'd be happy to accept them, and build in any engine-level support necessary for them.

My feeling is that having one mod to cover all things would be good on the basis of simplicity and making it easy for people to just download one mod for all the fixes they need. If you start asking people to go to multiple locations to get multiple fixes, they’re less likely to download them. Perhaps it could be a config option if people want additional bug fixes that are handled via big files? Eg “enableBIGFileBugFixes”

[also do you have an invite link for that discord server? That link doesn’t work for me as i’m not in the server]

[ncblakely]

That's fair. I don't have any issue with bundling those fixes with this mod. I could also change the engine to load a separate .big file (similar to Update.big) that takes precedence over the others, just to keep things tidy in a single file.

This invite link may work? It's the same Discord used by the Gardens of Kadesh project.

[251371029]

The barking dog was designed in this way in the beginning, with the icon configuration file in subtitle.script. They divided the voice into different "themes", with each theme given an icon or not given, but the configuration file for the voice grouping was likely encapsulated in EXE.

[251371029]

//theme 0: default for actor 0 (Fleet Command) themeColor 0, 255, 255, 255 themeDropshadow 0, YES themeMargin 0, 0 themeFont 0, Arial_13.hff themeFadeIn 0, 0.2 themeFadeOut 0, 0.2 themePicture 0, 0, FleetCommand

//theme 1: default for actor 1 (Tactical Officer) themeColor 1, 255, 255, 255 themeDropshadow 1, YES themeMargin 1, 0 themeFont 1, Arial_13.hff themeFadeIn 1, 0.2 themeFadeOut 1, 0.2 themePicture 1, 0, TacticalOfficer

//theme 9: Default NON-actor theme... (no picture) themeColor 9, 255, 255, 255 themeDropshadow 9, YES themeMargin 9, 0 themeFont 9, Arial_13.hff themeFadeIn 9, 0.2 themeFadeOut 9, 0.2

[SuperSajuuk]

@251371029 im aware of how this works having read the subtitle.script, but we can’t fix the missing icons [as well as the several cases of wrongly assigned icons] without knowing how it works internally in order to override it. Hence the purpose of this ticket being about fixing the engine-level issue that allows us to create a new subtitle.script that uses all of the icons defined in the archive. 👍