Subtitles? Thread

Interesting...

The thing with subtitles is that you will need some type of feedback from the game itself as to what is going on - unlike a film you can't say "at 15.03:42 say this", you'd need to wait for the engine to tell you "Now playing xyz.wav".

I know a lot of newer engines have subtitling built in, but for older games I think you're stuck unless you can crack open the game (perhaps load a custom DLL into the engine if the game supports it) and extract details on which files are currently playing.

For coding it really depends on which game you're talking about. A lot use some variety of Microsoft Visual Studio and you can get an SDK for, but you'll need to be comfortable with C or C++. Others have their own script language which might be able to do what you want - it really does depend and there will be no 'magic bullet' to work with every game.

As for subtitle files on existing games, take a look at the ones in Source.

Deaf people are not the only ones who use the subtitles in games, I use them in every game because I'll miss information if I don't. It's like a back up; you're listening to it, and if you can't hear a word you can read it and don't miss a beat.
Mods and Games that are mostly Single Player and don't have subtitles suffer because of this.

Well it's just in the idea stage really, I have almost no mod experience and I only really know HTML (lol).

I tried to get into 3D modeling, but had a lot of trouble due to lack of tutorials and such, so I figured I'd give this a try.

I'll be checking out the Source subtitle files, thanks for the info.

Yeah well, I checked to see if any of Valve's Source engine games lacked CC/Subtitle support, and none of them did.

It amazes me how little things like that don't bother most companies, but Valve went the extra mile.

I wasn't personally thinking of any game in particular, but I hear HL:S doesn't have subtitles/CC.

I can't verify it since I don't own the game (yet), but yeah.

If not, then maybe the original Half Life and its expansions.

valve did a pretty crappy job imho.  for the best closed captioning in a game that, imho, has ever been done, check out doom3[cc]:
Moddb.com

many other companies have done CC *WAY* better then valve has for years before.  NOLF 1 & 2 are great examples. 

but just as an FYI, there's a difference between subtitles & CC.  subtitles are words as text only, normally only on DVD's.  CC say everything: sounds, music, SFX, etc. but sometimes have the word structures changed as to fit on the screen @ the correct time.  IE if a peson says "dude, the zombies are coming to kill us what are you going to do?" it could very well be displayed as "Zombies are coming to kill us".

but, again, imho, dev's designing specifically for people with handicaps is a waste of dev $$.  There's no point to dev for the minority.  And before anyone complains, "point and click" adventure games, secret levels, etc. all got ditched for THAT very reason: no reason to dev for the minority.

If a game can be modded then you can do subtitles relatively easy. But remember, you only need this if there's talking.  Doing the SFX is more difficult.  I think the D3 CC team talked about that specifically. in a news post or something.