[Iain Baker]

Hi all I just noticed my TTS stopped working in Knossos. I tried the voice tab and it doesn’t play a sound when clicking on test or in game. I tried booting up balabolka and looking at the windows speech settings and both are playing back the voices just fine. Anyone else had this problem?

I’m not sure if it’s related, but windows did an update recently. IIR correctly it was working fine before the update, and so think this the first time I have loaded knossos since.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated 👍

[jg18]

Please post your fs2_open.log file.  Instructions on how to do this can be found in this post.

Also please post or attach your fs2_open.ini file, which has your TTS settings. To find that file, press the Windows key + R to go to Windows's Run menu, then enter the following and press Enter:

Code: [Select]

%AppData%\HardLightProductions\FreeSpaceOpen
A Windows Explorer window will pop up and fs2_open.ini should be there.

[Iain Baker]

Thank you, much appreciated.

I ran FS2 with the media VP just to check if the non-TTS voices were working in-game - they were, and whether the TTS would work in the techroom - it didn't.

link to the .ini file, since it won't let me upload it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k9lzp26PthE5K4h690OCLxpD6vAtMZe6/view?usp=sharing

If you can fix this problem for me I'll be very thankful.

Best wishes,

Iain

[Iain Baker]

Please post your fs2_open.log file.  Instructions on how to do this can be found in this post.

Also please post or attach your fs2_open.ini file, which has your TTS settings. To find that file, press the Windows key + R to go to Windows's Run menu, then enter the following and press Enter:

Code: [Select]

%AppData%\HardLightProductions\FreeSpaceOpen
A Windows Explorer window will pop up and fs2_open.ini should be there.

Done, thank you 👍

[jg18]

Thanks. Your fs2_open.ini file, which specifies your hardware config, shows that a playback device is selected under the file's "Sound" section, but the sound device setting that appears alongside the speech settings is blank. Odd. The selected speech voice might not be valid, but since it's just a number (index into your installed TTS voices), it's impossible to say.

Some things to try:

1. Go to Knossos's settings menu (gear icon in upper-right). Under "Audio" section, uncheck Enable EFX. Perhaps unrelated, but EFX isn't useful. It was added as part of the new sound code back in 2012 but AFAIK has never been used.

2. Also on Knossos's settings menu, under the Speech section, make sure that a Voice is selected in the drop-down box, and press the Test button. Do you hear a TTS voice?

3. Press the Save button on Knossos's settings menu before leaving the settings menu. The button is towards the top of the settings menu, on the left.

4. To rule out the cause being related to a mod, please try playing without mods: on Knossos's Home tab, choose "Retail FS2".

Let us know how that goes.

[Iain Baker]

Hi there, thanks for getting back to me. Tried all of those and nothing worked. TTS was absent.

Re

“Thanks. Your fs2_open.ini file, which specifies your hardware config, shows that a playback device is selected under the file's "Sound" section, but the sound device setting that appears alongside the speech settings is blank. Odd. The selected speech voice might not be valid, but since it's just a number (index into your installed TTS voices), it's impossible to say.”

Is there a way to force it to choose a different sound device for the speech?

[jg18]

Unfortunately I don't know what the problem is. Unless/until a coder can reproduce this, it's going to be very hard to diagnose.

It's quite possible that a Windows update introduced a compatibility-breaking change for how FSO/Knossos handles TTS, meaning it's also possible that some future Windows update could restore it.

To confirm, you tried the Test button in Knossos's  settings menu under "Speech" section for every option listed for Voice, correct? And you're pressing the Save button on Knossos's settings menu before leaving the menu screen, right?

You can try editing your fs2_open.ini file in Notepad by copying the text that appears with PlaybackDevice on line 14 (that is, "OpenAL Soft on DM2350D (NVIDIA High Definition Audio)") and pasting it to append it to the line that starts with SoundDeviceOAL on line 8, but I Have no idea if that will work. It's possible that Knossos overwrites the fs2_open.ini file every time you press Play, meaning changes in Notepad would have no effect.

The only other idea I have is for you to look at your Windows Update history and see if you can narrow down the list of updates that might have broken TTS, although we don't know for sure that that was the cause. Perhaps the release notes on those updates might say something about whether they involved changes to Windows's TTS. You'll need to do some Googling and see what info you can find.

I or another coder might be able to write for you a custom FSO build that includes extra logging around the TTS code, but I can't give an ETA on when I'll be able to do that, and there's no guarantee that would shed more light on the issue.

Sorry I can't be more helpful than that.

[Iain Baker]

Hi there, good to hear from you. Thank you for the help. You tried, that’s the main thing,and for that I’m very greatful.

Yup, I can confirm that yes to “To confirm, you tried the Test button in Knossos's  settings menu under "Speech" section for every option listed for Voice, correct? And you're pressing the Save button on Knossos's settings menu before leaving the menu screen, right?”

I looked up the 13th of June 2023 windows update. It didn’t mention anything about SAPI. So I did some more digging. Turns out that update has been causing lots of issues for lots of people - including breaking Narrator - which I suspect might be linked. So, probably nothing we can do at our end, but if the update fcuked up so many things up for so many people then hopefully that will press Microsoft to push out a updated that un-fcuks them again sooner rather than later. Which I seem to remember was the solution to the last time a windows updated screwed things up…

[Iain Baker]

Just an update to say this is still happening just in case someone has thought of something in the meantime.