Comprehensive guide to making closed captions in Source?

[robert.briscoe]

I've been reading over the Valve's wiki entry on the subject ( http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Closed_Captions )

but have to admit im still not quite sure what I should be doing here. Basically I have spoken dialogue which is triggered via ambient_generics throughout my levels which I want to be captioned but Im still unclear as to where to start with this. The wiki mentions creating a file for compiling, but the thing that confuses me is how it refers to the sound file, i.e: barn.chatter

lang

{

Language "English" //(or "French", etc)

Tokens

{

// Captions defined here.

nameofcorrespondingsound "This is the caption."

barn.chatter "We're picking up radio chatter. They're looking for your car."

// etc...

}

}

what is this actually referring to? it's obviously not a sound file so im guessing it's defined somehwere else?

If anyone has any info on this or knows if there are any better guides to creating closed captions i'd greatly appreciate the help!

[KungFuSquirrel]

I have no clue how to answer your question, but if this is for your Dear Esther remake, I'm going to hug you. I had to strain to hear a lot of the lines in the first one, sometimes completely lost what was being said.

[Surfa]

It refers to a sound in the sound text files. Most of these are located in the scripts folder and are normally named game_sounds_[use].txt.

It actually says so in the article you linked.

This should correspond to a sound defined in one of the sound files listed in /scripts/game_sounds_manifest.txt (e.g. barn.chatter which is defined in hl2/scripts/level_sounds_coast.txt).

[Campaignjunkie]

Whoa whoa whoa. Ditch the ambient_generics.

Instead, use a dummy NPC in some far-off room talking through an env_microphone that goes directly to the player. You'll have to plug all the audio files into Faceposer to make all the scenes, but it'll be worth it for the benefits: That way, when the player pauses (or saves) during a voice over, the sound will pause instead of continue playing / stop abruptly. Captions will also work better that way -- that's how the GladOS and Breen voice overs work. (Though the GladOS thing didn't use an env_microphone, still the same concept)

With captions, yeah, it refers to the sound script entry. BUT remember to compile the closecaption_english.txt into a closecaption_english.dat file, or else it won't appear properly... I just keep a "captioncompile.cmd" file in \resources\ with the following commands:

"%sourcesdk%\bin\orangebox\bin\captioncompiler.exe" %1

pause

... and then just drag and drop your closecaption_english.txt onto it to compile.

EDIT: oh, and I had to strain to hear the voice over too... I suggest normalizing all of the dialog in Audacity or something, and make sure it's in the \vo\ folder so the soundmixer will adjust the volume properly (see soundmixer.txt file in \resources\, which modifies the volume of a sound based on its filename / folder, used with specific soundscapes so that Valve could emphasize the dialog above everything else at certain points)

[robert.briscoe]

Thanks for the advice guys, finally got it working after fiddling around with dozens of Valve's goddamn txt files.

Yeah it's for Dear Esther, I have already fixed the soundlevels for the speech and music and cleaned up the audio, but I also had a lot of requests for subtitles in english and of course this lays the foundation for translation into multiple languages, which I think is essential for a mod which is mostly dialogue driven.

was learning the particle editor the day before... uggg! Why does valve have to make everything so intuitive!?

gonna try and get light bouncing working properly next.