Topic by lukas 2015-11-03 12:55:18

  • lukas
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Hi all,
has anyone managed to create a BGT game that uses Sapi and runs successfully under 8 or 10?

I have had problems distributing beta versions of my games to testers on Windows 8, even though they did have the local language TTS installed and programs like NVDA were able to work with it successfully. The affected machines were X64 but the voice in question seems to be natively 64-bit as well.

I am trying to find out whether the difficulty (the game simply not being able to see the voice at all, as though it hadn't been installed) was caused by the voice itself or by differences between Sapi versions in different releases of Windows, and BGT perhaps not being able to communicate with the newer versions.
from what I was able to find on the internet, it seems that newer versions of Sapi 5 should be backwards compatible, however the Google results are one huge pile of disorganized mess and sometimes even contradicting information for the most part.
So, if you do use Sapi in your BGT games under 8 or 10 but perhaps had to fix some issues in order to make it work, I'd be extremely grateful if you could share any tips.

Here is a sum up of what I was able to find out at least semi-reliably so far:
Basically, I need a reliable way to tell for sure if the issues my testers have been experiencing are exclusively voice-specific or related to Sapi as such in general.

1. Sapi 5.1 was introduced in Windows XP, 5.2 was a special Windows Server 2003 edition, 5.3 was introduced in Vista and 5.4 in 7. I couldn't find a word about the exact Sapi version number being used in 8 or 10 anywhere. However, even if BGT was specifically designed with the assumption that Sapi 5.1 is present on the user's system, I am running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (which should therefore supposedly come with Sapi 5.4) and I am able to run any BGT games that use Sapi, including my own, without any issues whatsoever, so 5.4 in deed does seem to be backwards compatible.

2. There are multiple instances of sapi.dll across the system, so I have absolutely no idea which one to check for details, having a 64-bit system but with BGT being an emulated application (not true 64-bit), as it gets installed in the Program Files (X86) folder, not Program files itself which seems to be used for true 64-bit applications, if this makes sense.

3. There doesn't seem to be any reliable, publicly available way at all to check the actual Sapi version currently running on the target system (such as the Dxdiag utility) or even a web-based installer that downloads and updates any components if necessary, again like the Directx web installer.

4. However, all the voices i've tried so far seem to be capable of installing the required Sapi runtimes depending on the platform if they are missing when installing the voice. I was not trying any english voices.

5. I'm not sure if even installing the older Sapi 5.1 SDK on newer versions of Windows would at all help the users having trouble with Sapi, as I don't think it would just replace the sapi.dll that is used by the system by default.

That's what I found out so far.
Many grateful thanks for any replies in advance!
Lukas

I won't be using this account any more or participating in the forum activity through other childish means like creating an alternate account. I've asked for the account to be removed but I'm not sure if that's actually technically possible here. Just writing this for people to know that I won't be replying, posting new topics or checking private messages until the account is potentially removed.

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Reply by CAE_Jones 2015-11-03 14:53:29

  • Registered: 2010-11-07
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I haven't had any trouble using sapi with BGT on my 64bit Windows 8 system. Is it that Sapi won't work at all, or do they have particular voices installed? Are the default voices that come with Windows actually 32bit?
I haven't done anything to change my Sapi settings, and I haven't installed any additional voices.

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Reply by lukas 2015-11-03 15:58:25

  • lukas
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Hi,
thanks for the fast reply. I have no idea about the default windows voices, but these should be 64-bit as the issue is that only the default system voices are available to them when starting up the game or trying to change Sapi configuration from within the game. So I am beginning to suspect the trouble is actually the Czech TTS not being a native 64-bit application. In that case, if the voice has not been set as the system default yet, which I know it has not in their case, they will have to use the 32-bit control pannel located (usually) in c:\Windows\SysWOW64\Speech\SpeechUX\sapi.cpl.
I'll have to tell them to try this. Thanks for leading me to this possible solution by asking if the default Windows voices were actually 32-bit. :-D
Lukas

I won't be using this account any more or participating in the forum activity through other childish means like creating an alternate account. I've asked for the account to be removed but I'm not sure if that's actually technically possible here. Just writing this for people to know that I won't be replying, posting new topics or checking private messages until the account is potentially removed.

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Reply by keyIsFull 2015-11-03 17:08:10

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The default english voices are 64-bit. Microsoft david, hazael, sira pro

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Reply by lukas 2015-11-03 20:21:09

  • lukas
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Thanks for the info, KeyisFull. In that case, this seems to confirm my suspicion. :-)
Lukas

I won't be using this account any more or participating in the forum activity through other childish means like creating an alternate account. I've asked for the account to be removed but I'm not sure if that's actually technically possible here. Just writing this for people to know that I won't be replying, posting new topics or checking private messages until the account is potentially removed.

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