No speech but sound works

[mcarans]

@OoMrFlibble Your fork started on my Kubuntu 25.04 system, but there was no sound. I followed the steps in the README to use system audio libraries instead of the ones in the package (libSDL-1.2.so.0, libopenal.so.1). It started with sound but speech stuff was greyed out in the Oolite game options:

I also tried my system's libespeak.so.1. Then I got some errors:

Configuration contains unknown keys - ("GNUSTEP_FILESYSTEM_LAYOUT")
Add them in the comma separated list GNUSTEP_EXTRA=... if required.

Unable to create time zone for name: 'Pacific/Auckland'
(source '(null)').

You can override the timezone name by setting the 'Local Time Zone'
NSUserDefault via the 'defaults' command line utility, a Preferences
application, or some other utility.
eg "defaults write NSGlobalDomain 'Local Time Zone' 'Africa/Nairobi'"
See '(null)'
for the standard timezones such as 'GB-Eire' or 'America/Chicago'.
Can't read data file: '/home/mcarans/GNUstep/Applications/Oolite/oolite.app/Resources//espeak-data/intonations'
Failed to load espeak-data

I tried to get rid of the time zone error by doing: defaults write NSGlobalDomain 'Local Time Zone' 'Pacific/Auckland' but that didn't seem to help.

There is no intonations directory in /home/mcarans/GNUstep/Applications/Oolite/oolite.app/Resources//espeak-data/.

I see:

1 > ls /home/mcarans/GNUstep/Applications/Oolite/oolite.app/Resources/espeak-data/
af_dict  cs_dict  de_dict  eo_dict  fr_dict   hi_dict  id_dict  jbo_dict  lv_dict    nci_dict  pap_dict   phontab  ro_dict  sq_dict  ta_dict  voices         zhy_dict
ca_dict  cy_dict  el_dict  es_dict  grc_dict  hu_dict  is_dict  ku_dict   mbrola_ph  nl_dict   phondata   pl_dict  ru_dict  sv_dict  tr_dict  voices-unused
config   da_dict  en_dict  fi_dict  hbs_dict  hy_dict  it_dict  la_dict   mk_dict    no_dict   phonindex  pt_dict  sk_dict  sw_dict  vi_dict  zh_dict

(Details moved from main Oolite repo)

[OoMrFlibble]

Some of the bundled libraries are tweaked old versions, so using system variants won't always work. IIRC libespeak is one of them.

In ~/GNUstep/Applications/Oolite/oolite-deps/lib there are two versions of libespeak. Namely libespeak.so.1 and libespeak.so.1.pulseaudio. You could try swapping those around.

I no audio from the live system of Kubuntu 25.04, but ran out of RAM on my first attempt, so am doing an install to dig deeper.

[mcarans]

Ah problem solved - I found this comment: OoliteProject#367 (comment)

"Are you checking the proper "Game Options" menu? ❔❕❔
💡Let me clarify that the "Spoken Messages" settings are always disabled in the "Game Options" menu presented in the rotating Cobra opening screen. To check/configure the "Spoken Messages" settings you either do it in-game when docked (you press "F2" and then select "Game Options") or while being in-flight (first press "p" to pause the game, then press "F2" and then select "Game Options").💡"

I was looking in the wrong Game Options menu. I reverted libespeak and in the in-game options (F2), I can select a voice.

The minimum I can change starting again to get working sound is using my system's libopenal.so.1 and using your package's libespeak.so.1.pulseaudio (renamed to libespeak.so.1).

[OoMrFlibble]

Thanks for the timesaving hints.

I'll look into what's needed to work around the libopenal issue.

Using a minimal install of kubuntu25.04 I found I had to install libjack1 as well. Perhaps I should auto-bundle that from the build system too.

My intent is to bundle enough libs to get this working for most current distros without having to install more stuff.

[mcarans]

I got rid of the time zone error by running sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo posix in the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory so that posix links back to its parent.

I looked for libjack1 in my system but it doesn't exist. The only similar packages are:

libjack-jackd2-0/plucky,now 1.9.22~dfsg-4 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libjack-jackd2-0/plucky 1.9.22~dfsg-4 i386
libjack-jackd2-dev/plucky 1.9.22~dfsg-4 amd64
libjack-jackd2-dev/plucky 1.9.22~dfsg-4 i386
libjack0/plucky 1:0.126.0-4 amd64
libjack0/plucky 1:0.126.0-4 i386

[OoMrFlibble]

Tweaked the Linux-deps to NOT include libopenal.so.1. At a guess, it needs /etc/openal.data, and I don't know a way to bodge around that. This means users will need to install libopenal1 if their platform doesn't include it by default.

Changed libespeak to be a symlink (at least in the source), pointing by default at the pulseaudio version. AFAICT most modern distros use pipewire now, with pulseaudio support. Had I not switched this default, then installing pipewire-alsa on the target machine would have sufficed.

Dragged in added textures from upstream oolite-binary-resources.

I'm not sure if the timezone thing has any effect on the game.

New release available with these changes 1.91.0.7710-250627-93a1322

[mcarans]

@OoMrFlibble I can confirm that your new version worked out of the box for me

[OoMrFlibble]

Thanks for the confirmation.

I'll see if there's any issue arising from the timezone thing when I next get a few moments.