#150463 - Jesse - Mon Feb 04, 2008 11:01 pm
Hyena is an AudioGame player for multiple platforms.
Inspired by the AudioBooks, Hyena allows game-books to be played with only sound and just one button. This makes it possible to play games while your body is occupied with other things, like driving or out running (or while sitting in class :)).
Hyena v1.00 is bundled with:
Lone Wolf - Flight From The Dark, by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk - http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/FlightFromTheDark
and with speech synthisis generated by NeoSpeech - http://www.neospeech.com/
Homepage & downloads at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/hyena
Enjoy!
Last edited by Jesse on Wed Mar 05, 2008 5:30 pm; edited 3 times in total
#150464 - Jesse - Mon Feb 04, 2008 11:08 pm
And do try to play the game with the lid closed. It's probably the first DS game where you fully can do that. :) (as long as you have headphones).
I also want to thank the people making it possible to do homebrew like this for the DS; they receive far too little credit. Hyena uses libnds, libfat, efs_lib and as_lib, so a huge thanks goes out to joat, dovoto, noda, chishm and everyone else who has contributed to these libraries. Also, extra special thanks the people behind this forum that provides so much information and support and last but not least to wintermute for the whole devkitPro setup that makes things so much easier: I owe you all.
Thanks.
(and I probably got some names wrong, so feel free to correct me so I can fix it! :)
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#150531 - Josiah - Wed Feb 06, 2008 9:49 am
I downloaded hyena, patched it and installed it on my R4, but all that happens is that I get a black top screen and a white bottom screen. Forgive me for being dense, but what does this program do? And how do I make it do it?
Added later: I discovered my problem. I needed to install the AudioGames folder along with the Hyena.nds. Now I get the Lone Wolf AudioGame. I'll try it out now. Thanks!
#150535 - Jesse - Wed Feb 06, 2008 11:51 am
Good point. I should at least pop up some informative error message if the files are missing. Thanks.
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#150550 - Darkflame - Wed Feb 06, 2008 6:56 pm
Interesting.
I often thought games played purely with audio would work well on stuff like Ipods.
A DS version where you can play a game with the lid closed is a cool concept.
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#150569 - jetboy - Thu Feb 07, 2008 9:30 am
So you finally released this one. Congratulations! Lets see how big the feedback will be.
btw. I hope that after you get done with some after release fixes, colors will get more loving then :)
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#150845 - splotch - Wed Feb 13, 2008 12:45 pm
I tried it on my M3 DS Real but the screen got black, no matter where i positioned the AudioGames folder.
#150927 - Jesse - Fri Feb 15, 2008 9:54 am
That's weird. I'll release an update soon. Hopefully I can make that working for you.
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#150931 - masscat - Fri Feb 15, 2008 11:05 am
Had a very quick play with this. Here are a couple of initial thoughts:
The volume is quite low.
I get some corruption of the hyena logo graphics at the start. Only a few pixels and it varies between runs.
Could you make it so that you can scroll the text upwards with the stylus?
Something like tapping the top part of the screen scrolls up and tapping the bottom scrolls down. And/or drag (up and down) the text with the stylus. And/or place the stylus on the screen than then scroll up (or down) by moving the stylus up from this starting position, the further from the starting position the faster the scroll.
I haven't played one of these books for many years.
#151386 - selbaer - Sun Feb 24, 2008 11:04 pm
| Quote: |
| I tried it on my M3 DS Real but the screen got black, no matter where i positioned the AudioGames folder. |
Select starting from Slot2, then it will work on the Real.
#151442 - splotch - Tue Feb 26, 2008 1:25 pm
| selbaer wrote: |
| Select starting from Slot2, then it will work on the Real. |
Not for me. I get the "initializing could last for a minute" screen, then a black top and a white bottom screen.
#151449 - selbaer - Tue Feb 26, 2008 6:24 pm
| Quote: |
| Not for me. I get the "initializing could last for a minute" screen, then a black top and a white bottom screen. |
strange, for me it works.
I got the Real with FW 2.9 and the Ram-Extension. It really takes some time to start, but i don't rember this message....checked it, no message appears.
#151500 - splotch - Thu Feb 28, 2008 1:00 am
I?ve update from v2.8 to v3.0 today - still no difference.
#151506 - JLsoft - Thu Feb 28, 2008 4:00 am
splotch, this is untested by me, but use DSOrganize 3.2 (with the booting method set to 'Chishm' in the Configuration) and launch Hyena from its file browser...see if that helps at all.
#151524 - Jesse - Thu Feb 28, 2008 10:49 am
| selbaer wrote: |
| I got the Real with FW 2.9 and the Ram-Extension. It really takes some time to start, but i don't rember this message....checked it, no message appears. |
That message only appears the first time the app is run (or if you move the .nds file to another location). But it seems like the problem is later on, since that screen dissapears. I would guess that it fails to load the external data files but since I've omitted to have a decent error message, we can't be sure.
splotch, make sure the files on the in the archive are on the memory card in the same structure (i.e. in the AudioGames folder that should lie next to the Hyena.nds). If that doesn't work, I hope to release a small update soon that should be a bit more talkative if something is wrong.
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#151820 - Jesse - Wed Mar 05, 2008 3:49 pm
New version released:
* Scans the AudioGames/ directory for game-books, and gives a choice on which to load.
* Detailed the .gamebook file specifications at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hyena_AudioGame_specifications
* Integrated information on how to play the games.
* Better error messages if files are missing.
* Removed crashes due to memory fragmentation.
* Removed .xml format in favor for plain-text.
Flight From The Dark fixes:
* Fixed numerous game-logic flaws and lockups
* Echoes your Combat Skill whenever it has changed
* Echoes your amount of Gold whenever it has changed
I'm seem to have more problems where the sound-engine shuts down when you boot the game. But since it's not that often and it doesn't affect the game-experience I haven't bothered to track it down. If you have no audio when you start the game, just reboot.
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#151885 - splotch - Thu Mar 06, 2008 11:17 am
It now works with with the new version! This is a really cute project.
The quality of automatic reading is very impressive!
#151901 - raynerape - Thu Mar 06, 2008 2:33 pm
I am impressed as well.
I want to know - is the text-to-speech conversion integrated in the game itself and will Hyena speak other English language text provided as TXT gamebook, or is reading only available for the Lone Wolf game thanks to the 40 mb file? The 40mb file contains what - WAVs of spoken text or real text-to-speech engine? Can it be reused for other games?
#151926 - Jesse - Thu Mar 06, 2008 8:52 pm
I got surprised as well when I heard the this speech synthesis the first time. It's generated as mp3 offline on my PC and as you guessed, stored in the big data file. Having this kind of quality speech synthesis would probably not be possible on a DS since the speech engine is a couple of 100 MB and I also doubt that the DS would have the processing power needed. Also, it's worth noting that this particular voice is a couple of years old, and I've actually heard a few newer voices that sounds even better. I haven't been able to get hold of one of those for use with SAPI5.1 and a license that makes it usable. Working on it though. :)
But as to if it can be reused: The PC version of Hyena generates all this audio from the game-book itself, so as long as there is a game-book in Hyena format, the voice comes basically for free. I would prefer someone recoding the voice though. :)
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#151930 - Michoko - Thu Mar 06, 2008 9:31 pm
Very nice project and very original!
It must have required a lot of work, so congratulations! :)
#151935 - raynerape - Thu Mar 06, 2008 9:49 pm
| Jesse wrote: |
| I got surprised as well when I heard the this speech synthesis the first time. It's generated as mp3 offline on my PC and as you guessed, stored in the big data file. Having this kind of quality speech synthesis would probably not be possible on a DS since the speech engine is a couple of 100 MB and I also doubt that the DS would have the processing power needed. |
But GamePark Pandora would. ;)
#151942 - simonjhall - Thu Mar 06, 2008 11:19 pm
Just had a go - very slick looking and nice idea in general! Good text reading, too...
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#152128 - Jesse - Mon Mar 10, 2008 2:06 pm
Hey. That's a cool (and weird) device. I should get one of those.
(but I still doubt would cope with the requirements of the most advanced speech synthesizers).
(and thanks everyone for all the complements!)
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#152132 - raynerape - Mon Mar 10, 2008 2:31 pm
| Jesse wrote: |
| Hey. That's a cool (and weird) device. I should get one of those. |
NDS Form Factor and Touchscreen + PSP x3 Power + ASUS EeePC screen and QWERTY + Linux and OS-happy Devs = GamePark Pandora.
I can't wait for them to release the first batch in couple months.
#152133 - nczempin - Mon Mar 10, 2008 2:34 pm
Ah, that's a no-go for me then. We use QWERTZ.
SCNR ;-)