Hi folks,
I don't often post here, so for those who don't know me, my name is Kieren Smith, and I'm the Producer at Astraware, in charge of working with the developers to make sure games like Broken Sword come out looking, playing and sounding as fantastic as possible.
Since this was a particularly interesting discussion, I thought I'd drop by and reply to some of the questions which have come up!
I guess the big question is the voice quality - the sample rate used by the game for the voices is indeed 11KHz, which (after checking with the developers) was the same as that used by the original voice samples. Very early on in the project, I spent some time comparing the playback from the PC version, the ScummVM version on Pocket PC and the early alphas of our own Pocket PC version, the speech is important to the game and you don't want something critical to come out sounding like George has a mouthful of water. To be completely honest, I actually couldn't hear a noticeable difference between the ScummVM and our own version in terms of the speech quality - the limiting factor here was the quality of the sound output on the device itself, and even though I consider the quality on my Exec to be pretty awesome, I couldn't detect a difference myself. Trying headphones instead, all three came out pretty much the same again (PC speakers had seemed better, but I wonder if that's because the larger speakers meant they produced a better quality sound overall, in dependant of the source)
(as a side note, when looking at the ScummVM version, I'm pretty sure it was possible to re-encode the speech files from the CD at 44KHz, even though the original data isn't sampled at anywhere near that rate! :P)
It is possible that the strong compression of the speech produced some changes to the final sound quality which I couldn't detect, and if that's the case and people do feel it's serious, I'll certainly take a closer look at it to see if there's anything which can be done in a future version. Reducing the compression on the speech will have a noticeable impact on size (already the largest overall component of the game), and we wanted to try and get the final size of the game to under 128Mb (and I'm very happy that we succeeded!)
On the topic of the music quality, unfortunately the original recordings weren't available, so we used the best quality source we could!
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Astraware should consider adding a, say, configurable "Escape" button to greatly speed up gameplay by just letting the player skip these animations.
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Consider it on my "to consider" list for future updates :) I rather liked the in-game animations, and apart from wanting to be able to skip them when testing a section for the umpteenth time, I have to admit that I'm not sure the majority of users would want it. However, it's not a bad idea, and since you can skip cutscenes it might make sense to add a similar mechanism for in-game animations
if it's possible to do so (cutscenes and animations are two very different types within the game engine, so it may not be as easy to jump ahead past an animation as it sounds!)
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Note that the game stores its savegames, by default, in the main memory, in \My Documents\My Saved Games. While saved games don’t take up much disk space, you may still want to relocate them to a storage card to, for example, minimize writing operations on the main storage (to, say, avoid filesys.exe compactions on non-native WM5 Pocket PC’s - hear me, Dell Axim x50(v) or HP iPAQ hx users that upgraded to WM5?) To do this, just relocate the directory to a card and accordingly modify HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Apps\ Astraware Broken Sword\ SaveDir in the Registry.
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There's a lengthy background explanation to why we default to internal memory for storing savegame and other preference files, but I've come across this problem myself (interestingly though, the native WM5 devices don't seem to suffer from it). The tweak you suggested (changing the location "SaveDir" points to) does seem to help, and is something which can be generally applied to those of our games which behave like this. I've resisted posting the tip publicly because while many users of this forum are strongly technically minded, I am
always worried about less experienced users causing damage to their registry through inexperience, so I would ask that anyone considering editing their registry should first be absolutely certain of what they are doing!
Warmest regards,
Kieren
Producer, Astraware
kieren@astraware.com