What can we do with the Flight Attendant?

[Dr Vesuvius 22]

Hi all, brand shiny new MCE user here (and relatively new to the whole flight sim scene to boot). I was looking for a solution for voice ATC comms and after testing it alongside It's Your Plane and VoxATC I picked MCE. But of course I'm now finding it useful to have a virtual someone in the right seat handling all the fiddly stuff when flying the big iron. And the barely documented mechanic & purser options are really adding to the immersion in a fun way (though I did go through about three or four mechanics before learning to tell them to disconnect).

 

So I've worked out you can get the cabin crew to open and close the doors and warn them to prepare for departure/takeoff/landing. I've also discovered that you can call the flight attendant to the cockpit. But what can she do for us when we get her here?

 

(get your minds out of the gutter, you dirty old men!)

 

No seriously, are there any other undocumented options for the purser (or the mechanic, for that matter) that we can play around with?

 

Chris

AKA Dr Vesuvius

[FS++ 707]

Hi all, brand shiny new MCE user here (and relatively new to the whole flight sim scene to boot). I was looking for a solution for voice ATC comms and after testing it alongside It's Your Plane and VoxATC I picked MCE. But of course I'm now finding it useful to have a virtual someone in the right seat handling all the fiddly stuff when flying the big iron. And the barely documented mechanic & purser options are really adding to the immersion in a fun way (though I did go through about three or four mechanics before learning to tell them to disconnect).

 

So I've worked out you can get the cabin crew to open and close the doors and warn them to prepare for departure/takeoff/landing. I've also discovered that you can call the flight attendant to the cockpit. But what can she do for us when we get her here?

 

(get your minds out of the gutter, you dirty old men!)

 

No seriously, are there any other undocumented options for the purser (or the mechanic, for that matter) that we can play around with?

 

Chris

AKA Dr Vesuvius

 

Hi,

 

MCE supports both pre-recorded voices (for quality) and TTS voices (for flexibility).

 

When you select a pre-recorded FA voice (Stella, Yvonne, Jessica or Isabela) they can only speak whatever is in their stock vocabulary. That means it’s restricted to things like opening and closing cabin doors as well as making the cabin ready for takeoff or landing.

 

On the other hand, if you assign a TTS voice to a flight attendant, and there are many high quality ones out there, you will be able to script endless virtual conversations. Your imagination is the limit.

 

Use the VoxScript tool to create custom voice commands (to talk about anything you want), and have the flight attendant reply randomly from a pool of pre-written sentences you write yourself.

 

The same applies to mechanic or FO.

 

Can’t get any more powerful than that :P

[Sizel 4]

Once i get my head around the basic uses of MCE i hope to be able to use the VoxScript tool to do this. Sounds fun.

[alpha117 73]

Simon,

 

If you have any problems, just let us know. I've made some 'scripts' for the cabin crew and they are very easy to do. So have my cabincrew, make me coffee, dinner etc. Oh and even talk about Travis!

 

What I will do is finish the 'story line' off and will post them here on AVSIM.

[Dr Vesuvius 22]

MCE supports both pre-recorded voices (for quality) and TTS voices (for flexibility).

 

Thanks for the response, Gerald. I get that with the flexibility of a TTS voice the world is your mollusc-of-choice. Maybe sometime down the line when I've got all must-have-firsts I might pick up a couple of quality TTS voices. Having the attendant do the standard airline safety briefing might be a fun enhancement. But with quality TTS voices typically at £25-30 a pop, I can think of other more important things to spend the money on.

 

 

I was mainly just checking whether there were any other options already coded into the recorded voices apart from the ones I'd mentioned. Sounds like I've already found everything that's there.

 

Compliments on a great product. Looking forward to the updates you've already announced.

 

Chris

AKA Dr Vesuvius

[Sizel 4]

Simon,

 

If you have any problems, just let us know. I've made some 'scripts' for the cabin crew and they are very easy to do. So have my cabincrew, make me coffee, dinner etc. Oh and even talk about Travis!

 

What I will do is finish the 'story line' off and will post them here on AVSIM.

 

Sounds great Clive. Look forward to it. Thanks.

[Dr Vesuvius 22]

OK I've run into a bit of a snag. Despite what I posted here last week I decided to bite the bullet and bought a high quality SAPI voice from http://www.cereproc.com/ (which I highly recommend both for the quality of speech and for the regional UK accents) to give my Purser more flexibility in what she says.

 

But diving into the VoxScript tool, my dreams of having her read out a generic safety briefing were shattered by the 127 character limit on responses.

 

I'm looking into alternative options - maybe recording the speech to an mp3 file and playing it back with the freeware Flightdeck SFX panel, but is there any way of triggering a longer scripted speech natively within MCE?

[FS++ 707]

OK I've run into a bit of a snag. Despite what I posted here last week I decided to bite the bullet and bought a high quality SAPI voice from http://www.cereproc.com/ (which I highly recommend both for the quality of speech and for the regional UK accents) to give my Purser more flexibility in what she says.

 

But diving into the VoxScript tool, my dreams of having her read out a generic safety briefing were shattered by the 127 character limit on responses.

 

I'm looking into alternative options - maybe recording the speech to an mp3 file and playing it back with the freeware Flightdeck SFX panel, but is there any way of triggering a longer scripted speech natively within MCE?

 

The 127 characters limit is arbitrary and could be raised to 255.

 

Based on experience with TTS voices, they tend to come out better when sentences are relatively short. Therefore we’d rather encourage users to write short ones.

 

You can still achieve your aim though.

 

If you can manage to record your message to a wav file (mp3 not supported yet), you can just play it using Voxscript. Use the “add sound” button when making the script.

 

Cheers,

[Dr Vesuvius 22]

Ah I see, that's a perfectly justifiable limitation. Actually because of the way you have response text centred in the VoxScript Input dialogue box, it fills up after 70 characters. While you can add more, you can't see what you're typing. Would it be possible to change that to work more like a standard Windows text box, with the ability to scroll right and left to see all the contents?

 

Anyway the ability of VoxScript to play a sound directly is exactly what I need and actually works out better than reading the text directly. This way I can process the pre-recorded speech to sound like it's through an intercom and add an appropriate "bong" sound at the start. (If anyone else wants to try the same sort of thing I'd be happy to go into more detail on the process.) I'd actually got a version of this working already using a freeware SFX playing panel, but launching it natively from MCE/VoxScript would be a much cleaner solution.

 

One other question, I'm having problems getting the purser to respond to a custom VoxScript. When creating VoxScripts aimed at the mechanic or purser, do I have to include the target's title at the start of the command filename? And do I have to say it every time to get the script to trigger?

 

Let's say I want the purser to bring me a cup of coffee. All the pre-programmed commands I've found for the purser start with "Cabin Crew" or "Flight Attendants". So when I create the Voxscript filename, do I have to call it "cabin crew bring me a cup of coffee.vscr", with a clone of the same script called "flight attendants bring me a cup of coffee.vscr". Of is the target name already defined by the fact that I'm creating it in the "Purser related scripts" category?

 

And then, once it's set up, do I always need to use the target name to initiate the script? Or could I just say "Boy I wish someone would... bring me a cup of coffee" and have the purser respond moments later. Or if I've summoned the purser to the cockpit already with a "Cabin crew to the flight deck/cockpit" and she asks what I want, would just "Bring me a cup of coffee" work or would it need to be the full "Cabin Crew, bring me a cup of coffee."

 

(I'm thinking of the way Trav sometimes gets into a sort of contextual mode, with a question like "What's the frequency again?" and you can just answer with a shorthand "one one niner decimal five" instead of "Set com one to one one niner decimal five". I'm wondering if calling the purser to the cockpit sets her up to listen to your requests in the same way?)

 

Thanks for taking the time.

 

Dr V

[alpha117 73]

Guys,

 

These scripts might be of help. I did these sometime OK. :rolleyes:

 

Brings a bit more 'life' to the cabincrew

 

http://www.2shared.c...Gib/Purser.html

 

Unzip them into >Documents>Multi Crew Experience>MyVoiceScripts>Purser

 

Will only work with TTS voices

[Dr Vesuvius 22]

Thanks for sharing your scripts, Clive. Reverse engineering them was a great help and cleared up most of my queries.

 

I haven't used them as-is, because I'm damned if I want that bounder Trav getting more (implied) action with the cabin crew than I am :-D your scripts also showed a good way to script more complex actions by combining initial response phrases, scripted actions and post-action phrases, with varying delays to sort the timing out.

 

I've put together a set of scripts more focussed on procedures, so I can ask my cabin crew to "start gate departure process" and the purser will give a "I'll get it started" response, followed by the sound of the cockpit door closing, followed by the standard "welcome to the flight" speech, then she secures the doors and prepares the cabin for gate departure before reporting back. It has minimal effect on the sim, but it's all just buzzing around in the background, really helping the immersive feel.

 

For a very basic scripting tool it's pretty damned effective. Just imagine what we could do if the FS++ boys gave us some proper scripting constructs to play with, like conditionals and variables. The possibilities would be staggering. :blink:

 

As it is I'm 90% of the way to where I want to be with the purser interactions. Thanks for steering me in the right direction.

 

Chris

AKA Dr Vesuvius

[alpha117 73]

Chris

 

No problem. You're right about Travis, there is a 'back story' about him that I'm working on. I used these to learn about scripting and wanted more cabin crew interaction.

Glad they were of some use.

 

Would like to have 'a go' when you have finished them.

[Dr Vesuvius 22]

I'm in the process of re-recording the longer speeches using the default MS Anna voice so people can have the speeches match the TTS text. Should have it packaged up by the weekend.

 

Dr V

[alpha117 73]

great stuff there Chris.

 

Also once you are happy with it and if you decide to 'share' you great work with the MCE community, it would be great if you could upload it to the AVSIM library. If you're not sure how to do that, then just let either WR269 or myself know and we will help you out.

[Dr Vesuvius 22]

blerg. Got the bit between my teeth. Sleep is for the weak.

 

Dr V's Cabin Crew 0.5

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6908881/DrVCabinCrew0_5.zip

 

Designed for use with the default Windows 7 "Anna" voice. Included is a set of VoxScripts, a set of pre-recorded audio announcements using Anna's voice, text copies of all the announcement "scripts" and instructions to help you recreate and customise this package using the SAPI voice of your choice. Everything's covered in the instruction document.

 

This has been fairly hastily thrown together working far too late into the night, so it's entirely possible there may be some egregious errors in there and certainly a need for some polishing work. I have tested the VoxScripts and they seem to work fine. But for now let's just keep this as a nice quiet test run between you, me and the rest of the MCE support forum.

 

Note to FS++ chaps. I've been a terrible person and bundled in copies of your door open/close sounds, since it only occurred to me that they'd be needed in the user's VoxScript sounds folder late in the packaging process and including them does vastly simplify the setup rather than trying to explain how to copy them from their existing location. If you object to this, I'll modify the package accordingly as soon as I can, but I wanted to get this out sooner rather than later.

 

To be brutally honest, this version with the MS Anna voice sounds nowhere near as good as the original version I did using the Cereproc Jess voice, which is why I've included instructions for people to create their own versions using the SAPI voice of their choice.

 

You ought to be able to combine this with Alpha117's scripts published earlier in the thread to give a lot more options for interaction with your purser.

 

Feedback welcome. Need sleep now.

 

Dr V