[Flightgear-devel] ATIS audio +- default.vce

[John D. <sf...@av...>]

It appears that interest is coming from multiple directions,
interest in upgrading the audio overall, plus particular
interest in having usable ATIS audio.  This is not unrelated
to the effort to handle non-ISA-standard-day weather conditions,
since if you're going to have a non-standard day, you need to
obtain the altimeter setting via ATIS or some such.

When I tried repairing ATC/atis.cxx I got quite far along.  I
was (finally) able to generate a mostly-correct /text/ for an
ATIS message.  Then I discovered that some important words were
not available in the voice files, default.vce and default.wav.
One can almost make a report using only missing words:

  Airport automated observation: sky condition clear, no
  clouds below thin broken ceiling.  Dewpoint ....

... and these are not even the only important words that are
missing.

Similarly, of the thousands of airports known to FG, fewer than
40 have their names in default.vce.

The name "default" suggests there might be other .vce files,
although default.vce is the only one in cvs.

So, what's the situation?  Are there more-complete implementations
available somewhere?

Using the "festival" audio server seems to be not entirely
satisfactory, for several reasons, including:
  -- installing festival is nontrivial exercise on some platforms.
  -- even on Linux the cvs FG is unable to talk to the festival
   server in a useful way, in situations where other apps including
   telnet can talk to it just fine.

Any other suggestions?