espeak and LAC on Raspberry Pi

[bbosen]

The free, well-known "espeak" text-to-speech application is a helpful and important, optional companion to Linux Air Combat. LAC will assume it is present and will use it to generate audio prompts that pilots will find very helpful during missions.

On any system (including Raspbian) if you have NOT installed espeak, you should edit LAC's "LacConfig.txt" configuration file (look for it at /home/pi/.LAC/LacConfig.txt) so that LAC will use its best efforts to attempt generation of those audio prompts by other means. That option is not as good as espeak because it doesn't know how to generate some of the audio messages in the newest missions, but without espeak it's better than nothing. When editing LacConfig.txt, look for the "NetworkMode" attribute and carefully read the associated, instructive text. As you can see there, increasing the value of "NetworkMode" by 16 tells LAC to avoid use of espeak (probably because you haven't installed it). Since the most popular value used for "NetworkMode" is "3", you would change it to "19" to supress use of espeak in most cases.

Unfortunately, the version of espeak offered in Raspbian's standard respositories doesn't seem to work at the time of this writing in August of 2020. That's the bad news. The GOOD news is that they offer a version named "espeak-ng" that DOES work. Unfortunately, LAC will try to invoke it as "espeak", which does NOT work. Fortunately, a very easy work-around has been successful during our testing. Just make an extra copy of "espeak-ng" named "espeak".

After installing espeak-ng from Raspbian's standard repository according to well-established norms, you will find a copy of it at /usr/bin/espeak-ng. From a terminal window, enter that folder with the "cd" command like this:

cd /usr/bin

Then make an extra copy of "espeak-ng" with this command:

sudo cp espeak-ng espeak

That's it! The next time you use LAC, you'll hear additional audio prompts that will help you locate friends, opponents, and airfields. It will also offer background information about mission status from time to time.

; )

[bbosen]

Update: Raspbian's repository began offering "espeak" a couple of years ago, so it's no longer necessary for LAC to access it through a renamed copy of "espeak-ng".

[bbosen]

We recommend installing the free, well-known "KMix" audio mixer on your Raspberry Pi system, especially if you're using espeak, because KMix can be used to solve a problem with espeak's acoustic volume as described by THIS posting in our "espeak" forum:

https://sourceforge.net/p/linuxaircombat/discussion/mumbleandespeak/thread/2292f36f03/