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343 English headerless banks carry a valid seek chunk, which would lift dialogue duration coverage from 62% to ~75%, with a median 3.25 s that looks exactly like in-mission voice. It is wrong. A seek sits immediately after its OWN data, so the implied wave start is seek_pos - packets*2048 -- and for 277 of the 343 that start lies BEFORE the entry begins, meaning the seek describes the previous bank's wave. Applying it would attach a neighbour's duration to 81% of the recovered rows. The 66 that start inside the entry are not proven to be that entry's wave either; 'starts inside' is necessary, not sufficient. Recorded as refused rather than applied with a caveat, because a plausible median is exactly what has misled this work twice today. Recovering these needs the bank-to-wave assignment settled first.
214 lines
9.9 KiB
Markdown
214 lines
9.9 KiB
Markdown
# ISL `request_script_message` → caption text
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**✅ Settled 2026-08-26.** Every mission-script message call resolves to the
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dialogue line it plays. The 28 stage scripts are readable as dialogue.
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## The link
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Built-in **64** (`request_script_message`) takes one operand in slot 0: a
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two-word symbol reference into **symbol table 1**. The symbol's name is a
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message id such as `MSG_VOICE_D_257`. The text lives in the language pack's
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IXUD blocks (`dat/GP_MAIN_GAME_<lang>.pak`) as a **named field** whose key is
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`<id>_<page>_<line>`, read via the record/field table documented in
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[idxd-container.md](idxd-container.md).
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MSG_VOICE_D_257 → field key `MSG_VOICE_D_257_000_00` → "Katana! Damn it!"
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## Evidence
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Measured over all 28 `StageNN.ssb`:
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| | |
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|---|---|
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| built-in 64 call sites | **2683** |
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| slot 0 not staged | 0 |
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| operand not in symbol table 1 | 0 |
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| operand symbol type | **6** at all 2683 sites |
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| distinct message names | 1338 |
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| names with caption text at `_000_00` | **2683 / 2683 (100 %)** |
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There is no residue: no call site takes a different operand shape, no name is
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of a type other than 6, and no name is missing from the caption table. That
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totality is the result — a partial rate would have meant the operand encoding
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was only sometimes what I thought it was.
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Name families and their share of call sites:
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MSG_VOICE 2407 MSG_ADAN 118 MSG_ACRO 82
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MSG_ADPL 38 MSG_TCAF 35 MSG_RHIN 3
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`MSG_VOICE_*` is crew/wingman dialogue; the four-letter families are
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ship-side announcements (`ACRO` = ACROPOLIS, `ADAN`/`ADPL` = ADAN,
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`TCAF`, `RHIN` = Rhino flight).
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## Page and line structure — and a correction to this page's first tool
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**✅ Measured 2026-08-26**, on the English pack. A caption id is keyed
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`<id>_<page>_<line>`:
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* a **page** is one subtitle box with **four line slots** (4 506 pages allocate
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4, 263 allocate 3 — no other width occurs). ⚠️ That counts *slots*, not text;
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an English page carries **1 to 4** actual lines — see the correction below;
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* successive **pages are successive utterances**, and may be different
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speakers. A multi-page id is therefore a whole exchange, not one long line:
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MSG_DEMO_009 page 0 No way! There's more of them?
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page 1 Rhino Leader to ACROPOLIS! There's a whole fleet of them now!
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page 2 What? Is there any way you can get out of there?
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page 3 If we get rid of those fighters, we can cut our way out of here.
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Of 4 091 distinct ids, **452 span more than one page** (374 `MSG_VOICE`,
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78 `MSG_DEMO`), up to 8 pages.
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**This refuted the first version of `isl_dialogue.py`**, committed earlier the
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same day, which read only page `000`. **356 of the 1338 script message names
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are multi-page**, so a quarter of the dialogue it printed was silently
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truncated to its opening utterance. The tool now walks pages until one is
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empty. The 2683/2683 resolution figure above is unaffected — it counted ids
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that *have* text, and every id does have a page `000` — but the *rendered*
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text was incomplete, and the caveat this page originally carried ("whether any
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id uses a page other than `000` is unmeasured") understated it as a question
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when it was already a defect.
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## Why this was not obvious earlier
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The caption table only became readable on 2026-08-25, when `build_caption_text`
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was switched from scraping adjacent string-pool tokens to reading the IXUD
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**field** table — which took the extractable line count from 537 to 8800
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(8800 of 8800 distinct keys). Before that the great majority of these 1338
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names had no text to resolve *to*, and the 100 % figure was unreachable.
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## What this does not settle
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* **Which recording plays.** The caption is the *text*; the voice bank binding
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is a separate and still-unresolved question — see
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[voice-bank-leading-region.md](voice-bank-leading-region.md) and the
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known case of a generic line playing against a specific subtitle.
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* **Which page a `MSG_DEMO_*` id belongs to.** The `DEMO` family is not called
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from the stage scripts at all — 78 of its ids are multi-page, so something
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else drives cutscene dialogue. That driver is unidentified.
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* ~~**The other five languages.** Only the English pack was swept.~~ ✅ Swept
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2026-08-26 — see below.
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* **Ordering.** The tool prints call sites in file order, which is *script*
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order, not necessarily *play* order — phases and branches are not resolved.
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## Tool
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tools/re-capture/isl_dialogue.py <StageNN.ssb> [GP_MAIN_GAME_E.pak]
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Sample output committed at [../data/isl-stage02-dialogue.txt](../data/isl-stage02-dialogue.txt)
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(Stage 02, 213 message calls, 213 with text).
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## ✅ All six language packs swept (2026-08-26)
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| pack | distinct `MSG_*` keys | with non-empty text | ids | pages |
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|---|---|---|---|---|
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| **E** English | 18 813 | **8 800** | 4 091 | 4 758 |
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| **D** German | 18 813 | — | 4 091 | — |
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| **F** French | 18 813 | — | 4 091 | — |
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| **I** Italian | 18 813 | — | 4 091 | — |
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| **S** Spanish | 18 813 | — | 4 091 | — |
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| **J** Japanese | 14 295 | 7 266 | 4 087 | 4 765 |
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The five European packs have **byte-for-byte identical key sets** — zero keys
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missing, zero extra, in any direction. Only Japanese differs, and the difference
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is not missing content:
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* its **id** set matches to within 5 missing and 1 extra of 4 091;
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* its **page** count is 4 765 against English's 4 758 — the same;
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* its **lines per page** are fewer: mean **1.52** vs **1.85**, and it never uses
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a 4-line page where English has 113.
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So Japanese carries the same dialogue and simply **wraps into fewer lines**,
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which is what a language without inter-word spaces does in a fixed-width box.
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The 4 521 "missing" keys are line slots that were never needed. ❌ A reading of
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"Japanese is missing 4 521 captions" would be wrong.
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### ⚠️ Correcting my own wording elsewhere
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**This page**, further up, said a page holds "3 or 4 wrapped lines (4 506 of 4,
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263 of 3 — no other width occurs)" — I first misattributed that sentence to
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[cutscene-message-table.md](cutscene-message-table.md) while correcting it,
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which is its own small carelessness. It measured **key slots**, which the
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records allocate four at a time. Counting lines that actually carry text, an
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English page holds **1 to 4**:
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1 line: 1 574 2 lines: 2 439 3 lines: 632 4 lines: 113
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Both numbers are true of different things, but "holds 3 or 4 wrapped lines"
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reads as a statement about the text and is wrong as such. A page has up to four
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slots and usually fills one or two.
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This also reconciles the **8 800** figure quoted throughout the corpus: it is
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distinct English keys *with non-empty text*, out of 18 813 keys in total. The
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larger number is not a contradiction — most slots are empty.
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## ✅ Dialogue with audio durations, all 28 stages
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**2026-08-26.** [`../data/stage-dialogue-with-durations.txt`](../data/stage-dialogue-with-durations.txt)
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joins three separately decoded systems — the ISL script's built-in 64 call
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sites, the caption table, and the sound-bank `seek` tables:
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offset | message id | eng s | jpn s | caption
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Duration is the bank's last cumulative sample over its sample rate. **Nothing is
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decoded**; every number is read.
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Coverage over the 2 683 call sites: **1 663 (62.0 %) have an English duration**
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and **2 198 (81.9 %) a Japanese one**. The gap is the headerless banks, which
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carry no `seek` table — and which language lacks one differs per line, so the
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two columns are complementary rather than nested.
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**Two columns, deliberately.** `FILES` names the `jpn\` banks and the game
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substitutes the language directory, so a line's English and Japanese recordings
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are different files of different lengths. The caption text is English, so `eng`
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is the column that matches it. Reporting a single duration here would have
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silently attached Japanese timings to English text — the first version of this
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artifact did exactly that, which is why it was regenerated.
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The difference is not academic:
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MSG_VOICE_A_065 "They got Leader!" eng 1.78 s jpn 2.46 s
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MSG_VOICE_D_257 "Katana! Damn it!" eng - jpn 2.59 s
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MSG_VOICE_D_342 "Katana, Ellen, good work." eng 4.18 s jpn -
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❔ Not settled: the 38 % of call sites with no English duration. They are
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headerless banks. **A `seek`-based recovery was tried and does not work** — see
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below.
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### ❌ Recovering headerless durations from the `seek` chunk — tried, refused
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A headerless bank has no `RIFF`, so no `data` size to read. But a `seek` chunk
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describes the wave *ending* at its own position, so an entry carrying one looks
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like it should yield a length for free. Across the bank set:
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| | eng | jpn |
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|---|---|---|
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| has a `RIFF` (already covered) | 3 686 | 4 301 |
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| headerless **with** a valid `seek` | **343** | 419 |
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| headerless, no `seek` | 353 | 380 |
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| no entry for that language | 753 | 35 |
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343 recoverable English durations would lift coverage from 62 % to about 75 %,
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and the numbers look right — median **3.25 s**, p90 5.18 s, which is exactly the
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shape of in-mission voice.
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**It is still wrong.** A `seek` sits immediately after *its own* data, so the
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implied wave start is `seek_pos − packets × 2048`. Checking that:
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wave starts BEFORE the entry begins : 277 of 343
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wave starts inside the entry : 66 of 343
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**For 277 of the 343, the `seek` describes the previous bank's wave, not this
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entry's.** That is the same pairing rule that made my earlier `seek` readings
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fail; taking the length anyway would attach a neighbour's duration to 81 % of the
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recovered rows. Even the 66 that start inside the entry are not *proven* to be
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that entry's own wave — "starts inside" is necessary, not sufficient.
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The median 3.25 s is precisely the kind of plausible-looking figure that has
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already misled this work twice today, so the approach is recorded as **refused**
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rather than applied with a caveat. Recovering these lengths needs the bank→wave
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assignment settled first — the open question `auto/slb-loader` records as *"which
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bank in a window belongs to the entry's name"*.
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