Syplheed-Reborn/docs/re/structures/cutscene-message-table.md

The cutscene message table — speaker, portrait, timing and audio cue

✅ Settled 2026-08-26. The MSG_DEMO_* family is not called from any stage script; it is driven by its own IDXD tables in the language packs. Those tables carry, per line of cutscene dialogue: who says it, which portrait is shown, how long it stays on screen, and which audio cue plays.

This answers the question left open by isl-message-dialogue-link.md — what drives cutscene dialogue, given that built-in 64 never mentions it.

Where it lives

32 IDXD objects per language pack (dat/GP_MAIN_GAME_<lang>.pak). Each holds a Generic record with a Count, plus some number of Message_NNN records — 149 in total across the English pack, covering 138 distinct ids.

Record layout

A Message_NNN record has two named fields, ID and PageCount, and then 9 positional fields per page:

slot	content	example
0	speaker	CharacterNATALIE
1	portrait	FaceNATALIE_01
2	constant None at all 149 records	None
3	on-screen seconds, 1.00 – 5.00 (mean 2.48)	1.9
4	audio cue, or empty	DEMO_017
5–8	the four caption keys of that page	MSG_DEMO_600_000_00 … _03

The field count is exactly 9 · PageCount + 2, and that identity holds for every one of the 7 distinct PageCount values present (1→11, 2→20, 3→29, 4→38, 5→47, 6→56, 8→74). That is what pins the per-page grouping.

Evidence

• 1 252 of 1 252 caption-key slots equal <ID>_<page>_<line> exactly, with zero mismatches. The grouping is not a guess about which slot is which.
• 78 records span more than one page — which independently equals the 78 multi-page MSG_DEMO ids counted from the caption side, by a different method. Two measurements, same number.
• In 68 of those 78 the speaker changes between pages, confirming from the data that successive pages are successive utterances rather than one long speech.
• The id sets close exactly: 138 ids in the caption table, 138 in the message table, none on either side without the other.
• 28 distinct speakers, 98 distinct portraits.

The audio cue (slot 4)

296 of 313 pages carry a cue, and there are 296 distinct values — one per page, never reused. It joins to the SOUNDS table described in sound-cue-table.md:

DEMO_017  ->  sound id 8017

The numbering rule is DEMO_nnn → 8000 + nnn, which holds for 286 of 286 plain-numeric cues. The 9 remaining cues carry a letter suffix (DEMO_067A, DEMO_190A–C, DEMO_216A–C, DEMO_278A–B) and are assigned 8400–8408 in order. There is no unexplained residue.

Within a message, 77 of the 78 multi-page records number their cues consecutively; one does not.

A guess I had and dropped: slot 4 looked at first like a movie reference, since the values resemble the DEMO_nnn naming of a clip. It is not — there are 97 .wmv files on the disc and their names look nothing like this (ADV.wmv, RT01A.wmv), and the values are unique per page, which no movie reference would be.

What this does not settle

• MSG_DEMO_500 — one page, KATANA, 2 s, no text and no cue. A placeholder, apparently.

• Slot 2 is None at all 149 records, so what it would hold otherwise is unknown — a constant with no observed variation carries no information.

• Nothing here was run. This is a static read of the tables; the playback order, and whether slot 3 is really the on-screen duration rather than an audio length or a delay, has not been checked against the running game.

Artifact

../data/cutscene-message-table.txt — all 313 pages with speaker, portrait, seconds, cue and text. Regenerate with tools/re-capture/sound_cues.py demo.

✅ The cue-less pages are the resupply lines — and they corroborate the movie work

Settled 2026-08-26. 16 of the 17 pages with an empty slot 4 belong to five ids, and those five are exactly the resupply lines already documented from the movie side in voice-bank-leading-region.md. The caption text matches word for word:

id	speaker	line	bank
MSG_DEMO_600	NATALIE	"Rhino 3 has landed. Commencing resupply."	VOICE_D_450
MSG_DEMO_601	NATALIE	"Rhino Leader has landed. Commencing resupply."	VOICE_D_451
MSG_DEMO_602	NATALIE	"Resupply complete. You are cleared for take-off!"	VOICE_D_452
MSG_DEMO_603	TCAFSUPPLY	"All right, beginning resupply."	VOICE_D_453
MSG_DEMO_604	TCAFSUPPLY	"Resupply complete. Switching to take-off sequence."	VOICE_D_454

This also explains the duplicate records. Each of these ids appears once per stage that uses it, and the repeat counts equal the movie-slot counts recorded independently for the corresponding banks — 5 of 5:

DEMO_600 x3   DEMO_601 x3   DEMO_602 x4   DEMO_603 x4   DEMO_604 x2
D_450    x3   D_451    x3   D_452    x4   D_453    x4   D_454    x2

Two facts fall out:

• the 11 extra records over 138 ids are these repeats, not an anomaly; and
• slot 4 is empty on purpose — a resupply line's audio is bound through the movie path (VOICE_D_45x), not through the DEMO_nnn cue path, so there is no cue to name.

The agreement is worth something beyond closing two items: the cutscene message table and the movie subtitle chain were decoded separately, from different containers, and they land on the same five lines with the same multiplicities.