Syplheed-Reborn/docs/re/structures/isl-message-dialogue-link.md

ISL request_script_message → caption text

✅ Settled 2026-08-26. Every mission-script message call resolves to the dialogue line it plays. The 28 stage scripts are readable as dialogue.

The link

Built-in 64 (request_script_message) takes one operand in slot 0: a two-word symbol reference into symbol table 1. The symbol's name is a message id such as MSG_VOICE_D_257. The text lives in the language pack's IXUD blocks (dat/GP_MAIN_GAME_<lang>.pak) as a named field whose key is <id>_<page>_<line>, read via the record/field table documented in idxd-container.md.

MSG_VOICE_D_257  →  field key `MSG_VOICE_D_257_000_00`  →  "Katana! Damn it!"

Evidence

Measured over all 28 StageNN.ssb:

built-in 64 call sites	2683
slot 0 not staged	0
operand not in symbol table 1	0
operand symbol type	6 at all 2683 sites
distinct message names	1338
names with caption text at _000_00	2683 / 2683 (100 %)

There is no residue: no call site takes a different operand shape, no name is of a type other than 6, and no name is missing from the caption table. That totality is the result — a partial rate would have meant the operand encoding was only sometimes what I thought it was.

Name families and their share of call sites:

MSG_VOICE  2407    MSG_ADAN  118    MSG_ACRO   82
MSG_ADPL     38    MSG_TCAF   35    MSG_RHIN    3

MSG_VOICE_* is crew/wingman dialogue; the four-letter families are ship-side announcements (ACRO = ACROPOLIS, ADAN/ADPL = ADAN, TCAF, RHIN = Rhino flight).

Page and line structure — and a correction to this page's first tool

✅ Measured 2026-08-26, on the English pack. A caption id is keyed <id>_<page>_<line>:

• a page is one subtitle box with four line slots (4 506 pages allocate 4, 263 allocate 3 — no other width occurs). ⚠️ That counts slots, not text; an English page carries 1 to 4 actual lines — see the correction below;

• successive pages are successive utterances, and may be different speakers. A multi-page id is therefore a whole exchange, not one long line:

  MSG_DEMO_009  page 0  No way! There's more of them?
                page 1  Rhino Leader to ACROPOLIS! There's a whole fleet of them now!
                page 2  What? Is there any way you can get out of there?
                page 3  If we get rid of those fighters, we can cut our way out of here.
  

Of 4 091 distinct ids, 452 span more than one page (374 MSG_VOICE, 78 MSG_DEMO), up to 8 pages.

This refuted the first version of isl_dialogue.py, committed earlier the same day, which read only page 000. 356 of the 1338 script message names are multi-page, so a quarter of the dialogue it printed was silently truncated to its opening utterance. The tool now walks pages until one is empty. The 2683/2683 resolution figure above is unaffected — it counted ids that have text, and every id does have a page 000 — but the rendered text was incomplete, and the caveat this page originally carried ("whether any id uses a page other than 000 is unmeasured") understated it as a question when it was already a defect.

Why this was not obvious earlier

The caption table only became readable on 2026-08-25, when build_caption_text was switched from scraping adjacent string-pool tokens to reading the IXUD field table — which took the extractable line count from 537 to 8800 (8800 of 8800 distinct keys). Before that the great majority of these 1338 names had no text to resolve to, and the 100 % figure was unreachable.

What this does not settle

• Which recording plays. The caption is the text; the voice bank binding is a separate and still-unresolved question — see voice-bank-leading-region.md and the known case of a generic line playing against a specific subtitle.
• Which page a MSG_DEMO_* id belongs to. The DEMO family is not called from the stage scripts at all — 78 of its ids are multi-page, so something else drives cutscene dialogue. That driver is unidentified.
• The other five languages. Only the English pack was swept. ✅ Swept 2026-08-26 — see below.
• Ordering. The tool prints call sites in file order, which is script order, not necessarily play order — phases and branches are not resolved.

Tool

tools/re-capture/isl_dialogue.py <StageNN.ssb> [GP_MAIN_GAME_E.pak]

Sample output committed at ../data/isl-stage02-dialogue.txt (Stage 02, 213 message calls, 213 with text).

✅ All six language packs swept (2026-08-26)

pack	distinct MSG_* keys	with non-empty text	ids	pages
E English	18 813	8 800	4 091	4 758
D German	18 813	—	4 091	—
F French	18 813	—	4 091	—
I Italian	18 813	—	4 091	—
S Spanish	18 813	—	4 091	—
J Japanese	14 295	7 266	4 087	4 765

The five European packs have byte-for-byte identical key sets — zero keys missing, zero extra, in any direction. Only Japanese differs, and the difference is not missing content:

• its id set matches to within 5 missing and 1 extra of 4 091;
• its page count is 4 765 against English's 4 758 — the same;
• its lines per page are fewer: mean 1.52 vs 1.85, and it never uses a 4-line page where English has 113.

So Japanese carries the same dialogue and simply wraps into fewer lines, which is what a language without inter-word spaces does in a fixed-width box. The 4 521 "missing" keys are line slots that were never needed. ❌ A reading of "Japanese is missing 4 521 captions" would be wrong.

⚠️ Correcting my own wording elsewhere

This page, further up, said a page holds "3 or 4 wrapped lines (4 506 of 4, 263 of 3 — no other width occurs)" — I first misattributed that sentence to cutscene-message-table.md while correcting it, which is its own small carelessness. It measured key slots, which the records allocate four at a time. Counting lines that actually carry text, an English page holds 1 to 4:

1 line: 1 574   2 lines: 2 439   3 lines: 632   4 lines: 113

Both numbers are true of different things, but "holds 3 or 4 wrapped lines" reads as a statement about the text and is wrong as such. A page has up to four slots and usually fills one or two.

This also reconciles the 8 800 figure quoted throughout the corpus: it is distinct English keys with non-empty text, out of 18 813 keys in total. The larger number is not a contradiction — most slots are empty.

✅ Dialogue with audio durations, all 28 stages

2026-08-26. ../data/stage-dialogue-with-durations.txt joins three separately decoded systems — the ISL script's built-in 64 call sites, the caption table, and the sound-bank seek tables:

offset | message id | eng s | jpn s | caption

Duration is the bank's last cumulative sample over its sample rate. Nothing is decoded; every number is read.

Coverage over the 2 683 call sites: 1 663 (62.0 %) have an English duration and 2 198 (81.9 %) a Japanese one. The gap is the headerless banks, which carry no seek table — and which language lacks one differs per line, so the two columns are complementary rather than nested.

Two columns, deliberately. FILES names the jpn\ banks and the game substitutes the language directory, so a line's English and Japanese recordings are different files of different lengths. The caption text is English, so eng is the column that matches it. Reporting a single duration here would have silently attached Japanese timings to English text — the first version of this artifact did exactly that, which is why it was regenerated.

The difference is not academic:

MSG_VOICE_A_065  "They got Leader!"           eng 1.78 s   jpn 2.46 s
MSG_VOICE_D_257  "Katana! Damn it!"           eng   -      jpn 2.59 s
MSG_VOICE_D_342  "Katana, Ellen, good work."  eng 4.18 s   jpn   -

❔ Not settled: the 38 % of call sites with no English duration. They are headerless banks. A seek-based recovery was tried and does not work — see below.

❌ Recovering headerless durations from the seek chunk — tried, refused

A headerless bank has no RIFF, so no data size to read. But a seek chunk describes the wave ending at its own position, so an entry carrying one looks like it should yield a length for free. Across the bank set:

	eng	jpn
has a RIFF (already covered)	3 686	4 301
headerless with a valid seek	343	419
headerless, no seek	353	380
no entry for that language	753	35

343 recoverable English durations would lift coverage from 62 % to about 75 %, and the numbers look right — median 3.25 s, p90 5.18 s, which is exactly the shape of in-mission voice.

It is still wrong. A seek sits immediately after its own data, so the implied wave start is seek_pos − packets × 2048. Checking that:

wave starts BEFORE the entry begins : 277 of 343
wave starts inside the entry        :  66 of 343

For 277 of the 343, the seek describes the previous bank's wave, not this entry's. That is the same pairing rule that made my earlier seek readings fail; taking the length anyway would attach a neighbour's duration to 81 % of the recovered rows. Even the 66 that start inside the entry are not proven to be that entry's own wave — "starts inside" is necessary, not sufficient.

The median 3.25 s is precisely the kind of plausible-looking figure that has already misled this work twice today, so the approach is recorded as refused rather than applied with a caveat. Recovering these lengths needs the bank→wave assignment settled first — the open question auto/slb-loader records as "which bank in a window belongs to the entry's name".