a962daf518
Measured the <id>_<page>_<line> key structure: a page is one subtitle box of 3 or 4 wrapped lines, and successive pages are successive utterances by possibly different speakers. 452 of 4091 ids span more than one page, up to 8. That refutes the isl_dialogue.py committed two commits ago, which read only page 000 -- 356 of the 1338 script message names are multi-page, so a quarter of its output was truncated to the opening utterance. Tool now walks pages until one is empty; Stage 02 sample regenerated (43 of 213 calls multi-page). The 2683/2683 resolution figure is unaffected: it counted ids that have text, and every id does have a page 000. What was wrong was the rendered text.
4.4 KiB
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, holding 3 or 4 wrapped lines (4 506 pages of 4, 263 of 3 — no other width occurs);
-
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. TheDEMOfamily 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.
- 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).