Hear Tell-Ambient Voice Subtitles V1.5

RDR2’s streets are full of NPCs who talk but have no subtitles. HEAR TELL fills the gaps through the game’s own subtitle system — 269,173 lines (EN) / 364,405 (CN) across 615 voice banks. Same style and position as official subs. Not one existing subtitle overwritten, no game file modified. Plain-text data you can edit.

“Empty mountains: no one to be seen.
Yet – hear – human sounds echo.”
– Wang Wei, “Deer Park”, 8th century

DESCRIPTION

Stand on a street corner in Saint Denis for one minute and you will hear a dozen conversations. Newsboys shouting headlines. A drunk cursing at nothing. Two women deciding whose husband is more worthless. Somebody haggling over a horse half a block away.

All of that audio shipped with the game. Almost none of it has subtitles.

Eight years later it still doesn’t. If English is not your first language, or you simply play with subtitles on, those streets have been half mute the entire time. You knew people were talking. You never got to know what they said.

HEAR TELL fills in the missing subtitles. Not as an overlay – through the game’s own subtitle system.

Two men on a bridge, warning each other about something. Eight years without a subtitle.

WHY IT LOOKS NATIVE

The mod calls the game’s own subtitle functions directly. Same torn-edge banner, same position on screen, same fade in and out, same font, same speaker-name prefix. Nothing is painted over your screen.

If you didn’t know a mod was running, you would assume Rockstar shipped it.

English: 269,173 lines
615 voice banks covered
Existing subtitles overwritten: zero. Lines that already have an official subtitle are never touched. Only the blank ones get filled.
Game files modified: zero. One .lua script plus plain-text data. Uninstalling is deleting the files.

MAIN FEATURES

Ambient chatter, shopkeepers, lawmen, strangers, and a great many player lines that never had subtitles
Displays through the native subtitle system – identical style, position and timing to the official subtitles
Speaker names come from the game itself, so they follow whatever language your game is set to
Animal noises, breathing, coughing and other non-verbal audio deliberately stay silent. Only actual speech gets a subtitle.
Shows you only what that specific character says. It will never put another NPC’s words in their mouth.
All subtitle text is plain text. Notepad opens it. You can fix any line you don’t like.

REQUIREMENTS

Two standard script-mod prerequisites, not bundled in this archive:

ScriptHookRDR2 – lets the game load external scripts
Ultimate ASI Loader – provides dinput8.dll, which hooks the above into the game

If you have ever installed a script mod for RDR2, you almost certainly already have both.

Why they are not bundled: most people already have them, often at a newer version than mine, and overwriting yours can break the other script mods you have installed.

Everything else you need (RedLua.asi, lua51.dll) is included.

INSTALLATION

Install the two prerequisites above first. Without them this mod does nothing at all.
Drag everything in the archive into your game root folder – the one containing RDR2.exe. Say yes when asked to overwrite.
Launch the game. Subtitles start on their own. There is nothing to press.

Watch one file when overwriting: RedLua/Settings.json holds RedLua’s own settings (menu hotkey, autostart). If you have customised it, back it up first and restore it afterwards.

Two downloads are available – English and Chinese. Pick one.

HOW TO TELL IT IS WORKING

Go to Valentine and either rob a shopkeeper, or aim at a wagon driver and press E to make them stop. Both are guaranteed to produce subtitles if the script loaded. If you see them, you’re set.

If you get nothing, or you want manual control, press F7 for the RedLua menu:

Reload: F7 > core.main.scripts > AmbientSubs.lua > core.script.rel
Autostart fails occasionally. One manual reload fixes it.
Unload: F7 > core.main.scripts > AmbientSubs.lua > core.script.unl
Subtitles stop immediately.

After unloading you cannot load it again in the same session – you have to restart the game. That is not a bug: while running, the script hooks into low-level game internals, and unloading cleans all of that up completely. Once cleaned up it cannot be reattached. If you only want subtitles off for a while, use the game’s own subtitle setting instead.

Still nothing? Check in this order:

dinput8.dll in your game root
ScriptHookRDR2.dll in your game root
RedLua.asi and lua51.dll (both ship in this archive)
RedLua/Scripts/AmbientSubs.lua
RedLua/Scripts/AmbientSubs/trans.txt
Subtitles enabled in the game’s own settings

If F7 does nothing whatsoever, it is almost always #1 or #2.

EDIT IT, TRANSLATE IT, BUILD ON IT

Every .txt in RedLua/Scripts/AmbientSubs/ is plain text, three tab-separated columns:

context name variation number subtitle text

Found a line that reads wrong? Edit that line, save, restart the game. That’s the whole process.

Want a Spanish, Portuguese, German or any other version? You have my permission in advance – you do not need to ask. Replace trans.txt wholesale and release it. The data is plain text precisely so that this is possible. A credit is nice, not required.

KNOWN LIMITATIONS – PLEASE READ BEFORE DOWNLOADING

The text was produced by speech recognition plus automated correction. It is not Rockstar’s script and it contains errors. Some lines will read slightly off.
A small number of lines are spoken in another language, or are too garbled to make out. Those deliberately get no subtitle. That is expected behaviour, not a gap.
Subtitles are ASCII only. The game font has no glyphs for accented characters – they would render as empty boxes.

If a line reads wrong, you can fix it yourself in seconds. See the section above.

SHOUT OUTS

Not one line of game code was changed. Not one game file was touched. This works because other people laid the foundation first – four pieces, each handling one link in the chain:

Ultimate ASI Loader (ThirteenAG, open source) – prerequisite
Provides dinput8.dll. Loads first when the game starts, then hooks .asi plugins in. Without it, nothing downstream ever starts.
ScriptHookRDR2 (Rage Modding Collective) – prerequisite
Gives the game the ability to load external scripts. RedLua runs on top of it.
RedLua – included in this archive
Open-source Lua runtime for RDR2, and the platform this mod runs on. It scans RedLua/Scripts/, runs what it finds, and provides the F7 menu. This entire mod is one .lua file – without RedLua it is just text sitting on a disk.
LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3 – included in this archive
The Lua implementation RedLua uses. This mod relies on its FFI capability to call the game’s own subtitle functions directly. That is the entire reason these subtitles look native instead of being text drawn on top of your screen.

Thank you to these authors. They built tools so other people could build things on them. I just added a brick.

FINALLY

15 days. Roughly 360 hours.

If you catch what a passer-by says for the first time and it makes you laugh, or makes you stand there and listen to the end – then those hours were worth it.

Found a bad line, a missing subtitle, or made another language version? Tell me in the comments.

May you understand everyone you pass in the rain out there.

Credits:

JohnWilliamsson