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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#61
Faw wrote:Imo the best way to do this, which would also require the minimum amount of work by Josh, is making a basic extension functionality and then leave the rest to the community. This would work by for instance having a folder where the game looks for custom voices in some format, kind of like custom radio stations for Fallout.

That way he doesn't have to approve anything and the community can manage their own sets of voices/whatever other content can be customized.
An interesting approach. If the game had easy-to-find folders (e.g., Taunts, Cry for Help, Docking Request, etc.), then yes, I suppose it would be easy for players to download files or whole packs of files and drop them in. Josh would still need to program the game to procedurally insert names of stations, NPCs etc., for docking requests and the like, and make NPCs use the files at the right occasion. But yes, it would free him from having to approve the files the community has voted on.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#62
Faw wrote:Imo the best way to do this, which would also require the minimum amount of work by Josh, is making a basic extension functionality and then leave the rest to the community. This would work by for instance having a folder where the game looks for custom voices in some format, kind of like custom radio stations for Fallout.

That way he doesn't have to approve anything and the community can manage their own sets of voices/whatever other content can be customized.
I was just thinking that same thing as I read the last days worth of pages. As for the voting system I've got an idea that would help make it easy.

Make a new category on the forum root for voices. Make a seperate sticky in there for each phrase. The people can submit a copy to youtube and then just post a link to the phrase it is being submitted for. Each thread gets its on poll which is already built into the forum UI. Then it can all be done without any new servers being stood up and nothing but links are taking up storage space.


Then someone or several forum members can take the winners, convert them to mp3. They could be sorted into folders by phrase and then zip them up. This would be the only thing to take up space on the server. When they are unzipped into the directory the system decides it needs phrase x, looks in the folder '/game/voices/pharse x/' and picks an mp3 at random. Threads could be put up with unofficial clips too for anyone who wanted them.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#63
Flendon,
While that may be easy to implement, I think it would be a pain to vote. Imagine if you had 50+ clips to listen to... you would have to listen to each one in a separate tab in youtube. Plus there is a problem of fairness. If I post an ok voice clip and I was the first one to post then there is a high chance that I could make to the final round just because I was one of the first clips in the thread. Basically there is no way to sort by highest votes. The key to successfully crowd-sourcing voice clips and crowd-sourcing the approval process is getting as many clips and votes as possible. This means everything should be as easy and efficient as possible. I know josh hasn't said yay or nay about this idea but let me look and see if I can come up with a fairly easy way to implement the idea. I'm thinking you can do some cool stuff with a service like dropbox.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#64
pulsar9 wrote:Flendon,
While that may be easy to implement, I think it would be a pain to vote. Imagine if you had 50+ clips to listen to... you would have to listen to each one in a separate tab in youtube. Plus there is a problem of fairness. If I post an ok voice clip and I was the first one to post then there is a high chance that I could make to the final round just because I was one of the first clips in the thread. Basically there is no way to sort by highest votes. The key to successfully crowd-sourcing voice clips and crowd-sourcing the approval process is getting as many clips and votes as possible. This means everything should be as easy and efficient as possible. I know josh hasn't said yay or nay about this idea but let me look and see if I can come up with a fairly easy way to implement the idea. I'm thinking you can do some cool stuff with a service like dropbox.
I love dropbox, but they have a 20GB/day bandwidth limit for sharing. I think some other sites are out there without limits, but I'm not sure how many of them are free.

For the voting, their could be a submission period, say a few weeks. After the submission period the voting is opened and no new submissions are accepted. That will solve the first submissions having the best chance.

I was about to say the problem of opening each youtube video in a new tab would be a pain to solve, but I just had an idea. The dev blog is on blogspot which allows video embedding. Or it could be a volunteers blogspot so all the organizing doesn't take up all of Josh's time. All of the videos for each phrase could get embedded into a post for that phrase. Then everything is neat and organized, open the voting thread, open one new tab to the blog post, view all the videos (each gets a number or letter), go back to the voting thread and vote for the number or letter of your choice. Most of the phrases should be less than ten seconds I'm guessing. Someone can go through first and discard any that are obvious junk. It shouldn't take that long to listen to 10 or even 30 clips that are only 5-10 seconds long.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#67
Knowing Josh, he'll probably come up with some Neural Network powered speech synth software that will do the job... And do it from procedurally generated text =P.


Jokes aside, I think using voice synths fits the spirit of the game perfectly and could be done in an elegant way. I see some ways to do this and justify the machine, unnatural accent:

1) Obscure the voices with communication noise, a la WWII fighter jet.
2) Argue that the voices in the game ARE actually synthesized, because it makes more sense for the pilots to send information encoded in text rather than an audio file.
3) A mix of the above.

Anyway, keep the voice synth optional for people who think it harms their immersion, and it should be nothing wrong with it.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#68
Don't forget

4) It's synthesized. Mainly because you don't have the anatomy to speak understandable Frombambul (not enough movable mouthparts...), and neither does the guy at the other end of the comm have the biological equipment for speaking Galstandard (neither East, West, nor the Peroxide variety). But hey, you have the ore he wants and he has the money, so both of you use the autotranslator to get business done.

But it could be worse...remember when you met the Orz?

(MESSAGE FROM TRANSLATION COMPUTER: INCOMING MESSAGE EXTREMELY UNORTHODOX IN COMPOSITION.
TRANSLATION INCLUDES MANY LINGUAL BEST-FITS. FOR CLARITY, BEST-FITS ARE DENOTED BY ASTERISK PAIRS.
OVERALL ACCURACY OF TRANSLATION: UNKNOWN.
(MESSAGE BEGINS...)

Who are you? You are not Orz! We are Orz! Orz are happy *people energy* from the outside.
Inside is good. So much good that Orz will always *germinate*.
Can you come together with Orz for *parties*?


And that doesn't even cover the more exotic for of alien communications. Hard gamma-ray burst as a way to say "hello!", anyone?
Hardenberg was my name
And Terra was my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#70
Ridon wrote:hm... if it's possible to add soundfiles later, then everyone could download the voices (or voicepacks) he/she likes... no need for josh to hear every clip :) and no need to fear that someone slips in something "wrong"
This would probably be the best way to do this. I'd find someone who could do a GlaDOS style AI, complete with snarky humor and all. :D

As for something 'wrong', aw, come on. Wouldn't you want Big Gay Al (from Southpark) guiding you to your destination? :lol:
Image
Early Spring - 1055: Well, I made it to Boatmurdered, and my initial impressions can be set forth in three words: What. The. F*ck.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#72
I wouldn't mind a computer voice reading stuff to me. I know there are some people that might prefer to read everything and then there are some people (like me) that would rather have at least some of the text read to me. My eyes tend to glaze over when I encounter a wall of text in a game and sometimes it doesn't even have to be a wall of text. If at all possible voices could be toggled so that those that prefer a voice reading to them can have a voice and those that want to read everything can.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#73
pulsar9 wrote:I wouldn't mind a computer voice reading stuff to me. I know there are some people that might prefer to read everything and then there are some people (like me) that would rather have at least some of the text read to me. My eyes tend to glaze over when I encounter a wall of text in a game and sometimes it doesn't even have to be a wall of text. If at all possible voices could be toggled so that those that prefer a voice reading to them can have a voice and those that want to read everything can.
I agree with you there. If Josh decides not to go the crowdsourced voice acting route (or any other voice acting route), I'd at least like to be able to hear various male and female computer-generated voices reading comms to me. I don't want to have to read words while I'm fighting and trying to give orders to my ships! Still, I hope that'd be a fallback, as real voice acting would be really cool and, I think, feasible.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#74
I Grew up watching space movies and listening to Ship AI. to play a game of this level and ambition with out that (after us talking about itanyway) i would just feel something was missing XD. id pay a lot of resources to have an advanced ship AI like HAL or Cortana or even GLaDOS as someone mentioned. make the ship itself an interactive NPC that i could interact with. obviously since youd have to buy instal and power a ship ai it would be an optional thing for ppl.
If I've rambled and gone off topic im sorry but i tend to be long winded as you might notice if you stumble across my other post XD. thanks for reading.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#75
id pay a lot of resources to have an advanced ship AI like HAL or Cortana or even GLaDOS as someone mentioned.
Geez. I'd rather pay to have a ship that does what I want, when I want it, and how I want it, as opposed to starting to argue with me, talk back or trying to kill me. Then again, my car also is incredibly low on fancy electronics that can break down in the worst possible moment, so I guess that's just me.
Hardenberg was my name
And Terra was my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination

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