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Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#1
I'm curious about what level of spoken dialogue we can expect in-game, if any. I understand that the procedural nature of the game might make pre-recording messages impractical if not impossible, but I wanted to hear from Josh and others what they think. I always find it immersive in space sims when you can hear comm chatter between pilots, between docking ships and stations, and directed at the player. Being able to hear communications frees up your eyes so you don't have to read a series of comms, allowing you to focus on flying/combat while listening.

To that end, I was wondering about the feasibility of crowdsourcing voice acting! As development progresses, I imagine Josh will start to accumulate a pile of comms messages that he knows will be used, or perhaps phrases that can be combined procedurally into sentences. If he doesn't want to sink money into paying voice actors, he could set up a web page with phrases he wants recorded. Fans from the community could then put on their voice actor hats and do their best to read the phrases, and upload the recordings. Josh could then use the best ones in the game.

The upload form would need to include a method of giving copyright to Josh - perhaps just by checking a box and digitally signing your name in a box. What do people think?
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#3
Skyfligher wrote:If anything voice acting could be used for ship AI automated messages.
I agree, that could be a good use of it. And I think crowdsourced voice recordings could be used for a lot more than that - anything from NPCs requesting to dock at a station, to pirates telling you/an NPC to drop cargo, to your wingmen responding to orders, to pilots talking trash in dogfights.

There are a ton of instances where the spoken word will make space feel alive and full of people living and dying, and I think the community would be a great resource to provide those words.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#6
N810 wrote:Lol yea that or ... :?


Proceduraly generated voices. :mrgreen:
Haha I shudder to think what kind of demonically possessed voices that could result in! :D

EDIT: Although, you bring up another idea - Josh could procedurally modify voice pitch, timbre, and speed slightly to make various recorded phrases sound like they're spoken by different people. And no, don't ask me how - I have no idea how or if that's even possible!
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#7
I like this idea! I do think Johs would have to add in some sort of randomness to the way voices would be played in game, otherwise doing the same action and hearing the same voice say the same thing gets monotonous..and not at all immersive. It reminds me of RTS games where you click to move your characters, and they keep looping through (even if randomly) a few different sayings. They get very boring and kind of annoying. I would like to see how Josh could make this more random, and even procedurally generated(:
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#8
Shrimpables wrote:I like this idea! I do think Johs would have to add in some sort of randomness to the way voices would be played in game, otherwise doing the same action and hearing the same voice say the same thing gets monotonous..and not at all immersive. It reminds me of RTS games where you click to move your characters, and they keep looping through (even if randomly) a few different sayings. They get very boring and kind of annoying. I would like to see how Josh could make this more random, and even procedurally generated(:
Yeah, I agree with this. I mean, it doesn't really kill a game for me to hear the same phrases spoken by the same voices over and over (that's how Freelancer is, and I still love that game), but it doesn't improve it. It seems like Josh is good at sound/music manipulation, and we know he's good at procedural generation. So yeah, maybe he could procedurally vary recorded voices. Voice pitch, speed, and delay between different words are a few variables that come to mind.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#9
regardless if its voice based or text it needs to be 100% one or the other. mixing between the 2 never leads to a imersive experience.
though with as complex as some of the ai threads have been i wonder if its possible for them to use a form of speech recognition so you could 'talk' to them using a standard headset. I know that would be complex as hell to set up....but would be one of the coolest things ive seen in a space game of this caliber. and weve see this game keeps stepping beyond what any other games done to day XD.
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?

#11
Henrique Vignon wrote:I think it's not worth it, the amount of voice acting needed to avoid constant repetition would be tremendous, keep it text only I say.
I agree that the amount of voice recordings required will be somewhat tremendous, but I can't agree that it wouldn't be worth it. Do you really want to have to take your eyes off the action all the time to read what people are saying? Do you really want space, which appears to be bustling with human activity, trade, fighting, and life, to be devoid of human voices? I think that would be a jarring discontinuity, and make the player feel isolated from other people. It would be a shame, when the AI is going to be so robust, and NPC-player interaction is going to be so rich, to not hear another human voice.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "worth it" - I think fans of the game will want to record phrases and words for Josh (for free!) and give him the copyright, in exchange for literally having a voice in the game. I'd say giving Josh a huge compendium of words and phrases he wants recorded is well worth the relatively little effort it would take for him to set up a site to collect them, and for fans to record them.

Also, if Josh can figure out a way to procedurally vary phrasing and how voices sound, the effort required to capture the needed phrases would be even less. Even if he can't, I'd say the effort-reward ratio is still quite favorable.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#12
insolent wrote:
Henrique Vignon wrote:I think it's not worth it, the amount of voice acting needed to avoid constant repetition would be tremendous, keep it text only I say.
I agree that the amount of voice recordings required will be somewhat tremendous, but I can't agree that it wouldn't be worth it. Do you really want to have to take your eyes off the action all the time to read what people are saying? Do you really want space, which appears to be bustling with human activity, trade, fighting, and life, to be devoid of human voices? I think that would be a jarring discontinuity, and make the player feel isolated from other people. It would be a shame, when the AI is going to be so robust, and NPC-player interaction is going to be so rich, to not hear another human voice.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "worth it" - I think fans of the game will want to record phrases and words for Josh (for free!) and give him the copyright, in exchange for literally having a voice in the game. I'd say giving Josh a huge compendium of words and phrases he wants recorded is well worth the relatively little effort it would take for him to set up a site to collect them, and for fans to record them.

Also, if Josh can figure out a way to procedurally vary phrasing and how voices sound, the effort required to capture the needed phrases would be even less. Even if he can't, I'd say the effort-reward ratio is still quite favorable.
Yeah but then the quality won't be quite up to snuff I'm afraid... even though people will be doing for free and at the best of their intentions not everyone is a professional voice actor(actually few people are).. and let's not forget this will be a full commercial product, it will be sold on steam, gog etc so amateur quality voice acting is not exactly acceptable.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#13
Henrique Vignon wrote: Yeah but then the quality won't be quite up to snuff I'm afraid... even though people will be doing for free and at the best of their intentions not everyone is a professional voice actor(actually few people are).. and let's not forget this will be a full commercial product, it will be sold on steam, gog etc so amateur quality voice acting is not exactly acceptable.
Hmm, valid point. I do think this could be mostly remedied by Josh's ability to choose the best submissions. I anticipate that quite a few people would submit voice recordings - this game has quite a large fan base, which will grow substantially - and people would love a chance to be in the game in some way. So I think Josh would have a lot of recordings to choose from. Editing by his sounds effects person would help polish them further.

Furthermore, have you heard what passes for voice acting in even highly successful space sims? Some performances in Freelancer were pretty wooden/off-tone, and the X series was laughable at times. Frankly, I think having dozens of people recording the same phrases would net some at least passable results. Success would, of course, hinge on how many people knew about it and participated. But if Josh were to actively encourage it, he'd probably get a good turnout.
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#14
insolent wrote:
Henrique Vignon wrote: Yeah but then the quality won't be quite up to snuff I'm afraid... even though people will be doing for free and at the best of their intentions not everyone is a professional voice actor(actually few people are).. and let's not forget this will be a full commercial product, it will be sold on steam, gog etc so amateur quality voice acting is not exactly acceptable.
Hmm, valid point. I do think this could be mostly remedied by Josh's ability to choose the best submissions. I anticipate that quite a few people would submit voice recordings - this game has quite a large fan base, which will grow substantially - and people would love a chance to be in the game in some way. So I think Josh would have a lot of recordings to choose from. Editing by his sounds effects person would help polish them further.

Furthermore, have you heard what passes for voice acting in even highly successful space sims? Some performances in Freelancer were pretty wooden/off-tone, and the X series was laughable at times. Frankly, I think having dozens of people recording the same phrases would net some at least passable results. Success would, of course, hinge on how many people knew about it and participated. But if Josh were to actively encourage it, he'd probably get a good turnout.
But then you add the additional enormous overhead to Josh to have to go through hundreds of samples for every line of dialog to chose the best ones... I mean I hate to be the pessimist here but I still think he should stick to text only, for the sake of the project, or maybe if he fells adventurous futz around with text to speech engines ;)
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Re: Voice Acting - Crowdsourcing?

#15
the game should remain text based for the proposes of getting a 'finished' game released. with the option of josh releasing a voice pack at a latter date.
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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