Voice acting and player character persona?

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wildweasel
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Voice acting and player character persona?

Post by wildweasel »

Should CHC2 have voice acting? I would very much like to add voice acting to the game, through the major NPC's (informants and mission briefings), Strife-style - but part of me wonders if that's really such a good idea, considering how hard it'd be to get a dedicated voice acting team. It also seems a bit too ambitious, but I'll let you guys help decide if voice acting is right for the project.

Also, about our player character. I've already posted a couple sets of player sounds (Cam Clarke's from Painkiller, and the Imperial Male voice set from Oblivion) but I really don't think either of them "work" for the project. Perhaps it might come down to recording our own? Also, should we give the player character a personality? This would be reflected in his dialogue options and (possibly) more voice acting. Again, I'm going to let you all help decide if this is really right for the project, or if we should tone down the ambition level a bit.
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Post by ellmo »

Voice acting - utmost YES.

cons:
1. Would probably greatly increase WAD's size.
2. Would most probably, require some additional help from people outside the current team, if we want the voices and accents to be varied.
3. We should decide who writes the dialogs. Everything above two people working on it, may be more of a problem than a sollution.

pros:
1. The recording itself isn't time consuming.
2. Most of us speak (well, write, actually) english in a rather proper way. I don't suppose "reading" it fluently would be much of a problem; this way we would have a few voices already.
3. And finally the most important thing: I can't think of any decent game I have played recently, that wouldn't have voice acting in it. It doesn't mind if it's a complex RPG game like Icewind Dale, quick paced strategy like Warhammer: Dark Crusade or a shoot-em-up game like Doom 3.
Voice acting is extremly important in building the atmosphere, and it's price is acceptable.

Of course I would love to try my skills in both voice acting, and writing dialogs (thus also creating the basics of character's personality).
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wildweasel
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Post by wildweasel »

ellmo wrote:Voice acting - utmost YES.

cons:
1. Would probably greatly increase WAD's size.
If we record/save at 11 or 16 KHz and compress with OGG, that shouldn't be too big of an issue.
2. Would most probably, require some additional help from people outside the current team, if we want the voices and accents to be varied.
That's a good point, and that of course means that we'd have to wait a while (relatively close to the end of development) to seek voice actors.
3. We should decide who writes the dialogs. Everything above two people working on it, may be more of a problem than a sollution.
Well, I'm pretty good at writing dialogue myself, so I might have a crack at it.
pros:
1. The recording itself isn't time consuming.
Right.
2. Most of us speak (well, write, actually) english in a rather proper way. I don't suppose "reading" it fluently would be much of a problem; this way we would have a few voices already.
And for those that don't speak it fluently, all the better for our informants and bar patron NPC's! Variety is a good thing.
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Post by Nash »

If we record/save at 11 or 16 KHz
That is a very bad quality to record and save to. Recording should always be done at 44.1 KHz. Anything below that will degrade the sound quality a lot and produce tons of artifacts.

You may use OGG or MP3 compression but the sampling rate should stay at 44.1 so that the sound detail is retained.
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Post by wildweasel »

44 KHz sound is a bit of a waste for voice samples. Download this pack of voice clips and listen to them in sequence.

44khz is the original recording.
22khz is at half quality, but it still sounds practically the same.
16khz is slightly degraded, and it's fairly noticeable compared to the difference between 44 and 22, but it's still almost a 50% size difference over the original. I see this as the preferable audio quality, as it has the best quality to size ratio, and if we have a lot of sound samples, that will be critical to keep download times down.
11khz is the lowest quality, and is the most obviously degraded of the pack - so we're not going to be saving at 11 khz.
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