Hello,
I recently wandered around Hydlaa with the sounds on. Some areas were really nice, with ambient sounds and music. However soon the background music ran out and the Hydlaa plaza went silent, although it was full of people. Also talking with npcs was completely silent operation. I thought it would seem much more lively if there were some voices or such in the vincinity of crowded areas/npcs.
The in-game dialogs are many, and it propably isn't possible to digitize them all, but instead we could do something similar to Baldur's Gate system. There the first few sentences are spoken, rest is text only. Varying character names/races are left out from the spoken.
Without much further thought I drew some samples. I assumed that at least humans and dwarves would speak english. Harnquist's seemed much more lively with voices playing in the background.
http://users.tkk.fi/~vrantapu/PlaneShift/mixed_voices.oggMost sounds there I intended for male Ylian/Xacha, but also few voices for a random small creature and finally a thirsty Stonebreaker.
I bet many here, speaking english as natives, would sound better as voice actors. Would be cool to hear how other people perceive Yliakum's inhabitants voices. Feel free to post your versions.
*edit*
If you're unable to play .ogg:
1) can download a free audio filter for it at
http://www.vorbis.com/or
2) can use PS as temporary player: copy the .ogg into PlaneShift/art/music/ directory, and rename it to maintheme.ogg (take backup of existing maintheme.ogg). Run PS and you'll hear the sound during login screen.
