Got Music Department?

[Xillix Queen of Fools]

Certain recent developments in Planeshift engine are going to require me to organize and promote an active planeshift music and sound department.

The engine team has given us the capability to do voice recordings for the characters both in npc knowledge areas and quests. This is a big deal to us at the settings department as it will give us the chance to make our writings come to life in a way never before possible. When you couple this with the advent of menu driven quests, we are looking at a whole new way for players to experience the settings of the game.

There are complications . . .

A) The raw amount of time and effort it will take to alter our current content to fit the new menu system is gargantuan and Rizin is heading up that pursuit bravely. This will tie settings devs and prospects up for some time to come so if you are missing new books and quests for a while this is why.

B) Settings will need to do two things to be able to get recordings for our NPCs into the game:

1) Get applicants to help handle post production for the countless hours of audio we will have to create (we also want people who can work on sound effects and ad more auditory cues to various aspects of the game (think footfalls specific to the surface being walked on, and specific to the racial traits of the one walking etc) and add music specific to each area of the game.

2) Once #1 is accomplished, begin to do some community outreach to get the voice actors we will need to to flesh out hundreds of non player characters and tens of thousands of lines of text.

All of this I think is Vengeance getting back at settings for all the things settings is perpetually badgering engine to give us in terms of mechanics . . .

I think he is trying to keep us busy so we stop bothering him.

Overall though this is a very exciting set of possibilities for planeshift to be a more robust sensual experience and we are eagerly getting about the business of delivering some of this content to the players as(tm)ap!

Please apply to the music department if you think you can help on the technical end and if you would consider doing voice acting for your favorite npc send me a private message.

We aren't ready for broad scale recordings until we can get the music department running better, but I am curious about the interest level among the player base.

[zanzibar]

Post production is important but initial recordings are vital.  The problem you'll face is that your voice actors won't typically own a microphone of an acceptable quality, and they won't be able to travel to the house of another developer who happens to have an SM58.

The good news is that post production of vocal tracks is actually relatively easy and quick when it's just someone speaking.  The challenge will be giving your actors access to the proper tools to create proper initial recordings.

[Parallo]

I have an SM58 =D

But yeah, that'll be tough if you have to sift through loads of shite to get something decent.

[Xillix Queen of Fools]

Our willingness to accept our place as a non-professional venture is kind of key here.

We will be looking for the best sound we can accomplish on the standard household's microphone.

We don't have to have the clarity of Oblivion to produce entertainment.

In the PMs I am already receiving I am hearing that people are worried about their accents . . .

I have what may be seen as good news for those of you who fear that. Settings is working on a standard set of accents endemic to each race/region to allow for this.

Some may not like the real world aspect that this brings into the in game content but being a realist/dreamer I think what is most important is that there is a consistency to how we use these accents and am striving to establish norms for each race so that we needn't turn people away due to their regional accents.

When this system is complete and approved I will post it so players have some idea what to expect.

[Caarrie]

Even if you cant do the best think of sound effects for some of the spell effects that are lacking, if you think are you up to that challege you might be up to learning how to do more for the ps team.

[Mathy Stockington]

This is a great way to get the PS community involved. Good work!!

[zanzibar]

I have an SM58 =D

But yeah, that'll be tough if you have to sift through loads of shite to get something decent.

It depends on why it's bad.

Let's say that there's a character who gives a quest.  The actor would record to a single audio file all dialogue for that character and quest.  The actor could record multiple takes and different vocal interpretations of the dialogue.  The file could then go to the engineer.  Since all the dialogue is in a single file, all of it would be edited at once.  A settings dev would also have a copy of the file.  That settings dev would choose which takes he or she likes best, then send the time indexes to the engineer.  The engineer would split the audio into multiple files of the appropriate format, do some more editing, then ship them off to the dev team.

Actors would need a short guide on microphone placement and how to properly record it (how to tell if you're clipping and what to do if you are, for instance).  But that's easy.  The problem is that the voice actors you have at your disposal won't all have the necessary equipment.  Even if they all have microphones, if some have budget microphones and some have the real deal, you'll end up with audio that is highly inconsistent from recording to recording, unless the good recordings are made in post production to sound worse than they started.  Which is possible, and is definitely a possible solution.  Inconsistency is more noticeable than mediocrity.

[Xillix Queen of Fools]

The entire process we desire for recording and encoding is in the works and will be posted when we are ready.

[zanzibar]

The entire process we desire for recording and encoding is in the works and will be posted when we are ready.

Of course.  I'm just providing one example of a way that would work from my POV.

[Toobah]

Why not take a more unique aproach to the voice actor dilemma and eliminate them alltogether?
(found this in the crystalspace forums)
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html

It might be worth looking into this or similar speech-synthesizers. At least for use in simple dialogues.

[Tuxide]

Why not take a more unique aproach to the voice actor dilemma and eliminate them alltogether?
(found this in the crystalspace forums)
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html

It might be worth looking into this or similar speech-synthesizers. At least for use in simple dialogues.

I also saw it and it didn't look like it was compatible with the GPL2.

EDIT:  Actually needs to be read more closely, it does say X11-type but that is vague and it doesn't say anything specific.

[kaerli2]

We really need some quantitative data on mic quality.  We know that studio mics like the SM58 are the gold standard, but where do other microphones fall?  For instance, there are plenty of people with headsets out there (I'm one of them...) who get at least OK audio quality in VoIP applications, but is that good enough for recording dialog lines?  And there's also the issue of figuring out how to save and send long-ish audio submissions without losing quality to a codec.

[Xillix Queen of Fools]

I would hasten to remind everyone that we have been working together to hammer out some of this before this post.

We always bear in mind that this is a hobby and we go for the quality that best suits the tools and standards and practices most easily within our reach as volunteers with household tools.

By accepting lower standards on the microphone end, we open up the possibility of more fan generated content to ease the burdens of our labor by sharing it.

[Prolix]

First off spoken word recordings can be far smaller than music recordings, there is a far smaller range and depth of frequencies. While you may have seen book sets that come on six or more cds as cdaudio data you can fit several such books on one cd with a best quality mp3 rip that is 256k+ bit rate. Spoken word does not lose much at  a 96kbps rate.  Also related is the sample rate. Significant savings can be made by reducing the number of samples per second. I'm not saying that PS should go for the cheapest quality audio but that it does not need to be over produced.

[zanzibar]

Given that this is a technical area of the forum...

First off spoken word recordings can be far smaller than music recordings,

Yes, spoken audio is more forgiving than music.  You will notice the difference in quality, and you won't want to use it if it has to sound good, but the audio will still be understandable.  However...

there is a far smaller range and depth of frequencies.

This is not true.  Voice occupies high end frequencies, and high end frequencies are what suffer first when you use inferior file formats.  There is a narrower range for the fundamental frequencies, but there's much more to a recording than just fundamental frequencies.

That said, you can lose the higher frequencies and the audio will still be understandable -- it will also sound worse.

Also related is the sample rate. Significant savings can be made by reducing the number of samples per second. I'm not saying that PS should go for the cheapest quality audio but that it does not need to be over produced.

When you say "over produced", do you mean "high fidelity"?

Bit rate and bit resolution are what you would play around with to make a file smaller.  Voice audio at 8 bit resolution and 6khz sampling rate is still understandable.  (CD audio has 16 bit resolution and 44.1 khz sampling rate.)  Whether or not it's "acceptable" though depends on the application.