PlaneShift
Development => Development Team Blog => Topic started by: Xillix Queen of Fools on January 07, 2009, 05:45:33 pm
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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.
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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.
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I have an SM58 =D
But yeah, that'll be tough if you have to sift through loads of shite to get something decent.
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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.
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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.
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This is a great way to get the PS community involved. Good work!!
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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.
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The entire process we desire for recording and encoding is in the works and will be posted when we are ready.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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certainly cdaudio quality is not needed. I just made a recording using a simple desktop sound recorder, I used the voice lossless preset to save as wav. I then converted it to mp3 using lame with a standard fast preset (probably could have made it smaller.) I can't hear the difference, can you?
wav (http://jenness.info/bill/volossless.wav) 604kb or mp3 (http://jenness.info/bill/volossy.mp3) 60kb
By the way I was using a cheap condenser mike that came with dictation tape recorder. So by all means have somebody with the high end audio equipment post process stuff if you want but pretty standard equipment is good enough for something that is going to run on pretty generic computers. Most people do not have the latest and greatest.
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The latest and greatest isn't necessary. The SM58 was invented in 1966, and it isn't a very expensive microphone as far as good microphones go.
I'm looking at the mp3 you uploaded. It's 160 kbps. When someone is talking about a poor quality audio file, they aren't typically talking about a high quality mp3. Yes, mp3s are lossy vs wave, but the method I described will result in much smaller files. The method is more complicated than simply changing file types.
Something was wrong with the .wav file. The file was damaged in a very strange way. Try reuploading it.
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Two questions come to my mind:
- How are you planning future dialog updates? Surely, actors will have to be dedicated for longer than short term.
- (off topic) You said quests go menu-driven. Does that mean list-clicking answers?
Otherwise, I've got only one word for sound immersion: \\o//
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We are going to use the speex format to compress the files. MP3 (or Ogg) is a generalized format for music and such, and thus missing opportunities for compression of voice that speex finds. Speex is a very dominant format, being used in lots of things from Ventrilo to Asterisk. We are seeing compression ratios of 40:1 and even one of 75:1 with "acceptable" quality. This is crucial because the audio will be pushed in real-time on demand to each client from the server.
You guys are welcome to obsess about model numbers of microphones but I think it shows that you are missing the point. As Xillix pointed out, we are not even attempting to get to "pro" quality audio here. This isn't Oblivion, I believe he said.
- Amateur voice actors
- Uncontrolled background environment (machine fans, etc.)
- Low quality mics
- Compressing the bejesus out of the result
We are doing this because we think it will make the game more fun. We're offering to have players help us record because we think it will be fun for people to contribute. If you think it is fun to help write the guide about how to make the best audio, that's fine too, but I don't want to scare off people from trying to record.
If you don't like the end results, you can certainly disable the audio voicing entirely and never have to hear an amateur voice or compression artifacts. :-)
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hmmm then we can play another game, guess who's voice it is \o/
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That wav file used the codec araw according to vlc which did not actually produce any sound for it, it played fine in audacious and xmms, perhaps it was a codec issue. The tool I used to make a recording I also used to make a speex based file which was quite small but the tool gave it a spx extension which I could not find a palyer that would play it except the tool that I actually used. Anyway this was just a quick and dirty example I made for posting.
I could have compressed the mp3 further and the wave file was at 2200khz, 32bit and 705kb/s as far as that goes.
Speex is commonly used in voip programs like teamspeak and i believe skype. It is probably a good choice and obviates the need for fancy equipment.
As far as synthetic voices go, ie festival, I think it might be useful, for kran or derghir voices. It doesn't really matter what kind of license the application has because you can always encode the actual sound produced with a different codec, the one concern might be distinctive voices that may be held to be proprietary. You can however use this tool to create your own voices. You would probably want to for non-human inflections anyway.
I think this is a fine initiative, however it works out.
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There is zero chance we will be using a voice synthesizer. Boring robot voices will not achieve our goals.
Speex is part of the Ogg framework, so if you download Ogg codecs for Windows Media Player, WMP will play the spx files. CS obviously has a new speex plugin now, developed by us, so you will not be required to download Ogg or anything else other than PS to play PS.
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I could have compressed the mp3 further
A lot further. The file was much too large to be useful I think.
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/me examines the mutilated corpse of what might possibly have once been a horse...
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I vote for Prolix to contribute/apply - his voice is sonorous and fitting, in my eyes :P
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Why would we not go for this (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html) it is perfect for what you want (on demand pushed to the client) and you record your own voice samples to build up a profile. No idea why you would think this is like microsoft sam. Sounded like a normal person.
PS. if you do build a profile prolix should be in for sure (has my vote).
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Umm... because robots can't act? :-)
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We know that studio mics like the SM58 are the gold standard, but where do other microphones fall?
Gold standard? Im a recording engineer and by no means is a SM58 good enough by my standards for any professional game. First reason is the microphone was designed for a live sound enviroment and not a studio one. However the Sm57 has been used on micheal jacksons earlyer albums to great effect but this was mostly due to high quality expensive outboard. I know this is counter productive but no one has mensioned condensor microphones yet so. I also would like to help counter this speech problem your having. typicaly speaking the human voice consists of a high amount of mid range frequencies, because of this pc microhpones are only designerd for this range in mind "partly unnatural but possibly effective:". Due to the problem your having i wouldnt consider high end microphones a lickly resolution as their made to capture the full vocal range which you hear daily on single tracks and for the most part people wont own them. Also its highly likely that no one studio will be availible free with enough voice actors. What i propose is geting people to submit a audition via mp3 format at 128kps mono of a pre wrote dialogue from this you can esstablish the quality of sed persons equipment, their voice tonality and the type of enviroment their using for recording which imo will be a big factor in producing a quality product. After which i would assign each actor a spesific role to suite their vocal type. Lower voices may suite larger characters where lighter more well spoken voices may suite more intelliget/smaller characters such as elf's "think lord of the rings". submissions with poor results should just be discarded because they will probably bring down the quality of the product. Im sorry if that seems abit harsh to seem but i think its a realistic. im not trying to tread on peoples feet just offer an opinion. Again its late when i write this so my english may be poor as im vary tired. MAny Thanks John hope ive helped a little xxx
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Ok, so let's say I have a beautiful, deep manly voice with a tiny bit of an accent, and I'm ready to audition.
What kind of hardware do I need to obtain the required quality level? Can someone post a clear, definite answer to that? Anything that plugs directly into a PC, or not?
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Hi guys (i'm a new prospect :) :)
I used to sell these, and would rate them for their price. This depends on what the dev budget is of course.
http://www.provantage.com/samson-technologies-sac01ucw~7SASN001.htm
Straight into audacity!
Also, whilst I realise that this is no doubt a decision for the developers, I would be happy to produce the sounds recorded using a mic like this (including noise removal, vocal compress and audio compression, etc).
Here (http://www.edwardblakeley.co.uk/talan_friendly_ulukaigreet3.ogg) is a very short sample of a voice over I recorded and produced for open source game OpenOutcast (http://www.openoutcast.org). This sample is 12kb in size of the OGG format and sounds great in game.
Edd
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This depends on what the dev budget is of course.
There is no budget. Volunteer game done by volunteers. Everything is donated.
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Hi guys (i'm a new prospect :) :)
I used to sell these, and would rate them for their price. This depends on what the dev budget is of course.
http://www.provantage.com/samson-technologies-sac01ucw~7SASN001.htm
Straight into audacity!
Also, whilst I realise that this is no doubt a decision for the developers, I would be happy to produce the sounds recorded using a mic like this (including noise removal, vocal compress and audio compression, etc).
Here (http://www.edwardblakeley.co.uk/talan_friendly_ulukaigreet3.ogg) is a very short sample of a voice over I recorded and produced for open source game OpenOutcast (http://www.openoutcast.org). This sample is 12kb in size of the OGG format and sounds great in game.
Edd
There seems to be some distortion on the end of "friend"....
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There seems to be some distortion on the end of "friend"....
I'm afraid I can't hear what you mean! There is a reverb trail but no distortion.
The sound clip has been processed to sound very low (that is the voice of the alien race in oOC).
Edd
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http://www.megaupload.com/?d=JV3ZDH4A
I just did this with an old akg d50s. This is what I would consider to be a high noise recording, and it's probably what you'll run into a lot. Eddyster's "Old Friend" recording is low noise. (As a sidenote, I can't hear the distortion anymore.)
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There is zero chance we will be using a voice synthesizer. Boring robot voices will not achieve our goals.
Why would we not go for this (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html)
Umm... because robots can't act? :-)
I don't mean to say you should or should not use a voice synthesizer, but listening to the same audio recording over and over again is also robotic. Whether you use one or not really depends on whatever your goals are.
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Artificial voices take a great deal of tweaking to sound even acceptable.
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Artificial voices take a great deal of tweaking to sound even acceptable.
What kind of tweaking specifically?
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http://www.festvox.org/ (http://www.festvox.org/)
skip to this page (http://www.festvox.org/festvox/c3610.html) for a bit of an idea once you are all set up.
It does seem they ave gotten away from pure sound modulated computer audio but I haven't looked at this for some years.
It looks at a cursory glance like you now utter the phonemes yourself and record them. I'm not really sure about any of this as I played with the standard voices which were not great at the time.
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Hi guys would really like to get involved here and wondered where you're all at and whats the priority for the project. i have a wealth of knowledge as a drumandbass producer but i can get involved with anything music vocals etc. Can someone fill me in on things and ill get to work
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if you really want to get involved your best bet is to apply to the team then they will tell you what you need to know to get started. most of the time info like this is not public due to the way the game is developed.
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ok cool so who do i need to contact
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http://laanx.fragnetics.com/nexus/
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You can also ask around on #planeshift (http://www.planeshift.it/chat/)(<-click). The music department seems to be more active lately (or there actually may be somewhat of a department now) and people there may be able to tell you more. This probably works better than the nexus route at the moment.
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I would reply in a PM as prompted by the OP, except as a new member apparently I can't send PMs yet (which is a fair anti-spam rule).
I haven't even created an account in game yet. I plan on first getting as much detail about the game world so I can best plan out my character first.
However, I would be willing to do some voice work. I used to do community theater, and I've LARPed for years. I love to act. I don't know much about tweaking the audio files I would in turn record, but I do have a headset mic. I currently only use it for Skype, and haven't tried recording with it before, but I can try recording some samples and sending them in.
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It would also be a good idea to record different vocal combat and crafting sounds diffrent races and genders make, such as with weapon/tool swings and spellcasting. A variety of such sounds mixed with silence on and off, so it doesn't get grating, would add to the game's atmosphere. A slider can be inlcuded for the frequency of such sounds.
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Just curious, but are you guys looking for musicians to help with the instrument skill as well? Or is that priority farther down the check list. :)
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@mesmer
Different voices styles and accents are planned
@bangladeath
yes please all musicians are welcome apply here http://www.planeshift.it/recruitment.html
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@mordraugion
I was referring to sounds like "Rargh!", "Ugh" etc. Emote sounds/words could be implemented as well.
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@mesmer
I meant sounds like "arrgh" "oof" etc along with the spoken dialogue ;)