NPC?s that talk using the sound system.

[Fish]

Getting the NPC?s to talk using the sound system might make an interesting way to get quest started.  In most quests you have to find an elusive NPC and asked them a specific question.  With vocal NPC?s you could have a play staged.  The play is the beginning of a quest.  As the quest goes on the people taking on the quest will hit other points or more plays are kicked off.  A key element in making this work is to involve the player more deeply in a plot.

I believe an example might be in order to better illustrate this concept.  I?m going to base this quest on a monster that I developed in the monster thread.  Here is a reprint of that monster.

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NPC monster.

It looks like an NPC talks like an NPC has the same AI but is actually a monster. A standard quest might be finding one of these and getting rid of it.

Name: shape shifter

Class weight: same as NPC or player character.

Physical Traits: same as NPC or player character.
Physical Attacks: weapon in hand.
Magical Attacks: can confuse and blind
Items Dropped: Magic weapon and cash. If you track it back to its layer it has a hoard

Life/Hit Points: reasonably high.

This monster lives in cities. It is always up to no good and use usually the source of a lot of murders. It takes its time and picks its target to get the maximum money available. Since its target?s are usually rich nobility there is quite often a handsome reward for killing one. Since it can change its shape at will they are hard to locate without spells. Once you find one they are hard to kill. Accepting the quest is not for the fainthearted. If not detected they will eventually travel to another city to wreak more havoc. Generally player character?s are not attacked by this monster. However if they are rich enough and have enough status they can be targeted.
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The quest starts with the player character being invited to a party.  The party is being thrown for prince for his 18th birthday.  The player character catches a couple of conversations as a third-party.  It seems some of the guests are worried about a new Duke that has come over from a neighboring kingdom.  Just before the prince is going to make his entrance a loud scream rings out.  The prince has been murdered along with a servant.  The new Duke is nowhere to be found.

The player character is brought up before the King.  The King wants answers about how his son died.  Since the player character is beside several other NPC?s that do all the talking no interaction is required.

Upon leaving the castle the player character is contacted by the assassins Guild.  Apparently there Guild is now being targeted by the King?s men.  They explain that they have no interest in harming the royal family in fact it?s in their best interest to keep them quite well alive.  However they have information on what did it.  They then explain the above monster in some detail.

At this point the initial play has been set in motion the player character has the option of accepting the quest and gaining both the support of the royal family and the assassins Guild.  There?s also a hefty reward from both parties.  However tracking down this monster and killing it is not trivial.

The advantage of involving sound in a quest I think is obvious.  It adds an element of realism to a game they cannot be duplicated by simply reading text.  It also plays out like a movie or play right on the screen.

Even though I seriously doubt that would it would be reasonable to expect anything like this in the first game it would make an interesting future project.  Most of the elements to make it work already exist.  The only additional element that I believe that would have to be included to make it work is the ability to a use sound on a target when it hits a specified location.  Another ability is the server would have to be able to take over a character and move it around like an NPC for a finite amount of time while the play is being run.

[Drilixer]

so... you want voice acting?

[Fish]

Yes it would involve voice acting however that?s not the point.  The idea is to use sound in a staged setting to add realism to a quest.  The quest set up would in fact be like a play where you are the main character.  At intervals in the quest this engine would kick in again from time to time to show the player they are on the right track and to give them clues as to what to do next.

Each quest would take a fair amount of time to build.  This engine would not be kicked in for just any quest.  However I believe you would add realism to a quest that would make players search them out to do them.  When this game is more mature this feature that would give future developers something fun to work with.

I suspect the first quest done this way would be a fairly lockstep deal.  However once developers get into it they could develop quest with many independent intermediate steps and several different endings. Yes it has been done before, final fantasy is a good example however I?ve never seen it in this venue.  Furthermore when I?ve seen this it usually wind up being the point of the entire game.  In this game each full-length quest would be in the form of a downloadable module. As time rolls on their would be more and more to choose from.

This would satisfy the game within a game concept as well.  There could be whodunit murder mysteries to action-packed raids.  They could be short stories to full-length novels.  The key is to tell a good story where the player is the main character.  By adding targeted voice and lockstep sequences this can be accomplished.

This assumes that the game engine part that does quests is reasonably flexible.  I?m assuming that they are planning on doing a better job than Ever Quest where almost every single quest is a scavenger hunt.  This idea is in addition to a decent quest engine.

[Wedge]

Yes, but you don\'t need voice acting to do this, because for one there is no way in hell you want voice acting in the game, the resources for that kind of thing being done well are not cheap nor practical.  Just look at Vagrant Story, entirley text-based but the simulated people talking in an entirely believable manner.  And I didn\'t really read all you said because I am lazy and never do, but yeah, ummm, Vagrant Story rules.

[Caldazar]

Voiceacting eats bandwidth. People with 56k wont be able to enjoy PS. Plus, people who dont pronounce english like an american/englishman would have lots and lots of problems.

[Fish]

Voice acting does not need any bandwidth at all.  It is essentially a file resident in your hard drive.  I am not proposing that it be a long-winded graphic novel.  You would download the quest as an extra file complete with all voice necessary to make it work.  When you?re done with the quest you can delete it.

As for the language problem the snippets of sound can be translated.  However there are accents in English that are easily understood such as the British accent used in the BBC.  Sound effects can also be incorporated as easily as speech.  The computer would dispense each sound snippet on cue.

[Nazeroth]

ok 1. us 56k\'er would NOT like to d/l extra qeasts all the time. 2. this is a free game, meaning i would rather they spent their money on extra servers and whatnot, not acters. and 3. it would be ALOT of work if this game wanted to go international (language wise).

[Drilixer]

Originally posted by Nazeroth
ok 1. us 56k\'er would NOT like to d/l extra qeasts all the time. 2. this is a free game, meaning i would rather they spent their money on extra servers and whatnot, not acters. and 3. it would be ALOT of work if this game wanted to go international (language wise).

once the game is made we better be downloading loads of quests at least every month but back to the topic voiceacting is unrealistic if you don\'t pour money into it\'s development and obviously that isnt going to happen here

[Fish]

This thread has gotten mired down into bandwidth voice acting and 56K bod modems.  So let?s go over implementation point by point.

1. Nazeroth?s 56KB bod modem issue.  The key is you do not actually have to download the quest.  It?s optional.  You can always run the quest and text mode.

2. Nazeroth?s spending extra money issue.  I don?t think you know the cost structure of it.  One of the reasons why it?s free is that they are not spending much money at all.  The development team is working for free.  This doesn?t mean they aren?t getting anything from it.  They are getting exposure to game building and the satisfaction of knowing that their game is in line with their vision without some corporation telling them what to do.  Although this is not entirely a GNU project it?s pretty darn close.  If you want to know more read the cathedral and the Bazaar.  It pretty much explains it all.

3. Nazeroth?s it would be a lot of work.  This entire game is a lot of work. Next time you play a videogame go ahead and read the credits.  There were literally hundreds of people that work on some of them.  The credits for final fantasy go on for some time.  Translating this game to a different language would be incredible work even if there was no voice acting in it whatsoever.  The fact that some quests might actually be acted out would almost be inconsequential compared to redoing all of the regular quest on top of all NPC conversations.  I wouldn?t expect this game to be in anything but English for quite some time.

4. Drilixer?s voice acting is unrealistic.  Then why is it done all the time.  More video games are coming out with voice acting everyday.  It adds a touch of realism that can?t be beat.

5. Drilixer?s pour money into development.  See argument 2.  

The real question is what would it take to pull it off.  Essentially it has to be programmed in the game engine.  The game engine just has to be able to spit out a sound segment at a particular time or condition.  There is more than one reason why they might wanna do that.  To queue up a particular sound effect for instance.  Like say somebody breaks through wall into a new zone it might be nice to have an explosion sound.  There might be a variety of battle cries that player characters or NPC?s could yell.  Some monsters might have distinctive sound they make.  So you might get quite a bit of use out of this feature without any voice acting at all.

As far as voice acting is concerned what does it really take?  Has anybody ever played with a program called cakewalk?  It?s essentially a sound studio on a computer.  Then you need a microphone.  It doesn?t sound like a whole lot.  If anybody has played in a high school play they probably have all the acting experience they need.  How many voice parts would you need to actually make a quest.  Three possibly four at 10 paragraphs each.  How much downloading do you think 40 ten second paragraphs would take.  And yes they are compressed.  Six to seven minutes of sound is the same as a pop song.

So you don?t really need money just a group of people willing to talk into a microphone with feeling.  Translating isn?t much of issue because there won?t be much of that anyway.  Downloading isn?t much of an issue because you really don?t have to do it.


Once again this isn?t for every single quest in the game just a few of them.