We need short voice clips recoded by a number of vice actors for all our major races in combat. If you want to hear your voice in this game please do this. Go to SharePoint at http://www.botf2.com/default.aspx
and take Shared Documents / Sound Recordings / Romulan / Rom Combat and listen to what is in each subfolder. The lines are written out for you at the end of this post. These are the lines intended for the games combat engine.

If you want to reword some or add in a de-cloaking and cloaking line that will be great. Give it your Romulan arrogant tone or testosterone for the Klingon. Keep them to one, two or at most three words as this needs to be fast for combat. No sound effect or music as this comes from the combat engine. The combat engine uses wav file format.

Now think of the same situations for the other races. Make up a new set of lines or use these again. You can check out the other sound recoding files to hear what others have done with each of the five major races.


Recording suggestions: Try putting the microphone close up but to the side of your mouth and nose. This will keep you from recoding a rush of air as you exhale forcefully. Recording studios will use a screen to block that extra rush of air. If you want to go to the trouble rig up a fin mesh screen. Do not bump the microphone. We will hear that too. A good microphone really helps.


We like WavePad for editing the recorded files. http://nch.com.au/index.html It is out there as a free trial you can work with for a few days. They have a recorder as well. I use some of there other products like the mixer for productions like what you can hear in the game trailer files.



Original Romulan Voice Clips:
(Attach Subset) Think of your own lines that would come up in this setting

Attack formation
Charge Weapons
Engage Enemy
Fire Torpedoes
Fire Weapons

(Damage Subset)

Hull Damaged
Shields Degraded
Shields Down
Ship Destroyed
Station Destroyed
Venting Plasma
Vessel Destroyed

(Defensive Subset)

Defend Region
Defensive Stance
Disengage Combat
Patrol Region

The five major races are Federation, Cardassians, Klingon, Romulan and Dominion.

When you say the original Romulan Voice Clips, do you mean that you want more of these or you want different ones?

Either or - The same wording in your voice or think of something different if you can. We just need to cover the same situations in the game.

Oh, ok. I will see what i can do. I am still trying to get use to the sound enhancing software.

I uploaded a set of combat recordings for the Federation. More later but work is ongoing on the in-game png images for the Dominion.

There are some Klingon combat clips uploaded.

There is now a set of Cardassian combat clips on SharePoint.

Thunder47 is my new hero. He actually recorded some clips for the combat engine.

http://www.botf2.com/Shared%20Documents ... hasers.mp3

http://www.botf2.com/Shared%20Documents ... unders.mp3

http://www.botf2.com/Shared%20Documents ... s_life.mp3

Keep up the good work. Talk to Strobel if you plan to keep up with the recordings. He can give you a login to SharePoint.

If you like them ill carry on going

Make it so

Any updates on the voice clips, Kenneth?

I'm making an updated credits list for the game, so if we're using your voice clips, thunder, i'll add you to the credits. So if anyone else wants to make voice clips for the game, you'll be listed in the credits too!

Add Thunder in. The rest is unchanged.

We still need Mike to do the Cards and Wolfe the Dominion but these guys are busy busy.

I would like more than one voice for each race. We need people willing to record the full list of voice clips.

I don't mind helping out with this. I did a full quota of Dominion lines for Ultimate Mod 4 beta, which seemed to come out ok. I'll dig out the mic and give it a go anyway.

Is there a finished list, or list of those clips already done? We'd rather not end up with a load of duplicates.

Duplicates are a good thing, Daf - we can choose the best ones then, or even have them all in and let the game randomly choose one. That would help to reduce the repetitiveness of combat then, and it would just sound cooler having lots of different voices. That's actually one of the things I like about Starfleet Command 2 and Legacy; they have quite a few different officer voices. Legacy isn't very good at matching captains up with the correct ships though.

In fact, here's an alternative.

I used a program for synthetically generated speech for one of my mods to cater for new races, and it worked really well. It could be a good solution for certain short clips of dialogue.

There are a few such samples in the zip attached..

Yes, the quality of speech sounds better than what I have been subjected to from other programs of that type. Would you make voice clips as outlined above please?

What program did you use, Daf? I'm used to only hearing Microsoft Sam, MIke, and Mary, and the voice you used is way more realisitic than any of those three.

I used Textaloud mate. And the reason it sounds better is because (cringe) I actually bought it, with the sole intention of making Ultimate Mod 4 truly ultimate lol. My own voice which I used in voice clips for a previous version just wasn't good enough. A Bristolian accent just doesnt do a good job of mimicking Romulans and Klingons etc lol.

But textaloud did a good job, I was really pleased, as the fully licensed copy comes with high quality voices. I can't remember how much I paid, $30 maybe. But I only purchased the two voices (a male and female called Mike and Crystal). Extra voices will cost more though I imagine.

And yes I'd be happy (very happy) to use the program for something in this game, as it will put to use a paid for application that I have no other use for. Can you tell me exactly what dialogue to create - what races, what areas of the game etc..?

And also, if we want to have one voice per empire, we may well have to pool our economic resources and buy some more. I'd prefer each empire voice to be unique.

Here's some sample clips from the list at the start of the thread.

Thanks Dafedz. The files are being stored on SharePoint here:
http://www.botf2.com/Shared%20Documents ... 44987A3%7d

Go to the intended race folder and then combat folder to sort out the files. I guess the sample is maybe Cardassian? It is up to you.

Cheers for that Kenneth. I think I want to experiment further though. These robotic voices sound a bit too robotic, in that it's not possible to input pitch, context or emotion into the speech.

I also like a great number of voice samples already on sharepoint. What program is used to change and modify the voices, to make it computerized, electronic or Borg-like etc? There might be some neat effects I can apply that would better disguise the artificial nature of textaloud.

cheers

If you're looking to apply different effects to the voices, NCH have a fantastic program called Wavepad. They've got a free trial of the program. It's time-limited, but it comes with 95% of the features available in the paid-for version. I'll send you more info about the program in a PM.

Audacity is pretty good free program. Borg effects are made via echo, but it is usually better to copy the same or different voice multiple times (at least 4 tracks of the voice on a clip usually does it) and start each one just off by the others by fractions of a second (same effect as echo, but more control over it). There are a whole bunch of other effects in the program too, its fairly robust.

I use Audacity myself, and whilst it is great for recording voices, I prefer to use Wavepad for applying effects. Wavepad has a special effect called Chorus, that allows you to add echos with slightly altered frequencies - so it sounds like there is more than one person talking at the same time. It's quite a useful feature for making Borg voices, but I find it works considerably better on human voices than on electronic ones. I've only got access to Microsoft Sam Microsoft Mike, Microsoft Mary, and Robosoft 1-6 though, so it might work better on more modern electronic voices.

The voices don't come as standard though; only Microsoft Same comes with Windows XP by default. (Vista gets more but I don't know which ones) If you have XP you need to download them separately.

Click Here To Download And Install Voice Package 1

Click Here To Download Voice Package 2 (Unzip to a folder then run the setup.bat file)

I was just wondering. Is there a very good reason why we can't use the existing voice track from Botf for game events, or at the very least for combat? This is still not a commercial venture.

I us Wavepad as well.
We could us voices from the game or even the shows as long as they fit our feeds
I will get back to tracking down voice actors again at some point. I have great Klingon in mind.

Wouldn't there be legal issues surrounding our usage of the files though? A free, community-produced project like this is relatively rare afterall; our usage of those voices might be misunderstood by the legally-inclined. The confusion over whether the game is actually abandonware/vaporware or not also makes things more difficult. It's obvious that Atari don't understand the value of what they hold the rights for, but in some respects that also means they're probably not looking into it - or at least they aren't for the moment. But they might change their minds if they heard about our usage of the files. It would be a whole lot safer in the long run to come up with our own voices, even though it's pretty easy to extract the 1364 voice clips from the game.

I will be recording a new Cardassian voice actor in early May. Can anyone suggest ways to make these two word phrases sound more Cardian?

(Attach Subset)

Attack formation
Charge Weapons
Engage Enemy
Fire Torpedoes
Fire Weapons (What is the Cardassian beam weapon? Not a phaser?)

(Damage Subset)

Hull Damaged
Shields Degraded
Shields Down
Ship Destroyed
Station Destroyed
Venting Plasma
Vessel Destroyed

(Defensive Subset)

Defend Region
Defensive Stance
Disengage Combat
Patrol Region

Just because I don't think we should use the actual voice clips from BOTF, that doesn't mean I don't think we shouldn't quote it. We could always use the same script for the voices. As long as we use new voice actors, our files will be different and there shouldn't be a legal issue.

Cardassian weapons ARE Phasers, Kenneth. I believe they also used Disruptors as a secondary weapon.

There would still be a legal issue because the sound of the voice is copyrighted along with the dialog, the collection of the voices would be viewed as a whole as part of the entire work (ie the game). That being said, if you have come this far on the game using the same script that is probably the least worrisome thing in terms of copyright or trademark infringement. My personal opinion is that using new voices is a good idea just to give the game its own personality, and using some of the old dialog from BotF isn't such a big deal because it was pretty good and some phrases are just too common to trek to leave out.