Voice/Sound Notifications

I want sound notifications in-game because other RTS games have them.
Like this

"Worker has completed a build queue."

"Factory has completed construction queue."

"Your units are under attack."

"Your <building> is under attack."

"Strategic nuclear warhead stocked."

"Anti-nuclear warhead online."

The only thing that gets sound alerts in-game is the Commander getting attacked and "Warzone paused".

How much money should I throw at the developers to have this happen?

Here's the ticket for this issue. Our problem so far was largely the lack of available voice talent*, so the best thing to contribute is work.

If you have no ability to do this kind of work, but you have excess money to throw at the problem, you could spend them directly on a voice artist or artists of your choosing who you think would fit with the ZK theme. This also involves some manager work of finding and communicating with that artist, of course.

The linked github issue is supposed to help with that, as it provides a list of messages in order of importance, and at least some requirements and guidelines.

i like the nuke and anti notication idea. but for unit and building attacks i think it would be too much as it generally happens all the time, possible a unique sound triggered, but not a voice\sentence.

i think alarms about stalling and excessing on eco would be helpful for people, its common, but when its stupid waste they need an audio. esp when its extreme.

We don't need "voices". We can get voices if we want, but I would literally much prefer just techy alert tones like the commander to a sentence alert. Age of Empires 2 never had voice alerts: just a trumpet for units under attack, and trumpet+bell for buildings/workers under attack. Not having alert tones for under attack is one of the most glaring remaining issues I have with this game. Somehow though, I can't remember losing more than a small section of the map without being aware, though. And maybe that's because of the easy zoom functionality, or because of the global weapon sounds. Thinking about this gives me nightmares of hearing the scythes' weapons.

I assumed it was just that no one has taught me the setting, yet. Is there no setting to enable "under-attack" tones?

"Reinforcements have arrived."

TBH, the noise the commander makes while being attacked doesn't even sound all that important, I sometimes ignore it until it's too late. Something that can convey more urgency would be welcome. But not always. Which brings me to my next point.

It seems like options are not popular around here. Why can't we have a choice of whether we want sounds/voices/tts/silence/burps/whatever and just be locked into one sound scheme? I'm not talking about implementing those things (and how hard it would be), just that it sounds like in such discussions it's always assumed that we must have one thing and not some other as a choice, so if something is changed, it had better appeal to everyone... or else. Is there a reason for this?

There was some widget (by Ivica I think) with voice notifications like that, if you can find the forum thread.

quote: It seems like options are not popular around here. Why can't we have a choice of whether we want sounds/voices/tts/silence/burps/whatever and just be locked into one sound scheme? I'm not talking about implementing those things (and how hard it would be), just that it sounds like in such discussions it's always assumed that we must have one thing and not some other as a choice, so if something is changed, it had better appeal to everyone... or else. Is there a reason for this?

Options are extremely popular around here. Zero-K is insanely customizable and is overflowing with things you can tweak, adjust, and outright overhaul. If you can code, you can write a widget to change pretty much anything; if you can't code, chances are good that someone has already written a widget to do what you want and all you have to do is enable it and configure it.

What the dev team is rightly cautious about is presenting too many options to the typical user and overwhelming them with choices. It's particularly bad to add options that the user has to be aware of and deal with. The devs have been working hard for the last few years to make the default user experience as good as it can be so that most users will be well-served without even knowing that options exist, let alone how to change them.

If you'd like something changed, like, say, having voice notifications, there are three approaches:

• Persuade the devs to work on it
• Persuade a non-dev coder to work on it
• Write it yourself

Developer time is always limited, and in general they work on things based on what they perceive the priority is to the game overall, combined with whatever catches their interest at the time (remember, everyone is doing this purely as a hobby). So the more people who ask for some new feature, the more likely it is that the dev team will work on it. But if they don't, someone else can. I've done this a few times myself, and so have a lot of other people.

Any new thing that anyone adds becomes an option. Unless the devs think that it improves the user experience for the typical new user, it's going to default to being off. And the option itself will be buried deep in the advanced options menu, which itself is hidden by default. But it'll be there, and you can turn it on if you want it.

quote: chances are good that someone has already written a widget to do what you want

Case in point:
https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/blob/master/LuaUI/Widgets/gui_news_ticker.lua

And I swear I saw someone make custom voice packs that yelled "BRUTALITY!!" for attrition over 200% and shit. Maybe even had a firepluk joke. Should be in a forum thread somewhere.

if someone gives me a rough spec of what's needed I can look into recording

Things I'd like to know would be
1. File format
2. Single track or seperate for each clip
3. any prefered voice style (eg, gender or trying to make it more robot sounding)

starting quality will be poor but if the general idea is good I can put more effort/equipment into doing it properly