Voiced Audio Alerts

quote: people can swap out depending if they they want the announcer from starcraft, warcraft, C&C, company of Heroes, etc

This may cause a copyright infringement and therefore be not allowed by ZK devs...

I luv it.

I want an even more sassy 'congratulations commander'.

I think you should combine it in one widget. You don't want multiple voice lines to run over eachother, so you need to share some state. For deduplicating some logic and starting the work on the settings interface it will be useful too.

first of all, nice work!

i am inclined to create the audio files for ZK and add a "robotic" touch to the sound. then it can be part of ZK itself. i was experimenting with the mass effect reaper sound distortion for any given voice ( similar to )

what do you think about this? would you want to collaborate?

also, we have an experienced sound engineer, who just needs some convincing ( looking furiously at katastrophe ). in my opinion all the sounds of ZK are somehow in need of improvement. some are too mashy, repetive, multiuse,...

As for overall sound quality in the game, yes that's something I've been thinking about since I first launched Zero-K. For sure we need frequency adjustments. At the very least simple things like Unit Responses shouldn't be triggering subwoofer rattle, I suspect a lot can be done with high pass filters for things like that. Possibly even the explosions need a 50% reduction in bass response and to cut out absolutely everything under 20hz. Then we can put light frequency band filters on everything but the most impactful unit interactions so that the map audio doesn't get so muddy when the trench warfare starts. This will also allow Voiced Audio Alerts to better cut through if they're not competing with every glaive laser for frequency response.

I've read through all of this thread which I think lays out very clearly what is going on: https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/36127?Search=&User=&grorder=&grdesc=False&grpage=1

For the Zero-K "Official Audio of the Game" I think the number one priority is going to be that the source clips for the spoken words is pleasant and high quality. These are lines that thousands of people will hear thousands of times across not just years, but probably decades (my first login is 10 years ago). There's a reason Blizzard labored so intensely on their sound design for their classic RTS, and it makes the gameplay hit much harder because they nailed it. I think this is what has caused people to shy away from tackling this part of the game, it has a big impact on the perception of the game and it's hard to build consensus around something that needs to be performed by probably a single un-paid voice actor. Hopefully building in customizability for players to swap in their own files will make it easier to reach consensus.

Knowing every line we need and getting a performer to deliver it well into a good recording environment is going to be the hard part. Creating the right synthetic voice modulations on top of great voice lines we've recorded is comparatively much easier. I have access to professional recording environment and could potentially start asking around some contacts for pro-bono voice actors. But we need to 1. nail down every event trigger for a Voice Alert and 2. have the complete script for voiced lines we want to capture before moving on that.

In the meantime, if you can produce recordings and want to supply them either for testing or consideration of a final implementation, or to be preserved as an alternate, or for people to slot in to the file tree and start using right now, that would be awesome! Having original recordings at all would be a huge step forward right now.

Here's the script of lines that are currently implemented for anyone who wants to start building out the foundation by recording them:

Base is under attack!

Commander is under attack!

Congratulations, Commander!

Economy sustaining damage.

Energy is low.

It is a draw.

Metal capacity reached.

Nuclear Launch Detected!

We have been annihilated!