The Meet the Devs threads, though we have stopped updating our feature on the topic as the inane banter about flowers and favourite colours got out of hand, there are still some interesting tidbits. Soundguy Mark "Wolfric Tugmutton" Lampert talks about limitations of dialogue caused by having all dialogue voice acted:<blockquote>What he said is true, but it's still not anything to back away from as there are ways to create a fully-voiced project where everything is good. The main thing is to organize early and always plan ahead, because recording time is a sort of point of no return in regard to the work it takes to re-do dialogue that doesn't work or we don't like, not to mention potentially costly. So you save it until the latest point that you can to avoid re-writes and re-recording. I like to cast very early, and we typically end up doing some early recording anyway (making it necessary), so it's a good time to get a feel for where we are, how the cast works together in the game, and how everything will be on a much larger scale when we do the big recording push somewhere down the line.
Fully-recorded voice does end up causing issues with disc capacity, but everybody in game development has certain limits that they need to fit into, just like the sound effects I produce for the game. I get this much space, art gets this much, animation this much, etc, so you do whatever is necessary to make it work in the end. Could be that a more efficient compression algorithm is the solution, or perhaps there are redundant lines here and there which could stand to go. There also has to be a little bit of extra space built into the whole estimate to allow for localization since translations might come out about 15% longer across the board, or maybe the files themselves are actually a little longer because the dialogue was spoken more slowly. Who knows. Plan and estimate, plan and estimate. It's just one of many challenges along the way, and I think the work required to pull it off is absolutely worth it.
I also don't think that every game out there requires it. I loved the non-verbal, modular languages that were put together for some of the non-human races and robots in KOTOR, or the purely non-verbal but still emotive deliveries in Wind Waker. It's not always going to make sense to do full voice in every game, but for the kind of work we do, I believe it does and it's worth the trouble.</blockquote>Dialogue writer Fred "Fizzbang" Zeleny adds:<blockquote>As Wolfric said, we've got quite a bag of tricks to work around various problems. But I think our biggest advantage here, as Todd said in the GI article, is that our number of NPCs are reduced, in the hundreds instead of the thousands. That gives us a whole lot of dialogue to play with, and I know I've been taking advantage of it in my quests.
As you may have noticed with my posts, I'm a wordy little son of a [gun].</blockquote>And finally, UI coder Ricardo "socrates200X" Gonzalez comments on the controversial "Fatman" nuclear launcher:<blockquote>Hmm...I'm afraid I wasn't present for the "nuclear catapult" meeting, per se...
(...)
Ah, that's better. I have the same concerns most do about it being an uber-weapon, but I'm fairly sure the designers won't be decorating the wastes with nuke ammo or keeping the rad count dialed down to debug levels. I definitely want my character to turn to ash within a certain distance, and catch a baaad case of radiation poisoning at anything farther. Concerning its lack of "realism", I play the fiction card. Concerning its lack of "verisimilitude", I think it fits just fine, although that opinion comes from the personal benefit of seeing it in context as opposed to in a screenshot.</blockquote>Link: Meet the Devs thread #17
Fully-recorded voice does end up causing issues with disc capacity, but everybody in game development has certain limits that they need to fit into, just like the sound effects I produce for the game. I get this much space, art gets this much, animation this much, etc, so you do whatever is necessary to make it work in the end. Could be that a more efficient compression algorithm is the solution, or perhaps there are redundant lines here and there which could stand to go. There also has to be a little bit of extra space built into the whole estimate to allow for localization since translations might come out about 15% longer across the board, or maybe the files themselves are actually a little longer because the dialogue was spoken more slowly. Who knows. Plan and estimate, plan and estimate. It's just one of many challenges along the way, and I think the work required to pull it off is absolutely worth it.
I also don't think that every game out there requires it. I loved the non-verbal, modular languages that were put together for some of the non-human races and robots in KOTOR, or the purely non-verbal but still emotive deliveries in Wind Waker. It's not always going to make sense to do full voice in every game, but for the kind of work we do, I believe it does and it's worth the trouble.</blockquote>Dialogue writer Fred "Fizzbang" Zeleny adds:<blockquote>As Wolfric said, we've got quite a bag of tricks to work around various problems. But I think our biggest advantage here, as Todd said in the GI article, is that our number of NPCs are reduced, in the hundreds instead of the thousands. That gives us a whole lot of dialogue to play with, and I know I've been taking advantage of it in my quests.
As you may have noticed with my posts, I'm a wordy little son of a [gun].</blockquote>And finally, UI coder Ricardo "socrates200X" Gonzalez comments on the controversial "Fatman" nuclear launcher:<blockquote>Hmm...I'm afraid I wasn't present for the "nuclear catapult" meeting, per se...
(...)
Ah, that's better. I have the same concerns most do about it being an uber-weapon, but I'm fairly sure the designers won't be decorating the wastes with nuke ammo or keeping the rad count dialed down to debug levels. I definitely want my character to turn to ash within a certain distance, and catch a baaad case of radiation poisoning at anything farther. Concerning its lack of "realism", I play the fiction card. Concerning its lack of "verisimilitude", I think it fits just fine, although that opinion comes from the personal benefit of seeing it in context as opposed to in a screenshot.</blockquote>Link: Meet the Devs thread #17
