Author Topic: Robot voice future plans... plus idea  (Read 3529 times)

Offline Teal_Blue

  • Hero Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 935
Re: Robot voice future plans... plus idea
« Reply #15 on: September 18, 2013, 12:52:58 pm »
just a thought, but could Arcen use Chris and Keith and Josh and Eric and Daniette and their spouses voices through the 'robotic voice filter'?

In that way you could possibly get different voices (if they don't all sound alike) and on a budget, as using in house voices is perhaps not as costly as using outside voice actors.

-Teal


Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Re: Robot voice future plans... plus idea
« Reply #16 on: September 18, 2013, 12:54:35 pm »
True, that's a good point.
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline Pepisolo

  • Arcen Volunteer
  • Master Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,511
Re: Robot voice future plans... plus idea
« Reply #17 on: September 18, 2013, 01:21:45 pm »
Quote
just a thought, but could Arcen use Chris and Keith and Josh and Eric and Daniette and their spouses voices through the 'robotic voice filter'?

Sounds like a great idea if you guys are up for the job. One slight flaw might be in keeping the raw audio of a consistent quality. Not sure what your mic set ups would be like compared to Khadgar.

Oh, here are a couple of filters I did. These are the best two. Having a lot of fun with this, though. I finally get to use those soundfonts I donated to get (just higher quality versions of free ones).

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30011618/Bot%20Audio/Digistring(10%20distance).wav
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30011618/Bot%20Audio/analogbot.wav

Oh, my friend couldn't understand a word of the second one.

Oh there's a lot of empty space at the end of the track. These are quite rough with no pitchshifting. Probably shouldn't be showing them actually, but hey I'm sure someone's interested.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2013, 01:25:00 pm by Pepisolo »

Offline Pepisolo

  • Arcen Volunteer
  • Master Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,511
Re: Robot voice future plans... plus idea
« Reply #18 on: September 18, 2013, 09:34:37 pm »
Here's a replica of the standard voice, but daleked up. Thanks to Trebor and Steve on audacity forum for showing how to get this effect. It's basically a little scarier. Here's the info on how to get this sound:

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=43844&p=111046&hilit=vocoder#p111046

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30011618/Bot%20Audio/standard-daleky.wav

Offline keith.lamothe

  • Arcen Games Staff
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 19,505
Re: Robot voice future plans... plus idea
« Reply #19 on: September 19, 2013, 12:15:49 am »
If I had a decent mic I'd give you my best impression of Stephen Fry reading Marvin from Hitchhiker's, but I don't have a studio mic by any stretch of the imagination :)
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games? Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline khadgar

  • Full Member Mark II
  • ***
  • Posts: 192
Re: Robot voice future plans... plus idea
« Reply #20 on: September 19, 2013, 02:26:33 am »
One thing that could possible be done, though I know very little about it, is to apply some sort of adaptive audio effect to the voices (or maybe the sounds too).

That is, apply some modulation at runtime to a smaller selection of sound files to produce a wider variance of sounds. I know that lots of games do this in situations where you'll have a single sound effect played many times in a row, to avoid sounding too samey. For example footsteps or gun firing sounds might be slightly modulated a tiny bit each time the sound is played so it doesn't sound like you're just playing 1 sound effect over and over.

Maybe this could be applied to the voice files, but instead of random variation, it could pick a different minor variation per grouping. I know that many of the lines are only said by a very small selection of bots to whom they are relevant (e.g. only bots that heal can ever say things about healing). However because of the greeting & death lines (and maybe a few others), which are globally shared, this might be worth investigating.

EDIT: Sine Pepisolo gave his takes on reengineering the voices, I figured I'd do mine. I'm a noob at audio engineering, but it was fun to mess around with the various effects and parameters.
« Last Edit: September 19, 2013, 03:23:03 am by khadgar »

Offline Pepisolo

  • Arcen Volunteer
  • Master Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,511
Re: Robot voice future plans... plus idea
« Reply #21 on: September 19, 2013, 11:27:41 am »
Interesting idea about adaptive audio effects, Khadgar. Not sure how feasible it is, but sounds very cool.

Very nice robot sounds, too. Much more professional sounding than my attempts. Good stuff.