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Xae · 10-24-2010, 06:29 PM,

Being that I'm the sound guy, I'm creating this thread so that we can decide on the details of how to implement voice acting in BM. This is not relevant to the present stage of development but warrants proper preparation none the less.

I've previously expressed my idea regarding this, and here's the full version of it. A lot of this is speculative and not meant to be taken as fully developed.

Site-note #1: I think we should invalidate persuasion in BM. All characters are immune to it (both the skill and any and all persuasion spells and abilities) and their attitude towards you is affected solely by quests. I realise that persuasion is a part of the gameplay in Oblivion but it's just so anti-immersion breaking that I don't think anyone will miss it.

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Voice Acting Outline

My idea is built around NPC categories. The whole motivation behind this is to minimise the amount of total lines of dialogue while still allowing for a world that feels inhabited by creatures all born capable of speaking (and also to take into account the various races and languages that exist in BM). Also, we don't want to make the player feel as though voice acting was cut because of reasons other than good game design.

NPC Categories

Clutter NPC: Purely cosmetic character without any persona lines. These people will only respond with a short, often dismissive line (or bodily noise) when activated. They do not even necessarily have names. Examples include: random townsfolk, establishment patrons, "filler" NPCs.
Minor Character: Character with actual lines and some degree of characterisation. The player can initiate actual conversations with these. However, they're not significant to any plot but are mostly voiced for practical reasons and frequency as well as necessity of use. Examples include: establishment owners, characters involved in quests and any otherwise clutter NPC with unique dialogue lines.
Major Character: These are the guys with deep background stories, developed character traits, significant involvement in one or more quest lines and with specifically crafted appearances.

Separating all NPCs into one of these categories will allow us to use as many characters as we need without having to create the "generic voice sets" from Oblivion. No lines will be spoken that are uninteresting and just there because of principle.

City Atmosphere

As we all know, vanilla Oblivion is full of townsfolk awkwardly stumbling into each other, suddenly realising that they're meant to be talking, after which they proceed to have something that only technically qualifies as a conversation. These random NPC-to-NPC conversations take up a huge amount of lines but the fundamental idea is rather stupid, as the end result is nothing like what you'd actually see in the real world.

Kicking a dead horse aside, my idea is that we scrap these conversations and use a variation on what they did in Gothic II. While walking around in cities (or any place where we deem it beneficial) the player will hear NPCs talking to one another. This to serve as either just atmosphere or as necessary for a quest. However, it will not be random. In the spirit of categories, these are the various types of NPC-to-NPC chatter that'll be present. Each has its own practical circumstances. I'll do my best to explain what I mean by each type.

It's worth remembering that a little goes a long way. Given that cities are small, just two NPC-to-NPC conversations per city would work just fine.

Note: Depending on what animations (specifically standing poses) are available, these can be very varied. What animations are available in vanilla Oblivion and are there mods out there who offer additional ones?

Very useful animations would include: Leaning against walls (on back or side), sitting with elbows on the table, walking slowly, standing with arms crossed etc.

The implication is not that these conversations are interesting to listen to, and they're not intended to be easily audible from afar.

Exterior Atmospheric: In cities, people who know each other sometimes stand around talking, or they walk at a slightly slower pace while talking. Or they talk while doing something. What they talk about varies greatly but it's typically non-personal stuff, like gossip or what they spent last night doing. This talk can be in English, but also Argonian or any other language, whatever we want.

In practice:

Example 1: In Gideon, a Dark Elf and an Argonian are sitting in the shadow of a house, near the creek. They're casually discussing what they've heard about politics in Cyrodiil and are making a few morbid predictions so what'll happen if the Oblivion gates start to surface everywhere in Black Marsh. Their voices are quite quiet and they're not very articulate.

Example 2: In Gideon, two Argonians are standing under the Serpentine Emmanuelle. They're speaking very softly, closer to whispering. One of them apparently stole something from a shop in Soulrest and he's asking his friend if he knows of a fence that would be interested. If the player steps close to them, they stop talking.

Example 3 (very dependant on animation, scripting and general time required): In Soulrest, two females are walking down the road talking about one of their kids almost having gotten eaten by a behemoth living in a nearby cave.

Example 4: In Stormhold, three Argonian mercenaries are standing/sitting near the outskirts of the town, talking about their jobs with a small amount of levity.
Interior Atmospheric: Depending on the place, these can range from really private conversations to just gabbing away with your friends at the Hole-In-The-Wall. Often these are whispered and people stop talking when you're near them. These can be in any language, of course.

In practice:

Example 1: In the Marshland Glow Inn, two Dunmer as sitting opposite of each other at a round table in one of the corners. They're whispering something about a Redoran-Hlaalu conflict in Morrowind.

Example 2: In an inn on the countryside, an Argonian and an Orc are sitting at the bar, talking loudly about pulling the legs off of a mudcrab one by one.

Example 3: In the Serpentine Emmanuelle, a Khajiit is talking to one of the... 'women', about having his bachelor party there, the same kind that his friend Deeza had back in '08, except without the need for the salve cream.
Quest-related: Spoken more coherently, perhaps with a subtle hint of drama, and in a less casual tone of voice, unless it's a conversation intended for eavesdroppin'.

Standard Conversations

This is what happens when you activate a character; standard dialogue. I'm including this here because it'd be interesting to examine ways to set BM apart from vanilla Oblivion by modifying how this works. Anything from something subtle like modifying the dialogue interface to something more drastic like changing the camera angle.

What, if any, options for customisation are available here?

Conversation Encounters

In Oblivion, the player is sometimes 'locked' in place and forced to watch something happen, such as the killing of the emperor in the beginning (which I could've totally prevented if it weren't for my fully-body arthritis suddenly flaring up). This feels a bit ham-handed and I'm wondering if (and this is largely tied with the above subject) we could transform it into a very simple version of what the conversations are like in Mass Effect 2, i.e. having several characters involved and still allowing the player to say something, as it were, here and there, to make certain key points in quests feel a bit more interesting.

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There are a lot more things left unsaid but this should serve as a good start.

Ibsen's Ghost · 10-24-2010, 07:36 PM,

The main concern, of course, is implementation. The generic lines worked well enough to create a sense of 'life existing' even if it wasn't very convincing. What you suggest does away with repeated incidental lines but brings in more specific lines. My general impression is that this would be difficult to achieve as a labour-saving device without a heck of a lot of preparation beforehand. People would be more reticent in BM but at least what is done would be meaningful. You would still need some degree of 'generic' voice files but these could be cut down as you suggest (the lack of 'persuasion', for example). However, such cutting down does have the slight disadvantage of making a mockery of some embedded game skills...such as 'personality', if getting rid of 'persuasion'.

It's a pity SACarrow is not so active these days as he is a very experienced individual in such matters.

Xae · 10-25-2010, 07:50 AM,

Personality is still used as a magic stat, as I recall, and completely leaving out persuasion would give actual significance to earning someone's trust. All in all, I think it's a game mechanic worth mocking, and not one that is particularly useful to good quest-writing anyway. I'd like to think that serious characters would not be credulous enough to simply demand to hear that 14 year-old girl in Memphis-joke in return for their trust, but rather through some kind of significant favour. Should we poll everyone for their thoughts on this?

I don't think it'd take more effort at all. Much less, in fact.

We start by writing all the quests (without using persuasion or the 'ask a random guy for the quest update'-bit), including the dialogue for all the characters. This is something we'd have to do regardless, and we'd save ourselves time and poor quality by leaving out the stuff in parenthesis. Then we'd proceed to voice and implement the minor and major characters, including all the shopkeepers and NPCs that have lines but aren't involved in any quests. Also something we'd have to do anyway.

The real difference comes now when it's time for all the NPCs without significance, who are there just for atmosphere. By scrapping all random conversations we save ourselves a ton of time and the mod becomes, in my opinion, better for it. Same result if we only have bartenders and innkeepers dealing out rumours, not every person you meet (this would also allow us controlled environments, where the innkeeper in the Marshland Glow would give out way more morbid and creepy stuff than the innkeeper in The Howling Seadog).

We then record 5-6 short dismissive lines per race and gender and then we can add as many clutter NPCs as we want, just walking around making the place(s) look inhabited, without anything to say.

Optionally, we can then add some of the exterior/interior atmospheric conversations. As opposed to the random ones from vanilla Oblivion, these would be spoken by the same people each time - one file for each line, instead of 20. To add variety, we could add several segments to these conversations so the player wouldn't hear the same part time and time again.

Deeza · 10-25-2010, 09:48 AM,

"I NEED TO TALK TO YOU."
"I SAW A MUDCRAB TODAY..."
"GOODBYE."

Couldn't agree with you more, Xae. I think Oblivion would have been superior if they'd left out a lot of the random dialogue and conversations. At best it looks stilted and awkward, at worst it's somewhere between hilarious and creepy. They'd have got a better effect by cramming the cities with more randomly generated NPCs and had crowd-of-people-talking-in-a-market noises playing in the background (something we should perhaps consider?).

Also agree on avoiding the Persuasion Pie-Chart of Doom. It just looks silly and it's downright implausible, as Xae says, that a hard-nosed xenophobic Argonian tribal warrior would be swayed by the PC doing his stand-up routine.

Xae · 10-25-2010, 11:37 AM,

I've considered using a crowd-chatter sound effect in the cities. If we were making something like Assassin's Creed then it certainly would work. However, a few people does not a crowd make. Oblivion's cities are so very small, and appropriately inhabited. If you have only a few dozen people or less living somewhere, then it'd be very strange if the market square was crowded.

That being said, having crowds in Oblivion would probably kick the FPS down the drain. We can and probably should have significantly more clutter NPCs than in vanilla Oblivion, but having too many isn't something the engine was built for and it doesn't make sense given the size of the cities.

General rule of thumb when it comes to crowd-based sound effects is that if the player is able to stand in any spot and effectively discern that there not enough unseen people around at any given moment to make the sounds that he hears, then the crowd sound effect won't work. Also, it's often a binary choice. Once you go below an omnidirectional sound (like what you'd hear in a properly crowded market square) then your ears will be able to actually tell from which directions the sounds are coming from and that makes it obvious that the people you see aren't actually the ones doing the talking. In other words, it's either fully crowded or several spot sound effects placed around the area.

With regards to Gideon, I think a crowd would be the wrong direction. If we want it to be a rather apprehensive place, then I say we go for a few scattered whispered conversations. If you walk around often hearing someone talking in a low or whispering voice then it'll certainly feel like it's not a very friendly place.

Soulrest is another matter. It's got tighter streets and obscured vision for the most part. Here we could probably use a crowd effect, since the player won't be able to effectively see all the places near him. With enough people walking around, we could likely sell it. I think we'd do well to properly plan the placement of clutter NPCs, should we choose to go in this direction.

Then there are of course some engine limitations. While I continuously ask the UDK's sound engine to marry me (I love the UDK on the whole) but she won't have any of it, the Oblivion engine is rather handicapped in this aspect. It has omnidirectional and spot sounds but no efficient way of creating blends and fades. Adding a few sound effects here and there shouldn't be a problem but that's probably as far as I can take it on my own.

When we get a wiki going I'll probably add a few pages to structure the sound effects of cities and special cells; rootworm tunnels, quest dungeons and the like. Sound is such an effective way of creating atmosphere and there's nothing like heading down a dark cavern while listening to a loud growling sound. Incidentally, using subtle but persistent omnidirectional ambience could be an effective way of making dungeons feel more unique.

Ibsen's Ghost · 10-25-2010, 12:45 PM,

Sounds good to me. The best thing to do at this stage is to see if it's do-able in terms of scripting. I'm not familiar with this stuff but I get the impression that turning off rumours and suchlike as it works with the OB engine will be problematic. I could be wrong though as I don't know anything about this area but I do remember SACarrow coming across various issues that were a real pain in the neck that should have been easy to implement but that Bethesda had used as part of their framework. I know, for instance, that silent mp3s need to be used for unique dialogue if there is no actual recording...silly stuff like that.

Basically, the technical aspect needs treatment before the planning and writing as we could find ourselves doing work that is impossible to implement....that's my only real concern.

Xae · 10-25-2010, 03:06 PM,

Indeed, I very much agree. We should test everything new to make sure it works before progressing with it.

With regards to rumours, instead of turning them off we could have every non-bartender NPC simply reply with "Why are you asking me? Talk to a bartender." This (if it's possible to assign only a single "rumour" to all BM non-bartender NPCs) would also help players get introduced to how it works in BM. Given that there'd be no random folk to ask for rumours anyway, it wouldn't result in many extra lines that need recording.

Could we PM SACarrow and ask him to take a look at some of this and share his thoughts?

Dr.DeathDefing · 01-27-2011, 05:38 AM,

May I add that if you make the cities with a lot more NPC's then you'd have people like me getting a laggy game. Even with sky trees and grass culled. And you'll either need to have a few of them living in inns and/or make more houses or have apartment blocks like bravil.

Adding to the persuasion bit, we could do a F3 and have the dialouge option of repeating the question except in brackets have "jingle gold pouch" this was added for some dialouge options if the speech challenge was crucial to a quest and the player failed it. So it might be a good idea to do this if your looking to kill the persuasion circle.

Deeza · 01-27-2011, 09:07 AM,

Good point. I thought fallout's dialogue system was a great improvement over Oblivion's.

Dr.DeathDefing · 01-27-2011, 09:20 AM,

By far. It impacted nearly everything in the world, the worlds opinion of you (Karma) and of course it is just funny at some points.
Do you know why they had far more severe curse words in it then they did in OB?

Getting a little bit off topic sorry.