Development:Audio

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Introduction

Thes guidelines standardize the sound and music in order to achieve equal quality for different contributions throughout the game. This standards are applicable for:

  • music
  • voices for intership radio transmissions, and perhaps campaign fixers
  • other sounds

See Also In-Flight_Non-Musical_Audio

Sound Requirements

The following quality settings apply:

  • 44kHz sample rate (the best that most microphones under $200 can produce)
  • Mono for voices and sound effects (stereo is acceptable)
  • Stereo for music
  • Vorbis OGG format (which puts everything in stereo) for the final production version

Music Requirements

FIXME

Music Engine

The soundserver (integrated in VS) handles playing songs, while the Vega Strike engine handles sequencing them using the defined playlists (which are selected according to the situation by dj_lib.py).

The soundserver uses SDL to play them, which supports .mp3, .ogg, .wav, I don't think it supports flac (perhaps on Windows), and it does support .mid (but I have the feeling it will get dropped, at least temporarily, during the soundsystem rewrite, as supporting midi with only OpenAL is simply impossible - we'll get something later, though, don't despair).

.m3u lists are just like winamp lists, which are a bunch of files, each on its own line (relative paths are computed against where soundserver.exe is, which is usually inside the bin folder - and usually you want to always say ../music/something ), and you can add comments (on their own line, I don't think it works on the same line) by starting the line with '#'.

Playlists are stored in the user-data folder (usually under ~/.vegastrike), inside their own folder hierarchy (~/.vegasrtike/playlists). Inside playlists, you may find additional grouping, by situation:

  • battle
  • peace
  • threat

Inside each, you'll find a playlist for each faction. Usually, the faction is selected according to the system owner at the time battle/threat/peace happens, though inside peace you'll have also around_sig and away, which get selected according to whether you are near a significant unit (base or planet - dockable) or not. That all gets configured in dj_lib.py, so if you add playlists, you have to add them to dj_lib.py as well - I doubt anyone will have to add playlists, though.

Inside playlists, you can (currently - until the extension commands get added) bias the frequency of some tracks by simply repeating them on the playlist. The engine will avoid playing the same track over and over, having a record of recently played tracks.

(information provided by klauss)

Music Engine Future Plans

Eventually, we'll add sequencing commands to playlists, disguised as special comments (probably '#!<command>') - that will allow us to specify a bayesian network for the tracks, with (potentially) custom transition - that means, each track can have a certain subset of tracks follow it, with a certain assigned probability. That's not that far in the future, it needs not wait for the rewrite, as it's doable as an enhancement to the current engine.

(information provided by klauss)

Voice Acting

Voice acting provides in-game voices for ship-to-ship radio transmissions, and perhaps some day for campaign fixer conversations. Ongoing projects are discussed here http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=29

Current voice acting projects are as follows:

  • Oswald "flight tutorial" mission: DONE by Turbo for Pyramid Dec 08
  • Ship-to-ship communication: ONGOING see below for the faction list.
  • In-flight entertainment (news, etc) see In-Flight_Non-Musical_Audio

Voice acting is easy to learn and fun to do. For instructions on voice acting, see Turbo's tutorial.

Fixer Voice Lines

Eventually, as campaign missions are written and finalized, we hope to produce voice acting for them.

Ship to Ship Radio Communication

This type of voice acting provides audio to go with the faction-specific ship to ship communications that lend fun and atmosphere to the game.

Broadcasts are keyed to events in the game, so each line must be in a separate file. To aid integration, the file names must follow this format:

<FACTION>_<OPENING-TEXT-OF-LINE>.OGG

Examples: 

 aera_lesser-being.ogg for the Aera broadcast, "The lesser being is always vanquished."
 rlaan_boring-boring.ogg for the Rlaan broacast, "Boring, boring, tiny one!  You bring us no tupperware."

A ship-to-ship factional communication voice acting package should include the following:

  • Documentation: a text file that names the voice artist, lists the lines spoken, and provides any technical details about how the voice was created, edited, etc, to aid future updates.
  • All the faction's speech, one voice line per OGG file, from VS/data/communications/<FACTION>.xml
  • The "bounty text" line from VS/data/modules/missions/bounty_leader.py, which reads: It appears we have something in common, privateer. My name may be on your list, but now your name is on mine. This voice line's file name must be <faction_name>_it-appears-we-have.ogg in order for the code to call it dynamically.
  • The updated <faction>.XML file that tells the game to play the sounds, by adding the SOUND FILE tag after each node's text comment and before the EDGE INDEX tag. If the node contains two sets of text, just add two SOUND FILE tags one after the other. Here is an example of the SOUND FILE tag and where it goes:
<node text="Make room for your betters, friends. Room for your betters." relationship=".03125">
<!-- node 4(random good chatter)-->     
<sound file="communications/sounds/highborn/highborn_make-room-for.ogg" sex="0"/>
	<edge index="4"/>
	<edge index="5"/>
Note: Currently the game code that assigns gender to ships does not function, but when it does and
we get enough voice acting for both genders in all factions, female voices will use the tag SEX="1"
  • If the faction is an alien language, the following additional guidelines apply:
    • the translator's voice should sound flat in dynamics and pitch, while remaining clear and understandable; more on that in the next section
    • The alien voice should speak for 1 second before the translator starts
    • When the translator is speaking, the alien voice should be muted by -7 Db to make the translator easier to understand
    • Also provide one or more alien "fixer" lines, without the translator overlay, that we can use for randomly generated fixer conversations in bars
    • Ideally there should be 2 versions of the package, one with the translator overlay for the English version of the game, and one without the translator so that voice actors can eventually create versions of the game in other languages. For alien voices that were created via some mathematical or logical algorithm, include information in the documentation about how it was done.
  • For communication lines which end in "[garbled]", indicating that the ship was destroyed while the pilot was broadcasting, use a 1/2 second burst of white noise, at 70% volume, at the end of the spoken line.

Faction Voice List

Here is the list of the production status for each faction's voice. If a faction's "citizen" variant has the same lines as the base faction, it is not listed:

Creating the Voice for the Ship's Translator

For aliens which speak a non-human language, the ship's translator will provide a "voice-over" of the alien speech. To make the alien speech easier to hear for gameplay immersion, and to account for differences in grammar, the translator voice-over begins one second after the alien voice broadcast.

Some translator lines are the same for all the alien races. Turbo already created those and posted them in the Aera thread http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=13311. What remains to be decided is whether all the translator voices should sound the same.

This took some experimentation to get a good result. Our first attempt used MicroSoft Narrator's "Michael." MS Narrator's voice meets the criteria for a cold soulless machine voice, but he was too hard to understand. We also tried applying a "vocoder" to a human voice, but it was also difficult to understand. What we settled on, to represent 1200 years of voice-generation and translation technology, was the following:

  • record all the translator lines in a flat, emotionless voice
  • edit out unwanted noises like lip smacking, breathing, etc
  • apply noise removal and click removal effects
  • apply a low pass filter for 15K Hz, other values default
  • apply a high pass filter for 1000 Hz, others default
  • apply the leveller (heaviest setting)
  • if desired, adjust pitch
  • if desired, repeat the click removal, filters, and leveller again
  • make other edits as required
  • amplify to full volume

The effect of all these transformations, including the repeated ones, is to make the translator's voice as clear as possible but still sound a bit mechanical. You can separate each translator line into a separate file for editing, or keep them in one larger file and cut and paste the translations into the individual alien voice lines.

Creating Alien Voices

A subset of voice acting is the creation of alien voices. The short tutorial below describes how Turbo created the voices for the Aera and Rlaan ship-to-ship communication.

This is the process I used to create alien-sounding speech without actually developing a language. If someone wants to do this for another race, please do, and start a new thread in http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forums/viewforum.php to get feedback on your work.

To begin, you should look at my voice acting tutorial to get some basics about sound editing tools and how to use them: http://www.willadsenfamily.org/us/don/ttlg/voice/va_tutorial.htm tutorial

The aera speech is based on humpback whale songs I found on the Internet. I used whales because they came to mind when I read that aera have vocal resonators (Artstyle_guide:Aeran) in their heads, instead of vocal cords in their throats. I plan to use insect sounds for the Rlaan. Other alien races' speech could be created with similar techniques, using different animal sounds or your own voice as the basis for each species. I modified the raw whale sounds by removing noise and clicks, then adjusting the tempo to 350% and the pitch down an octave. Audacity makes this easy. For example a tempo change in Audacity will not change the pitch, so you avoid the "Alvin and the Chipmunks" effect. Then I saved the individual bits of modified whale sound into different files so I had a variety of tones, growls, and grunts from which to choose.

The Rlaan voice was a combination of 3 different insect noises, reduced in pitch by different amounts, and DTMF tones (using the first 8-12 letters of the translated line) adjusted in pitch by -87%. These 4 tracks were split among the left and right stereo channels to simulate Rlaan having 4 mouths spaced several feet apart.

Once you have the alien voice lines created, open each translator's line one at a time. Mute the translator's speech so it will be silent while you work with the alien speech. Import the alien speech bits into a separate track of the same file. For the Aera I used tones to represent positive feelings, growls for negative feelings, and grunts as modifiers. Different aliens may do it differently. Change some individual parts to add variety: change pitch here or there, reverse a few parts if it sounds good, and add silence. It is best to do this with the (muted) translator speech on the screen so you can see how the patterns line up, and it is easy to select a few seconds and play it to see what it sounds like without the voice over the top. For silent portions of the translator speech, put a particularly interesting part of the alien speech there. If the translator is difficult to understand for a particular word, make the alien speech pause at that time. There is no reason an alien language would have the same tempo as its translation. The translator and alien can be approximately the same length, because when you go with the final OGG format both will be mixed into stereo anyhow.

Finally, deamplify the aera speech by -3 to -7 Db, whever sounds good without making the translator difficult to hear. Do this by selecting that track and the Amplify command. Then, unmute the translator, and listen to the alien voice and translator together. Make any final edits to the alien speech. If you can play the result with your eyes closed and understand the translator, while being aware of the alien voice behind it, you have it right.

Voice Acting Uploads

Once you have created a voice set, compress it into a ZIP file and upload it to the web, then post a link in the Music and Sound forum to get everyone's comments. If you do not have web space of your own, we have an FTP site that you can use. The public URL for downloads is http://www.willadsenfamily.org/VSvoice but to get upload access, go to the VS forums and send a PM to Turbo or Loki.

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