Work in progress: Voice acting

[MikkoMMM]

This is going to be a common effort to voice act all of the lore in the game. This post will list all the current recordings and I'll try to update it frequently. There are no specific rules, you may even record already voice acted parts if you think you can do better. If this becomes an add-on or perhaps even part of the official game then we'll just have to vote for the best ones but all of them will be accessible here. It would be great if we could have a different person voice acting for each different in-game person but we won't probably get that many people to do this so do as you see fit.

You can use this spreadsheet for details about individual pieces of lore.

infinite-dungeon-4 (beta34) by Elkan
dust-to-dust (beta34) by Elkan
dreadfell-poem-level-5 (beta35) by Grey
creation-human (beta35) by Grey
last-hope-tolak-statue (beta35) by Grey
troll-poem (beta35) by Grey
moons-human (beta35) by Grey
dreadfell-poem-level-2 (beta35) by Grey
dreadfell-poem-level-7 (beta35) by Grey
fearscape-entry (beta35) by Grey
ancient-elven-ruins-note-1 to ancient-elven-ruins-note-3 (beta35) by Grey
thaloren-lament (beta35) by Grey
sandworm-note-1 to sandworm-note-7 (beta35) by Grey
halfling-feet (beta35) by Grey

[Canderel]

Oh my word. Perhaps a wiki page is better than a forum post to keep things organised.

All i can say is... Wow. I think all the lore is probably the length of a 200 page novel. So perhaps chose those that's main plot related first.

[darkgod]

Ahah amazing!

I'm sure we can push ToME4 download size by a good chunk if all lore & chats are acted
But I can manage it to be optional so yeah go for it!

You can post them there, but register them on a page of the wiki for easier tracking too.

We'd need more than one person to do it though, to vary the voices.

PS: in Dust to Dust there is some strange noise before Skeleton section, a bit of editing would do well ?

[Elkan]

Yeah, that's kind of a first draft type thing, I whipped that one up quickly to get an idea as to whether it was the sort of thing desired or not. I plan on re-doing that one.

[Grey]

Yeah, there's well over 40k words of lore, and more planned. And, um, what if we want to make changes to lore pieces? :/ Plus there are a number of problems with implementation - what if you want the speech stopped?

On another note, fiddle with your volume settings a little - the recording is very quiet. Audacity has some great tools built in for volume normalisation and truncating silences. I've also found when recording Roguelike Radio it's best to go through afterwards in minute detail to cut out every little cough, mistake, gasp for breath, etc. Really adds to the professional feel.

I could probably do a few pieces if this is desired. I feel the works of Greynot would be most appropriate for me! I've already done the trollish poem before actually, and was planning on putting it on Youtube with some pictures, but then I had a hard drive fail :/

[Grey]

Oh, and another big problem is women. There are several major pieces that we'd need women for, and a bit of a shortage of female players. Um, anyone any good at squeaky voices? ;)

[Grey]

Hmm, I said 40k words of lore, but with all texts and chats it's probably over 60k. So you're talking almost a full novel's worth of text.

[Elkan]

I started recording in audacity but I'm very new to the audio editing/post processing malarky, I'd be quite happy to simply record large volumes of the lore and pass it on to someone more experienced in audio cleanup and editing, although I get this sneaking suspicion I won't get off so easily

[Canderel]

31mb? For 1 piece of lore...

You'll need to tone down the quality settings. 1 minute worth of talking should be less than 1mb. Make it mono, 22khz I think should suffice. I also think audacity has some noise reduction, which would make the silences flat line, which reduces the size of the file too.

[darkgod]

Well we have quite a few female players I believe, any volunteers ?

[Rectifier]

Sorry but my large voicebox and adam's apple says no.

[Elkan]

If someone can pm me a transcript of all melindas dialogue I can probably get a female actor friend to voice it, don't really want to dig through the game files for it for fear of spoilers though.

[darkgod]

There are not much more spoilers in the files than you'd see anyway with the transcript.
The files are in data/chats/last-hope-melinda-father.lua (the first 3 are actually her father obviously) and data/chats/melinda-fortress.lua

Note that melinda will get more lines someday, so your friend will need to do more later on

[Grey]

I figured I'd join in the fun:

http://gruesomegames.com/tome4/melikestoclub.ogg

[Grey]

Some more:

http://gruesomegames.com/tome4/skeletonpoem.ogg
http://gruesomegames.com/tome4/ghoulpoem.ogg
http://gruesomegames.com/tome4/vampirepoem.ogg
http://gruesomegames.com/tome4/humanmyth.ogg
http://gruesomegames.com/tome4/moonsisters.ogg
http://gruesomegames.com/tome4/kingtolak.ogg

Found some problems with the end being clipped off in the two Gerlyk legend pieces - will fix at a later date.