#Cephis - New Announcer Feedback.

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

prisma hamlet
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Leave feedback on the new announcer here.

torpid solstice
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Very Great new voice!

gritty fiber
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I just know the few snippets that got posted, but those are great. I'll play a few games later today and I'm very excited already!

cunning rune
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sounds good, i just cant get past the different pitch accent things in her voice 😭

old marsh
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I don't like it. It sounds too human. Uncanny valley almost. Instead of cool future AI robot assistant, it's like the AI you get on the phone when you call tech support.

fierce canopy
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I think future AI robot assistant will sound more human than humans 😛

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well they already do

ashen lodge
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sounds horrible, if it's meant to be a robot voice the lines should be more monotone and not "like all casual like girl gamer"

barren bough
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I like the new voice pack.

The hint of exhausted disappointment in "your whole team is wasting energy" is great.

solar thorn
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Sadly I gotta agree, nothing against the lady ofc. Some vocal directing towards a flatter intonation with more deliberate/clear pronunciation would go a long way, from the few voice clips I listened to.
I like the post right above this tho 👀 feel bad for wasting resources

stone stream
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I think I prefer Allison, just felt more in line with the game. Cephis sounds more like a teammate rather than a professional VA

prisma hamlet
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So reading the feedback there certainly are a few things that need to be clarified.
We specifically told her not to try to sound like a robot. It was meant to sound natural, but with as few words as possible to give you the information. You guys seem to have expectation of oldschool scifi where computers talked in very robotic, monotone and unnatural way.

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Allison was like this primarly because of the technology limitation, rather than a design decision. We've been trying to make her sound as natural as possible as well, but with varied amount of success.

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Now that said it's perfectly valid criticism if that's what you prefer and maybe expected.

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I also think we're now in a phase of "It's different so it feels off", which is also normal.

ashen lodge
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Here is an example of a very good announcer voice using a real voice actor and later added audio effects from an old RTS (KKND2 Krossfire, German dub)
Something along those lines would not only sound professional but fit the game nicely:

solar thorn
prisma hamlet
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Cephis voicelines are very crisp and clean in comparison

prisma hamlet
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We're not gonna rework the entire thing again and change direction entirely, but if there's a particular voiceline or two that feels off, retakes are not out of question.

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Though I personally cannot think of any. Those that felt off to me got corrected before release.

stark osprey
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Allison sounded hot af but Cephis sounds like a bored cashier.

boreal jolt
flint kraken
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Where can I find the audio samples on disk? to help sharpen my feedback, as opposed to playing a few games to remember what I thought.

prisma hamlet
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You can't

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But you can get the samples from github

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or you can listen to them in the ingame settings -> notifications

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and maybe record them

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or just point out which ones you're talking about

solar thorn
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Ye I used downgit to get the wavs and am running them through Audacity rn

Understood clearly @ not going to rework direction and only a voice line or two. I am gonna yap review the whole thing tho, because voice direction/vo is fascinating to me.

prisma hamlet
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tldr we don't want to change the direction, but we're totally open for improvements when you spot something that doesn't really match the direction, or just sounds weird

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you know

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also yea she's open for retakes when necessary

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and there will be more voicelines made in the future

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so it's good to know what to be aware of in the new ones

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We still have the whole tutorials/hints thing to work on, more Unit Detected callouts, including extra units and raptors...

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Who knows maybe some campaign appearance too

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Just as long as the feedback isn't just "old was better", i'm happy to hear it.

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because if all one has to say is "I prefered old", i'm just gonna dismiss that with "let's talk about it in a month from now when you get used to the new"

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the reasons why you prefered old you guys give are mostly valid though

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even if entirely based on personal preference or expectations

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damn Jaedrik about to drop a bomb. I'm waiting 😄 💖

solar thorn
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Overall way better than my first impressions. Most of these voice lines are perfect.

From the top:
AdvancedRadarLost - doesn't pronounce the omitted d, recommend pronouncing the r of radar like 'dr' or 'tr' , gives a natural meshed together sound common in fast normal talking but preserves announcer clarity.
AircraftDetected - dropping the t in aircraft is OK in the first two lines, extremely common in modern day English, but with less of a lift between the two words. But imo dropping the t in AircraftDetected3 as "aircrafffspotted" makes me twitch a little.
Astreaus - perfect
BaseUnderAttack - perfect
BattleEnded - great. People very often pronounce ttle as ddle.
Behemoth - perfect
Calamity - calamidy, people are used to hearing people change t into more of a d sound

Here I'll pause and point out, I think that part of the 'bored barista' vibe some are getting may come from the dropping t and making d pointed out in four+ of the above lines. I'm also on the lookout for 'vocal fry' as that's a common bored white girl barista trait but I haven't heard any yet. Likewise, people get bored barista vibes from lower intonation of female voices, but THAT isn't something to change imo.

ChooseStartLoc - Very lyrical intonation (lots of slidey rise and fall in the pitch), imo a little too much but it's not as shocking now that I've listened to it like 50 times in a row. I'll get used to it, it's not bad. Ok maybe the sliding is a little bad.
ComHeavyDamage - Commander, Taking Heavy Damage. I assume a gap between Commander and Taking was trimmed out, but the intonation of commander suggests there's gonna be a brief lift afterwards and there just isn't. Recommend using a rising tone for 'commander' and then a fall for 'taking' if you don't want a gap.
ComHeavyDamage2 - This corrects the exact problem from 1 LOL, that tiny gap with that sort of flat/low/long 'commander' intonation feels more natural.

Gonna have to be like 5 part message because I don't have Nitro 😭

prisma hamlet
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Gonna have to be like 5 part message because I don't have Nitro 😭
Make it a google document or something xD

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I'm serious btw

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THIS is the kind of feedback I want to see

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detailed and constructive

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giving us something to work with

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ComHeavyDamage - Commander, Taking Heavy Damage. I assume a gap between Commander and Taking was trimmed out, but the intonation of commander suggests there's gonna be a brief lift afterwards and there just isn't.
Yup, there was a long gap that got trimmed in post processing because we thought it's a bit too long but not bad enough to warrant a retake.

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basically wherever there's a comma in the text, is/was meant to be a pause.

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oh btw, this might help:

limpid sequoia
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I was pleasantly surprised starting a game today, love the new announcer! 🔥

flint kraken
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Ok took a listen to all the samples in in the menu. So not in-game.

I noticed the ones that sound ‘bored’, or ‘disinterested’ are the onds where the tone/volume (not sure what is the right term) goes down/tapers off towards the end.

Examples:
‘you are wasting energy’ the word energy sounds like it was spoken while being distracted. Same with ‘the whole team is wasting energy’ (so for sure there is consitency between them 😃)

‘Radar lost’: the last half of ‘lost’ seems to dissolve into lower volume/tone. Making it sound disconnected from the vibe of the game.

‘Please choose your starting location’ ‘starting’ gets the emphasis, as opposed to ‘location’.

‘Commander, self destructed’: the self-destructed sounds like it was read aloud from an assembly-instruction. (Compare to the actually excellent: ‘commander taking heavy damage).

Ones that are really good:
nuclear missile launch detected (‘detected’ actually has some energy to it)

‘Aircraft detected’ the ‘detected’ part has nice energetic bounce on the letters T.

Not sure how helpful these are, I feel I miss the language to express what makes some of these really take me out of the game. Great to see the effort pit into it of course, and I hope in the future we might get more voices.

Also, if the voice stays as is, I’ll get used to it for sure. Indeed this might be ‘getting used to new’ kind of situation.

prisma hamlet
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That's actually very good thanks

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I'm gonna summarise all this stuff into "which ones we should improve and why" to send it to Cephis after a while.

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After I collect such feedback from a bunch of people

junior compass
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There is no way for me to provide feedback without sounding like a bigot, which I probably am... But have you considered a nice English accent or deliberately artificial AI voice rather than that particular American one 😅 I don't mean to insult the lady, but it's that mixture of bright, apathetic and annoying all rolled into one accent. I'm genuinely sorry for saying that 😭. Bear in mind I find the razkharn and winter (winters voice and accent especially) sound irritating. I.e. lean into the thematic artificiality of BAR and robots, and I don't know if it's just a cultural thing but the American accent is... not inherently pleasant on the ears, whereas my impression is most English speakers find general educated English accents at least neutral, not cockney obviously :p I'm probably one of the only people who will just come out and say it, but there are others thinking it :p just as I wouldn't suggest an Irish accent or Daria's accent even though I love them personally, I think it's subjectively appropriate to find a relatively neutral or universal or applicable one for the universe.

prisma hamlet
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I can barely understand spoken british english sometimes

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lmao

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And while I don't want to dismiss your opinion, British accent is far from being "neutral" for many

junior compass
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Oh no, I get it alot (if not all) of this is cultural. My impression is that most native English speakers will find a particular british (again, a specific middle-high one like recieved pronounciation though, not too high like the queen's, and obviously there are a lot of bad/unacceptable English accents) closest to "mutually neutral/acceptable". Most of the other English accents around the world are going to carry connotations of emotion (or lack thereof) or be locally annoying/unintelligible. This one, no offense, sounds like i've moved to the US and tried to make a psychologist appointment and i've gotten the receptionist and now they're narrating BAR.

solar thorn
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Me listening to RagnarokDetected.wav CHICAGO ACCENT DETECTED

prisma hamlet
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LOL

grave gale
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To be honest, the joy of reading the T1 naval announcements for Legion was short-lived due to my fear of acting changes, and with all due respect to Cephi’s voice actress, I really find that not having the possibility to swap to the older voice actor (Allison), with whom I started to love the game, ends up being irritating at each announcement.

I can imagine there are a lot of different opinions on the topic, so I just want to share mine, with all due respect to the actors and the lead team. I’d like to be able to select the older voice if I wanted to — the alternatives are not to my liking, and this change, small to some, feels very significant to people like me, who, once we start a habit, find it hard to change... especially when it’s an annoying one (as this one may be perceived).

TL;DR

Not really a great fan; I hope I’ll still enjoy the game without voice announcements. Even if I don’t see this as a good decision, whatever the reasons behind it, I hope someone will consider letting players choose between voice actors — or at least explain why that’s not a possibility.

prisma hamlet
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I already explained why Allison has no place in the base game so i'm not gonna repeat myself

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if you find me working Allison V2 TTS from IBM

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We can resurrect the OG Allison

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From before all the AI bullshit that we went through that ruined everything

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hmm

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seems like they still have the V3

gritty fiber
prisma hamlet
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That too

prisma hamlet
solar gyro
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I'm sorry to say but I absolutely despise the new announcer 😭 As others said, it sounds like very bad AI.

Editing this because 30min channel cooldown lol:

By "sounds like bad AI" I meant it sounds like a bad robotic AI assistant, which it obviously is supposed to be. I just changed back to allison and it is like music to the ears. I mean no offense but the voice acting for cephis is just not good and it needs a more robotic tone, allison struck it perfectly. I dabble in voiceacting and music myself, hopefully adding to this, then again I've seen how feedback gets handled lol

limpid sequoia
prisma hamlet
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💀

cosmic whale
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cephis doesnt sound hot

prisma hamlet
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You know, I wonder

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Because there's one thing i was quite sceptical about

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This whole post process setup

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Sounding quite aggressive and harsh

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lemme lower that slowmode cooldown

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But yea maybe it's this that makes her sound unpleasant for some people?

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What do you guys think about this?

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Maybe most of the issue ya all have is this filter.

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I was quite against going this direction but the audio guy i've been working with insisted that this sounds good.

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I went with "Maybe it's just me then"

junior compass
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Its just the accent 😛 Masking the accent with post processing just makes it sound more like i'm talking to the psychology receptionist, but now the receptionist is on a bad line.

prisma hamlet
solar gyro
prisma hamlet
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People want a robotic voice in this game.
Yea this ain't happening and was totally not the intention, never was.

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Gonna repeat myself but even Allison wasn't supposed to sound like a robot

junior compass
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Its probably too detailed to get into in this feedback thread, but even IF we want to get into a more robotic voice, we need more than just overlaying distorting audio filters. its about tone, accent, intonations, pauses, gaps, rising and falling tones, vocal fry (or more accurately lack thereof), etc.

prisma hamlet
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She just did because TTS

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Fuck some people even thought Allison is actually real voice acted.

silk jacinth
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Just my 2 cents which are ofc very subjective: I find the accent irritating and it gives me vibes of a gum chewing student in the last row. Not horrible, but something like a 3/10 for me. And one shouldn't underestimate the influence of audio design on the overall perceived quality of the game. 🙂

prisma hamlet
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Here i'm basically trying to filter out personal preference opinions from more objective problems, since you can never please everyone and people have different ideas and expectations.

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Things like Jaedrik and Joride pointed out

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"I find accent iritating", well, I find British accent iritating. Which one of us is in the wrong?

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the answer: neither

solar gyro
prisma hamlet
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bruh

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now we're gaslighting? come on man

junior compass
prisma hamlet
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Yes

silk jacinth
solar gyro
junior compass
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And is there a redneck/hillbilly polish accent available in your country? Now of course its not objectively right or wrong to say no one can narrate a game in that accent. Theoretically you can read the bible in an australian ocker accent, but it would feel really wrong. And if someone did so, you'd probably come online as a native polish speaker and say "dude, you can't be serious"

prisma hamlet
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Well if the feedback is "I hate it, try again" then i'm sorry but that's not productive.

solar gyro
prisma hamlet
old marsh
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Video games are art, and art is subjective. I prefer a cold, robotic announcer voice (I actually just heard Raz for the first time, I like that one). I think it might help if we knew what the intentions where for Cephis. What is she supposed to sound like?

prisma hamlet
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Well the goal was to get Allison but not sounding like a robot from 50 years old scifi.

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pretty much

solar gyro
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Well I gave my feedback, another thing that would be really cool is leaving the allison voicelines in the game, I'm sure a lot of people won't want to go to the trouble of manually adding them

prisma hamlet
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But rather future AI that speaks fluent english

junior compass
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And similarly, the thing about certain american accents, whether we like it or not, is they're particularly grating/out of place to english speakers not from that region. Boston, new york, alabama, chicago: these are all REALLY distinct to an english speaker. Winter's voice is really grating, i don't know what that is: texas/south?. They're all highly specific to the regions and audiences they're in but are going to sound off to anyone outside. I was going to use Razkarn as an example of something acceptable even if it's not something i would personally use or listen to, but i think it might be another english recieved pronounciation one. Now my reason for saying target RP isn't because I think it's objectively "better", but because i believe its going to be an english accent with the least negative connotations and emotional responses from most native english speakers while still retaining clarity and universal interpretability 😛 Americans and non-americans can still understand it, possibly its culturally attuned because it's the "british announcer" accent, and it doesn't trigger an automatic negative reflex like certain north american dialects and phenomenon (i.e. vocal fry, d/t, rising/falling intonations which sound disinterested/hostile/dismissive).

prisma hamlet
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tldr she was meant to sound like a human talking to you

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and the aggressive post process might've blurred that out and gave a little wrong false impression

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It's very similar settings that are used on Winter's and Razkharn's packs though

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Think of it as an AI voice from the future that sounds indistinguishable from a human

old marsh
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In my imagination, an AI would be very exact in pronunciation, so I find "Aircraff" off-putting, even though that is the way everyone says it in real life.

solar gyro
prisma hamlet
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It even gave us problems to get right in post

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A little behind the scenes

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The voicelines were recorded alphabetically, over a few months

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so all the A's, were first

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so with this knowledge

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would you say the later ones maybe sound a bit better?

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The first batch was also one that got a bunch of retakes course correcting some things

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first version of things like Behemoth Detected sounded very calm

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that felt off for something like that

solar thorn
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1--n-MH6mru8otxXWuTIe5fAQEdb2_x7yc_RC3hL5QnM/edit?usp=sharing
Focus mostly on intonation and pronunciation as that's my sort of area of expertise (I'm a professional singer/autist). A couple technical things.

Google Docs
Cephis BAR VO feedback - Jaedrik

Overall way better than my first impressions, I even think some of them feel ‘Starcraft 1 adjutant’ in the same way that Allison did. Most of these voice lines are perfect. This will include the nitpicks of an obsessive perfectionist, so mileage of feedback usefulness will vary. A recurring nitp...

novel fox
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I need more time to appreciate the new voice, but i think keep it distinctive from human voices like in VC premade team is top priority game sound design.
No matter male/female or any accent, it need to be very different from human voice to differentiate it from teammates real human

earnest plank
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That sounds like a stretch to me.

junior compass
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My only other observation is not so much about the quality of the current voice or any voice acting, but it occurs to me that if we're not using a locally generated synthetic voice, aren't we just kicking the can down the road generating the same problem again that we did with Allison? I.e. if we lose access to a specific voice actor or a particular externally hosted piece of software, then we immediately become unable to record any new voice lines or make changes to any old ones. I guess what I'm saying is the bus factor is still 1, we've just switched key-risk from an externally hosted model to an external person.

prisma hamlet
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I have forwarded all the (constructive) feedback to Cephis and the rest of people involved, updates will happen.

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Just... don't expect them tomorrow

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Grab that Allison mod if you need to for now, besides the added sound effects which are running on another layer, it will sound just like before the update.

tidal willow
teal badger
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I don't think she needs to sound more robotic. I like the clean and clear sound of Cephis now.

EDIT: I will say, I will echo Chronographer's statement of monotone bored announcer. The homeworld announcer is also very great; however, her voice just fits Homeworld.

maiden topaz
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i really dont like what feels like having my settings changed out from under me and then trying to figure out in a team game in a panic how i can change them back and not finding any option for it. is the old announcer just gone? that's still unclear to me where i can even find that information. i really really don't like how this was done, it feels bad for me. it makes any opinion i might have about the voice much worse.

it's so important to have things that people rely on to play the game to not just be changing out from under them. i currently have a very negative opinion about the new voice, but it's so difficult for me to figure out if that has anything to do with the actual quality of it. i dont know, i can't even tell, because the thing is less the quality of the old or the new voice and simply just that it absolutely should be consistent and not be changed like this without warning. it feels like if you messed with my mouse sensitivity or camera settings without warning or something

just in general an incredibly poor game experience

tidal willow
verbal charm
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Was it just me or did allison sound like they were short of breath for the "juggernaut detected" alert. I feel like that extra emphasis was really cool

gritty fiber
maiden topaz
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it's not obvious to me when theres even a patch when i open the game. if i go through my normal procedure of launching the game and joining a game i dont see this, i'd have to go looking for it.

when this happened i didn't even realize it was the result of a patch at first, i was just trying to play and i thought something had broken my settings

gritty fiber
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The launcher very clearly has some blue bars which fill up, and when they're completely full, they turn green. It also does not allow you to start the game while it downloads. Additionally to that, you could just grab the discord role, which would have you get pinged for updates.
Anyways, this is getting a bit off topic. If you had such a bad time with the update and feel like it was not being communicated clearly enough, then feel free to open a seperate thread about it

lucid snow
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audio captain can we go back to old green laser? :C
Or change this new sound to sound more like old sound
@prisma hamlet

astral sandal
# gritty fiber The launcher very clearly has some blue bars which fill up, and when they're com...

tbh, i don't find it that obvious, especially since the download is so fast that one can walk away to get something, come back, and have it done. with that said, i did notice that there was a patch, although i didn't notice a link to patch notes in the launcher, and also didn't spend time looking, as i didn't really care and i know it's posted in other places.

as far as feedback on the new voice goes, idk, ask me in two weeks. right now it's so new i spend most of my time noticing there's something new.

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I will say it was amazing*ing seeing people lose th|or shit over it in the two med\high OS gam|s I speced today. 4 and 5 chev people who didn't realize th|re were other options. Reminded me of when some one turned on boosted start and people [grew and tantrum, refused to even try it, and had to stop

cinder bear
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I dont have much feedback to add but thank you, thank you, thank you for using a real VA instead of gen-AI. I know the temptation on a free volunteer project like this can be very strong so I really appreciate the effort involved in sourcing a human actor.

wooden scroll
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Maybe it’s worth having several announcers - I know some have gone back to Old Allison. Being an open-source game, I wonder if a voice competition of sorts would be good to see what voices (alongside this one) would stick?

As for Cephil, I can understand why the voice actor initially went for a robotic voice. Logically you’d think in the future AI would sound like humans, but that doesn’t necessarily fit from an artistic perspective in a game about fighting robots as robots. This is probably why some people prefer Allison, because holistically the voice ‘fits’ with the theme and aligns with their expectations

prisma hamlet
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in a game about fighting robots as robots
Wait for the lore drop

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There's more "human" in these robots than you think...

stable meadow
finite swallow
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I feel like some parts are muffled... Not as clear as I'd hoped...

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Also... Are we in such limitations that we need to remove Allison, because many people liked her and as long as we don't want to update all voice lines including Ragnar's and Winter's we might as well keep her in...

fierce canopy
prisma hamlet
finite swallow
ornate kernel
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Yeah... no. Allison was a proprietary voice by IBM which they sunsetted. Something "close" is not good enough, it's what led to the quality control mess of Allison over time. It needs to be the exact same. Since we don't have the exact same anymore, it's time to retire her.

unreal galleon
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Ok, some things I think that were not already covered by others:

  • The vocal fry I don't think is entirely the actress' fault. Some of it sounds very artificial, probably the fault of the processing done, but not SO artificial that you recognise it as a stereotypical robot voice. So it sounds more like lag. unit cap, reached
  • The lines are inconsistent. Some lines are dispassionate like friendly plAyer, reconnected, but radar, lost sounds outright depressed, you are wasting energy sounds like she's angry with me. Some are low-pitch advanced radar, lost, some are high-pitch aircraft, detected. I think I'd personally prefer dispassionate, even if not robotic. If you put emotion into the lines, then the announcer needs to be a proper character.
prisma hamlet
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She just switched to a new recording setup and it sounds cleaner

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we will also work on tweaking the post process

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and there will be retakes of most if not all the stuff

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so pretty much both Kroiya's concerns are noticed and will be addressed :>

maiden topaz
# fierce canopy What do you think Alpha means

it's hard for me to detect tone so i don't know if this is an honest question or someone telling me "you're wrong". i don't want to argue with anybody. i was just giving feedback, as was asked. if the response to feedback is just "you're wrong to have the experience you did", i don't really want to engage with that. i'm going to proceed as if that isn't the case. my bad if it is.

the way i ended up here was, as i said, i thought as setting had been changed unintentionally, and i looked at the enormous list of channels on this discord and realized i could not find it by browsing channels manually, so i searched "voice" in discord's search, and it ended up with me in here.

well, first of all, the word "alpha" isn't in a whole lot of places in the game. it's on the launcher under config but that's unclear that it refers to the version. it's not anywhere on the main menu. it's not on the version there. second, the word "alpha" these days has been devalued (and relatedly, "beta" and steam's "early access"). a lot of so-called alpha software is out there and is not "alpha" in the sense it was used 20-30 years ago when it had a clearly defined meaning. a lot has changed since then, for example the concept of "feature freeze" as a delineation to the end of alpha is basically nonexistent.

so, what did i think when i saw the word alpha? nothing. it's not possible for me to guess this based on the word alone in the modern world. so i looked at the context clues. the game looks very complete, and while there are some weirdnesses with the lobby, the game itself is incredibly polished. there is an active playerbase. tournaments for decent chunks of money are run on it. it's been around for what, almost a decade? and the engine it's based on has been around since the early 00s if memory serves? so the context clues imply to me that, no, it's not really alpha in that sort of sense.

i guess my read of the word was wrong, but perhaps you can see why i would have it?

prisma hamlet
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What they're saying is that basically the game is at the stage that some things may be work in progress or placeholders. Allison was not a placeholder but with how much of a mess that project turned into, it kinda became one.

maiden topaz
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yeah that makes sense, reading some of the stuff here, it makes a lot of sense why it was replaced

prisma hamlet
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The inconsistency was the killer

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you had basically like 2 different TTSes and 3-4 different AIs mashed together

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while individual lines might've not been bad, it was awful as a package

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if that makes sense

maiden topaz
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i'm pretty grateful for having a voice actor instead of ai tbh

prisma hamlet
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I don't want to offend anyone but you'd need to be deaf not to notice this problem, or completely ignorant to audio quality, in which case it would surprise me people would care so much about the new one either

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Either way. We've collected feedback and are planning out improvements across the board now.

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It may take a while

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But it will be done

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🙂

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No grand change of direction, but a re-recording of everything with keeping in mind what was wrong.

maiden topaz
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if that's in response to me directly, i didnt really make a comment about any that at any point. of course that stuff is noticeable

prisma hamlet
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The new microphone sounds quite a bit cleaner

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That should result in better quality end result too

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We will try to soften the post processing a bit so it's more pleasant to hear

prisma hamlet
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less bassy on the new one

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less reverb

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should be better to work with

maiden topaz
# gritty fiber The launcher very clearly has some blue bars which fill up, and when they're com...

about this, the launcher does this every time i launch it, and says "download complete" always, and it's basically always nearly instant. i have gigabit internet and an ssd so that might be why. i don't know if it's meant to be downloading something every time no matter if there's a new version or not, but yeah.

as far as having a discord role, that's obviously a workaround, and not a solution

unreal galleon
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also there's a click in the new recording peperip

prisma hamlet
#

but yea

#

she also noticed the click 😄

zinc ermine
#

There may be a slight bug, during the academy practice sesssion yesterday, Jamerz got the notification "your team has reached T2" (playing 1v1) when he placed the blueprint for the t2 lab but didnt actually have any t2 units

prisma hamlet
#

Factories count as canMove = true

#

i think

#

it's meant to play when you get your first T2 mobile unit done

zinc ermine
#

interesting, it was also just the blueprint he didnt have the t2 lab yet, just queued it

prisma hamlet
#

nice catch though

#

i will look into that

#

now that these new notifs have voicelines people will notice the bugs easier lol

unreal galleon
prisma hamlet
#

isBuilding

#

🤔

#

yea i guess factories don't count as isBuilding

#

lol

finite swallow
#

Does she play the game?

prisma hamlet
#

no

#

at least not that i'm aware

zinc ermine
prisma hamlet
#

soooo should be fine

unreal galleon
#

is isBuilding not a customparam?

zinc ermine
prisma hamlet
#

Replays don't play notifs

#

so not really

finite swallow
prisma hamlet
#

...

#

I have a suspicion though

#

this code doesn't have gate for checking if the unit belongs to your allyteam.
I'm 99.9% sure these callins should not be called for enemy units that are in sight.... but maybe they are.

zinc ermine
prisma hamlet
#

Factories do not trigger the notif on my end

unreal galleon
#

I'm confused, don't know why I expected not to be

image.png
prisma hamlet
#

lmao yep

#

i love when code works inconsistently

#

UnitDamaged? nah, only ally
UnitFinished? let's tell everyone!

#

anyways

#

will fix

#

thanks for report ❤️

#

oh this makes it easy

H2oVlshoNqUDmACjFXXqKtJ9vHTgaq.png
#

Fixed for next release

golden wigeon
#

the voice sounds irritating

solar thorn
unreal galleon
solar thorn
#

People using microphones professionally are wary of hard attack on certain consonants, which is why pop filters are everywhere. The softness of the t in this case (perhaps it's a tap on the roof of mouth instead of a traditional t on the top teeth maybe?) might be a learned thing, might be a microphone thing, who knows? But, it's there, which is goooood. I prefer hard attack and clear enunciation over all, people at my old parish used to point out my clear singing. After all, it's always better to sing "Make me a channel of your peace" than "make me a channel of your pee".

finite swallow
#

I swear I can't hear the dif between old and new mic... I am deaf I guess...

solar thorn
#

The resting tone in the new compared to old there is also a half step higher, which is good. Again it's subtle, but

finite swallow
#

Now I know why I like Metal music... I can't hear anything else

abstract trench
#

Please let us turn this off in the settings

prisma hamlet
#

... you can

#

you always could

maiden topaz
#

after playing with it some more, i like the voice actor, but i would really prefer if it sounded more electronic/robotic somehow. partially for reasons mentioned by another person above about it being distinct from voice chats i'm in. but also, i know i saw some people saying an actual futuristic computer voice would sound realistically human, which is true, but i don't think that's a good reason. bar is extremely retrofuturistic aesthetically. all these blocky robots and stuff, and everything else.

also, personally, if i was a future robot ai whatever the heck, i wouldn't choose to sound so human. even if i was a human mind-upload like in TA, dunno if it's the same idea in BAR. i think the idea that a thing might be so realistic i think makes sense for devices made for humans, but anything with its own sentience is gonna be having its own preferences

i do want to just say: good work

finite spoke
#

Cephis is my current favourite announcer atm, was using the male speaker before.

#

If people are not liking it being robotic enough, could just put a very light robotic sounding filter over the voices lines to save time. There's plenty of options/tools in Audacity to make Cephis's voice sound AI like, without needing to do retakes of her voice.

maiden topaz
#

yeah i was definitely meaning with some fx

rain agate
#

Greetings and thanks for your hard work on this hefty audio upgrade!

I am wondering are these new audio files replaceable?

ie, can I overwrite the new 'Cephis' audio files?

If so, where are the audio files located? I can not find them in the game directory.

Found some .wav files and checked inside some of the .sdz files, but no luck yet. Searching for 'Cephis' uncovered nada.

Have asked in the Reddit post, but have not received anything particularly helpful yet. I don't want to use the old version and replace those, as there are "outdated lines" and "missing notifications".

I hope they can be replaced, otherwise maybe we can look into that. Or perhaps someone can make a juicy mod to make it easy to replace these. It can help those who want custom, robot themed alerts. Immerse me in glorious robots!

      **TL;DR** - Where are the *new* audio files located in game folder? Please and thank you.
tidal willow
prisma hamlet
#

Don't replace Cephis files

#

Make a whole new announcer of your own

rain agate
#

Thank you so much!

Ah, so it's not in the game folder it's self, I see.

I've never built anything from GitHub so wish me luck, any advice or a build guide?

So I download the code, swap the files and then try and use readme to make a new build?

prisma hamlet
#

in your local data folder, make a sounds folder, then voice folder, then en folder, then folder named whatever you want your new announcer to be

#

Then fill it with WAV files named like the Cephis ones

#

Announcers are 100% moddable

#

You just need to follow the filenames

#

And you need to export the WAVs as 16 bit 44100hz

#

And ideally without metadata cuz sometimes it fucks it up

rain agate
#

Oh wew thanks heaps, that's much easier! peepoLove

prisma hamlet
#

If its not gonna be built out of ripped assets from other games feel free to post it in #1129127537763692654 when you're done

#

If you export the wavs wrong, the game will throw an error

#

Not crash but it will refuse to play it

#

And tell you the file is wrong

tidal willow
prisma hamlet
#

Yea either way

#

Make a whole new announcer with a different name

#

That will automatically appear ingame as an option

#

You can also make announcers for other languages that are already in the game

#

By putting them in different folder than en

#

We don't have any non english ones yet

#

But the functionality is there

fair hazel
gritty fiber
fair hazel
gritty fiber
fair hazel
gritty fiber
random abyss
#

Stop snitching to my allies that i rushed a t2 lab😂

Nah its great, so i dont forget to buy t2 anymore👌

granite summit
#

she sounds cute AYAYA

celest basin
#

@prisma hamlet Can I DM you with a question about the old TTS model?

prisma hamlet
#

i don't know everything but sure

prisma hamlet
#

@celest basin

mint adder
prisma hamlet
#

Notifications Options menu has volume slider for the notifs btw

#

but yes they are quite loud

prisma hamlet
#

Next update of the voicelines will come with updated filter that will make it a little easier on the ears

stone stream
#

I'm curious as to why Alison was dropped as an option when there are other voices you can choose in settings? Wouldn't it make sense to leave the option intact for the players that want it?

prisma hamlet
#

I have explained it multiple times already

#

The other announcers are being maintained and have consistent quality

#

Allison was completely dead and unmaintainable, as well as all over the place, frankensteined out of multiple versions of TTS and AI

#

If we were to continue supporting Allison, it would be a completely new AI voice anyway.

fair hazel
#

That was harsh, the forced switch bothers me and I much prefer a synthetic voice.

tidal willow
earnest plank
tidal willow
solar thorn
#

The RagnarokDetected line in particular was egregious north continental city accent to my midwestern ear. Raygn'rahk

neon owl
#

I for one think the best way to align cyphis with what the players desire is to make a case study of what comprised amazing voice lines from other games and copy their methodology

In my mind a good start would be copying certain aspects of the homeworld narrator, and understanding the dialect and inflection that makes c&c so entertaining https://youtu.be/ACMoJPjl6Fk?si=tXr_CMP5tEOi0pty

YouTube
XYHC
Normal EVA vs. Chad GLA EVA (Quote Comparison)

Check out my new game on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2503550/Operation_Octo/
(DEMO also available in Arabic and Turkish)

In Comand & Conquer: Generals / Zero Hour, the Global Liberation Army's EVA (Communications Officer Kanwar Khan) has some unique giga chad voice lines ;) The GLA Worker and Rebel Soldier also have some quotes t...

▶ Play video
prisma hamlet
#

So you're telling me I unintentionally copied Command & Conquer?

#

with how the lines are set up

#

might copy the We Have Been Defeated lol

#

since we're pending voicelines for victory and defeat

#

to be fair the main difference I can hear is that the advisor is very aligned to the faction you're playing

#

which BAR does not have.......... yet?

neon owl
# prisma hamlet which BAR does not have.......... yet?

It would be awesome if cyphis was the armada va, and there was a male va for cortex. But what I'm mainly referring to is how unique and interesting they catered the va to the lore for each faction, giving it's own personality

prisma hamlet
#

well I guess Razkharn could become the Cortex one

#

But he's also not really talking in a very unique way or special accent... Just using his beautiful deep voice.

#

We will see how this goes

#

What I might consider to do "for now*

#

Is splitting the VA selector into factions

#

But ya know

#

There's other languages

#

We're gonna try to get voice acting for other languages

#

Multiplying that by 3 for each faction...

#

That might become unsustainable

#

For now Cephis is THE voice of BAR commander advisor

#

And honestly, we need to balance the ambitions with what is available

#

Who knows maybe even expecting localised voice acting is already much

#

Maybe we should drop that and focus on getting that done great in english

#

Or maybe we should focus on one great VA per language

#

Decisions to make

#

Doing both would be very hard to manage, in a voluntary project especially

#

Its impossible to tell what opportunities show up in the future

#

Cephis VA only happened because someone forwarded my discussion about Allison Remake with real actor being in consideration

finite spoke
#

Maybe add captions into the game? Tekken 7 for example they were on a cheap budget for VA, so they just did a VA for the culture the character is based on and used translated captions. Instead of doing an english version of each character like they used to.

prisma hamlet
#

Thats already the case

#

Subtitles are already getting translated

#

Again, we will see.

#

BAR has no budget for paying professional voice actors so we're down to finding gems among the community willing to help. And Cephis is definitely one of them. We just need to iron out the common complaint points, and fill a few remaining gaps.

finite spoke
#

Personally have no complaints with Cephis, I think you guys did great with her. And over time with experience Cephis's VA will get better, so these complaints will vanish.

prisma hamlet
#

Yup

#

We could've handled the release as a little less of a surprise on a random day

#

And a few things I definitely could've been a bit more critical about while curating the lines

#

But we will work on that 🙂

#

We are working on that.

#

Slowly though

#

Fun fact

#

Till nearly the last day we were going to just drop her lines as Allison

#

But just before release we figured that it would be wrong

#

Allison got her name after the TTS, which was literally called Allison

#

Cephis is, well, her online nickname.

finite spoke
#

Was Allison VA real person or just tts?

prisma hamlet
#

TTS, and later AI trained on the TTS lines

#

That was a disaster

#

TTS was cool

#

Its quite advanced TTS model but it wasn't an AI yet

#

I hated what Allison has became over time with all these different iterations mixed together

finite spoke
#

Am curious how hard it is to make a custom TTS model

prisma hamlet
#

If you train an AI voice with enough data, its gonna beat a TTS

#

But Allison lines were far from enough data to train anything

#

Not to mention

#

AI trying to replicate a synthetic voice...

#

The end result was a frankenstein nightmare 😄

#

You have not heard the latest iteration that we completely scrapped

#

At that point...

#

We'd either find an actor, or go with completely new AI voice

#

Well, we found an actor

finite spoke
#

Could've named it "Corrupted Allison" then released it lol

prisma hamlet
#

Eh I just dropped old Allison as a mod so community can do whatever they want with it.

#

I wouldn't hate it if someone digged out that old TTS and recreated her from scratch

#

IBM Allison V2 got discontinued, V3 is still available apparently.

#

But behind a paywall with a free limited version

#

10000 letters a month or something?

#

Thats gonna get dry quickly if you do some trial and error lol

#

And there is a lot of tinkering to make her sound as good as IceXuick managed to make her sound back then

#

Like you need to put a lot of hints

#

How the sentences should be spoken

#

Shrug

#

Not our problem anymore

finite spoke
#

When I mentioned corrupted, reminded me of Shodan from System Shock. If you ever heard the voice of Shodan could be very fitting announcer for BAR. But like you said no professional VA since its volunteers

prisma hamlet
#

See the thing is we never intended them to sound like that

#

Allison was a TTS but IceX was trying his absolute best to make her sound as natural as possible

#

She only sounded like a robot because of the technical limitations and not a concious design decision lol

finite spoke
#

People liked her sounding like a robot in the end

prisma hamlet
#

Yea I guess

#

We will see what future brings. For now we focus on improving Cephis lines, and getting Winter and Razkharn to fill up the holes as well.

#

Cephis did come with a lot of new notifs lol

neon owl
prisma hamlet
#

You know theres one other solution we consider for that

#

Official english only, but have modding support for other languages

#

Which is already the case

#

And if someone makes a great mod for another language, without any copyright implications, we could offer including that in the game

#

I wrote a small guide on how to make announcer mods in #1438245838991134730 but its rough

#

Sonething more professionally laid out would be better lol

finite spoke
#

Thing is BAR is international, I bet there's dozens to hundreds of people who want to VA for the game even if English isn't their first language. Some people do enjoy foreign language VA for their RTS games, SC2 got fully Korean VA as on option, and dota 2 got several languages to choose from.

prisma hamlet
#

We love to say Pull Request Welcome

#

When people request some features nobody wants to work on xD

#

But we really could just make it a "Pull Requests Welcome" for international voice advisors

#

Make people come to us with something implementable, even if not finished, at least as a demo

#

Have them get it done, with just some guidance from us

#

Just another option to consider

#

Beauty of open source development

#

Anyone can just come up with "Hey I want to add this stuff to this project, do you agree?"

white fable
#

Tbh i played a bit with chinese tts fed with english text and its perfect

neon owl
prisma hamlet
#

Record Google Translate reading the translations and put them in the game lmao

#

I mean, for a mod thats acceptable xD

#

For modding you can really go wild with AI in general

finite spoke
#

Que the Hong Kong music from Deus Ex

prisma hamlet
#

GLaDOS when

#

fuck its already 4AM

#

Good Night

finite spoke
#

Gn man

zinc ermine
#

Would it make sense to add a "your team has started a t2 lab" notification? Oftentimes multiple ppl on the same team going t2 can... uh lose a game if they arent paying attention

prisma hamlet
#

inb4 people plop a factory frame to troll

#

or just a noob that starts but doesn't make it

valid crypt
#

I came back recently and didn't really click with the new announcer. But found Razkharn and that one is perfect for me! I think it's the accent and intonation. It's not easy for me to say why I didn't like the Cephis one. It is very American and personally I much prefer a British accent. I suppose others will prefer the US accent. But the way the lines are delivered with Razkharn feels more synthetic, with longer pauses between words. I don't think this is helpful at all but I really just wanted to say thumbs up for Razkharn. Is that a real person or AI gen?

finite swallow
valid crypt
#

Fantastic! It really works so good job Razkharn

prisma hamlet
#

All 3 are real people

#

I find it interesting about the accent discussion because Allison was also american english TTS

prisma hamlet
#

#1436385151146917908

zinc ermine
valid crypt
#

It is interesting, I prefer Allisons delivery. It doesn't sound American to me really, or at least it is less. There is also a lot more variance in tone

#

Well there is a lot of variance in Cephis too. I don't know. The accent and the pitch maybe.

junior compass
# prisma hamlet I find it interesting about the accent discussion because Allison was also ameri...

It's the regionalism, I don't know if non-English natives hear it as clearly? Allison is one type of American accent, and closest to what we might call American standard (more akin to Californian produced media) from outside the US... Whereas cephis carries regional twang and intonation that clearly identifies her like a kind of Chicagoan/North East dialect (I'm just guessing cause believe it or not I'm not actually that good with American regions)

zinc ermine
prisma hamlet
#

RobotRobert remake with some different AI came pretty fucking close though

velvet mesa
#

I absolutely hate the new notification voice. The only saving grace is how Allison is still available as a seperate download

mighty sorrel
#

sigh, tap sign . be constructive

velvet mesa
mighty sorrel
#

"I absolutely hate it" is not feedback .
If someone tell you to judge a cake , you don't say "I hate cake, and would rather eat pie"

velvet mesa
finite swallow
neon owl
#

One of the things that annoyed me about cephis was the "base is being attacked" when hit by a juno. Should remove that or make it separate imo

late spire
#

technically juno does 1 point of damage, so it hitting any buildings will trigger the message

prisma hamlet
prisma hamlet
#

Maybe have minimum damage of >1 will do

#

Base Under Attack in general needs a bit of a rework

#

So its not triggered by random wall at the frontline

#

Current criteria is literally just "is building, not mex, not radar, no weapon"

shell crystal
#

I don't like the accent in the example voice clip. I would prefer the announcer to say "your starting location" rather than "yer starting location."

random abyss
#

is it possible to not label drones as air, everytime i run into a legion drone defence, it shouts that enemy has air and people start panic building aa

prisma hamlet
#

if they have some recognisable customparameter or rulesparam

#

then yea a simple 'if' would do

#

i'd rather not hardcode any unit names

#

I had requests around to have Drones Detected notif

#

might be good idea if it becomes alternative to regular air one

#

It's a very good time to suggest stuff too as somewhere around mid-january we will likely have new things recorded

#

And maybe old stuff re-recorded too where the biggest issues have been

#

Aircraff Detected!

quasi acorn
prisma hamlet
#

noted

twilit latch
#

I like it, its slightly flirty 🥵

queen palm
#

Great voice

gritty fiber
#

"Enemy scout detected" instead of "enemy unit detected" when it's just a scout

finite swallow
twilit latch
#

only air scout i suppose

gritty fiber
#

yeah, i noticed that "enemy unit detected" usually plays when the enemy air scout is detected

prisma hamlet
#

Enemy Units Detected plays if no enemy units entered your LOS for a long time and one does.

#

recognising scouts wouldn't be straightforward for now as they don't have any special tag on them

#

There's some reworking of notif triggers i have planned for tomorrow so might take a look into that

#

but no promises on this specific one

stable tangle
#

I did have created a widget sometime ago. That keeps trac of idle constructord including commander then give sound notification on intervals. Could you be able to integrate that into the game?

#1137208240451629167 message

prisma hamlet
#

Idle Constructors notif is already ingame

#

Just missing the voiceline

stable tangle
#

Lets say I have con that is idle. And it sits idle throughout the game. In this case I am only getting idle notification only once. But in this widget it keeps track of idle units and gives sound notification through out the game.

manic zephyr
# gritty fiber The launcher very clearly has some blue bars which fill up, and when they're com...

The launcher fills up a bar and says 'download complete' literally every time, regardless of if there is anything new. If you aren't paying close attention, you won't notice the difference from a patch versus the normal startup unless it's a bigger download that takes longer and you're waiting on it.

Also I will add that my first reaction to hearing the new voice was negative. I thought it was substantially worse sounding to my ear. I haven't gone through all of them to see which are better worse, but that was just from hearing it while watching Youtube videos, as I took a break from playing the game while these changes happened. That being said there is also at least one Youtuber's voice who I don't care for and another's who I favor (both male, so not of use here). I know you say this isn't a right/wrong thing, but it might actually be useful to get a variety of voices/accents and poll what people actually like to hear or find annoying and find one that is generally non-annoying, whatever that may end up being, after correcting first for making sure they're reading the lines in an appropriate way. It may not technically be wrong if some like it and others don't, but it's practically wrong if the vast majority find it annoying or worse. If you can find an accent/intonation with a high consensus of appeal, that would be a good thing for the game and most players. That may not be Cephis, which may annoy the dev team that they chose someone that isn't working out well, but that doesn't change it if it is the case and not just an issue with how she reads the lines.

Also, if you aren't using an AI voice, as Cow says, we become dependent on a single person to generate new lines, which seems like a long-term issue. Finding a suitable AI voice that we can permanently have access to would be ideal. Or we just accept at some point no new lines will be made and hope we don't lose access to the person before we're done with them.

#

Also, from a technical standpoint, you're not actually limited to a single voice. You can try to come up with some 'one solution for all' . The best solution may actually be to realize a two-peak solution would be best and satisfy the vast majority of people. If you found two voice actors that between them satisfied most people and then the player just picked between them as to which they preferred, you might be left with very few dissatisfied people.

manic zephyr
snow vector
#

i miss the you are now playing announcement. i don't notice the sound that goes with it a lot of the times when the game runs in the background.

prisma hamlet
snow vector
#

well doesn't need to be the voice linen in particular. just something would be nice

twilit latch
#

"Time to shine, big boy" when entering team plz 🥵

mighty sorrel
#

"turn off the stream" is totally my favorite

prisma hamlet
#

Nothing stops me from adding multiple lines and picking one at random btw

#

maybe I could even figure that out for other announcers

#

Question is, is new client far enough for me to care...