Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

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Chema
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Chema »

Hi guys.

Following your suggestions I've made my best to incorporate the speech sounds (and a way to disable them in the game menu, of course). This is the best I could do and they are eating nearly all my free memory.

They are not as fun and great as I'd imagined... Any comments or suggestions are welcome. And no: it is not easy to sync the mouth animation to the sounds... :cry:

https://youtu.be/w7Ceec0MLfY
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by ibisum »

Thats going to get a bit annoying.

Maybe there should just be a sound effect at the beginning of the sentence, for each character? Sort of a short, pulsed sound with different pitches for each character - only so we can tell the beginning of a new sentence, by a new character, and not necessarily hear it for the entire duration?
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Symoon »

Sounds OK to me ;)
Maybe a bit higher pitch for the sound?
(will have to listen again, only listened once quickly at the lunch pause)
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Chema »

I tend to agree with Ibisum. These sounds get annoying very quickly. That is why I quickly added the option to the game menu so the player can deactivate them :mrgreen:

I even find them annoying in The Sims and other newer games after some time.

I also tried to use higher pitches. But the higher the pitch, the more they sound like random notes played on a strange instrument :cry:
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Symoon »

Hehe ;)
Well that was just an idea!
I won't feel bad if you prefer dropping it ;)
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Chema »

Well, unless I need the space and there is no way to get it through some code revising, this does not need to be dropped. Specially when the player can deactivate it.

The thing is that I need to tweak more code in order to produce the same effect in other cases (not only on the Talk command associated to a character, I mean, as I may want to simulate speech heard from radio or coming out of a robot). This probably means another script command. I'll see if I have room for that too.

But anyway I'd like to hear other opinions.. Dbug?
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Dbug »

Chema wrote: Mon Sep 11, 2017 4:14 pmBut anyway I'd like to hear other opinions.. Dbug?
I think it sounds weird mostly because it's the same sound for both characters.
My idea was to have different pitch for the various characters, like for the woman here have her speak one octave higher.

But yes, that was the idea :)
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Chema »

I guess the thing is if it is good enough as to be kept in a final version or not. Or if it is good enough as to not include other features because of it...

I will try to tweak a few things to make it slightly better. I might find a hack to make small alterations to the sounds so they seem different for each character, but I am not sure if I'll be able to do something that really works. For instance, I have no way to tell if a character is a woman to make the pitch higher, and all I could do is a hack which won't be general at all.
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Dbug »

What decides which color is used for the text of each character?
Could you somewhat use this information to pick-up the tone?
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Chema »

ha ha ha good point Dbug. That is exactly what I am trying to do... but that won't decide between man/woman... just a base for the note variations which may coincide or not :)

One thing. I just added pauses in the talk animation whenever there is a pause in the sfx (which occur, in turn, when there is a space or a full stop) and that changes things a lot! The sound sounds the same, of course, but visually it works much much better.

Now, in order to add the color thing, I need to find some free memory. I have 3 bytes left!!! Moving some tables to normal memory (the engine is in overlay ram) could be done, but I have only 23 bytes left there... Okay, gimme some time to find out where to scratch some bytes...
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by ibisum »

I think you should try the idea of only using a small, short sound at the beginning of each sentence, to differentiate when one character starts talking and the other starts listening. This works pretty well - especially if the tones are different. All thats needed is there to be a different tone - it doesn't matter if they match the characters' sex - just that there is a small beep/boop that is unique to the character.
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Chema »

@ibisum, I'm not sure... but it is worth trying anyway.

I have tweaked the whole system, increased the volume, added different base pitch as suggested by Dbug and synchronized (a bit) the lips with the sounds. It looks much better, in my opinion, but still uncertain about it reaching the final version.

It can, of course, be deactivated with the menu (without affecting the rest of sounds) and uses the player's setup for game sound volume.

https://youtu.be/AQ6aDEdxFyU

What do you think?
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by ibisum »

I will deactivate it pretty much immediately, so unless its essential to gameplay, I (disclaimer:personally) consider it superfluous, and thus: not worth the program memory/hassle?

2¢: samples!
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Chema »

Unfortunately, I agree with ibisum.

It was fun, entertaining and I learnt a lot. I even discovered a couple of small bugs while testing this, but the benefits are not as I expected. Probably with samples or more control over the sound chip, nice things could be done, but this it not the case.... I will deactivate the #define. Fortunately that brings me about 150 bytes free for other stuff.

Thanks!
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Re: Development of Blake's 7 (was OASIS development)

Post by Symoon »

It sounded good, but I agree that maybe having it lasting as long as the character speaks, could have been tiring in the end.

Anyway, thanks for having tried Chema, sorry it didn't give the expected results!
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