Traffic: Speech and Events

One topic we should begin to discuss early is what kinds of speech and sound events do we want in the traffic release.

Specifically, the kind of speech that happens when the player attacks a ship, or a ship drops cargo, or a ship gets destroyed. EoC was a little thin in this area compared to Freelancer. The PS traffic was excellent, but without sound was not well noticed. Ships attacked stations without a word from anyone. Those annoying tugs never say a word, and then attack.

This thread is for discussing what kinds of events we want to cover, and how those might be created.

Here are a few of the main events:

Ship gets attacked

Ship gets killed

Ship does a "mayday" signal for police or other help (with response) to let player pirates know there is trouble coming.

Group of ships arrive at a station.
Station dialog with those ships. (This could be real dialog, like asking for docking and getting a response, or just the station announcing that hostiles are inbound).

There are a few other items come to mind:

We could have real requests for docking (especially now with pod loading). And these speech items could be used for the player and for NPC ships.

Similarly, when the player gets refueled, the fueling ship gives alittle speech item. "Fueling completed". A similar item (but not the same item) could also be used for other ships that are refueling near the station. Which will make the station feel busier.

Another speech item for ship repairs. When the repair ship works on the player (or a wingmen) and completes, a little bit of speech could run.

We should also think about dialog bits for the pirate tolls and customs checkpoints. Rather than try to have speech cover the whole dialog (it is easy to sign ourselves up for years of work) I think it might be better to just put in the "Halt your ship" kind of piece. That will catch the players attention and get them focused on the text dialog. (sound reasonable?).

Freelancer had another speech item that would run when an AI ship targeted the player and planned to attack. It was kind of nice to hear before your ship was pounded. Wingcommander did the same thing.


One last item (but whole can of worms) we should choose if we are going to put some varity in these sound bytes. This would really help the whole cluster feel more varied. But it would also really increase the workload.

We could also vary the text based on the faction that owns the ship. I am not thinking 52 varieties of dialog. But we might consider a standard version, a Leung Empire version, and a Sultanate version. I think that would increase immersion.

Ok, I am sure more events will come to mind. Please post your ideas. Then we can sort the list to get the ones we will do for certain. And calculate out how much work that will be.

Great ideas GrandpaTrout.

I agree with all of course. Provided the pogging is not too hard, the main difficulty I see would be acquiring .wav files of these speech effects.

I would suggest that we make a list of possible speech types/situations, then give that over to our writers to make specific dialouge. Then..... we publish the full list of phrases and solicit .wav recordings from our player/fans. We could have a place to upload .wavs to on the website. From there I could process all the .wavs to give them a united/uniform feeling and then we could put them in game.

Whatever we do, I really think audible feedback/reactions from the gameworld would add to the immersion/simulation.

We could also consider Sultanate/Leung/Emerald versions based on what kind of response we get.

I've had a brief email discussion with GT on this topic, and thought I'd summarize it here. I agree that vocal comms need to be beefed up in this game to enhance immersions and provide context. Busy traffic areas could have more boring background chatter, stations lots of freighter, and STC comms that deal with traffic and positions in lots of hard to decipher 'air traffic' lingo/code.

Ship-to-ship action also could do with much more comms chatter that contributes to NPC behaviour context. I will gladly help sort out the types of message categories that could be used (pleading, threatening, neutral, pleased), and write a bunch of stock chit chat to fit these categories. I'll even gather some friends to do a bunch of recording (we did it all for the Epic:Dogs of War Nolan intor movie...only I've learned a few things and could maybe improve on them a fair bit).

Cambragol, would you be willing to take leadership on this effort? Let me know what you think, and where we should go from here. On another sound-related note, I have to say that I love the sound/atmosphere of the MS game. It really works. The only problem relates again to the absence of human specific sounds at stations and bases. Way back when this was in early development, I spent many many hours searching and editing music for the factions and their moods. I still have this. My only suggestions for this is, could it possibly be put to use for when a player chooses to enter a station? In other words, once a player docks to a station in, say Aleppo, could the gui and screen be accompanied by some culture-appropriate music, to enhance the feeling on having entered a Human-created environment? Let me know.

I think we all agree that comms chatter/npc dialogue of some kind would enhance the gameplay. It is something I definitely would want added to Traffic. We do have a lot on our plate for traffic, yet, I myself do not, compared to the coders’ workload. So perhaps this is something I could take on. Provided GrandpaTrout concurs, I would be willing to assume a leadership role. What I would be capable of doing for this would be the arrangement, packaging, and construction of all the files necessary for the 'Comms Mod'. What I couldn't do is write the code which attaches the sounds to events/actions, and I couldn't record all the audio events themselves. Post processing and arrangement of said audio events I could handle however. So, for recording the actual files I would need your assistance Hot4.

Where we should go from here, is to first make a list of sound events we will need. I see these as being of two types. Specific sounds tied to specific player related events/actions, such as hailing a ship, or requesting docking clearance etc. The other type would be comms 'chatter'. This kind of sound could either be attached to objects as a looping file of indiscernible conversation, or we could play the sounds according to events, eg. when a npc ship docks to a pod spewer etc.

This list of sound events would need to be a marriage between what we ideally want or could expect, and what the poggers can code in with minimal/reasonable effort. We also have to consider how adding more sounds to the game environment will effect performance of the game. I am already considering ripping out the last of the stock sounds, such as npc thrusters, impacts etc. Those sounds don't fit with the current scheme of 'interpreted' electro magnetic 'sounds'. So perhaps by removing those we would lend us some room to add a number of new sounds without impacting performance too much. Additionally, I think that as most of these new sounds would be single play events, rather than looped sounds, they might cost very little in terms of performance.

Building this list will require input from the pog coders, and ourselves. So this is where we should start. Hot4Darmat, have you thought about what kind of events you would like to see/hear? How about Joco and GrandpaTrout? Why don’t we just start out by adding events as we think of them, and after a while we can compile them, and see which ones we will actually be able to use. Then we can hand that list over to you Hot4Darmat, for some nice polishing, and hopefully recording.

Of course, all of this is dependent on whether GrandpaTrout wants us to divert any resources to this task. If he thinks effort could be better focused on more important things, then we should just hold off on this.

Here are some initial ideas for sound events from myself. I will add more as they come.

Replies to requesting docking clearance.
-Joco and I discussed having clearance related to faction standing so there could be a number of responses here, ranging from friendly to hostile.

Dialogues for all the ‘pog entities’, such as pod scrappers, mercenaries, wingmen
-This could simply be recording audio for the existing text, or perhaps adding multiple versions, with different voices. That could end up a lot of work however.

Dialogues for simple ship to ship communications.
-if we include simple ship to ship communications, we might want to include a number of generic recordings to give voice to any ship a player chooses to communicate with.

Dialogues for pirates/police at lpoints.
-these lpoint events being samples of what is to come in terms of the ‘meta’ game, there could end up being a lot more of this type of dialogue.

Okay, that is just a start. I think Jon and Hot4 must have a lot more better ideas than my own.

It sounds good (no pun intended). I like your division of effort, but I'll defer to the poggers and GT for priorities. My best guess for places to start once the coding issue has been determined, would be to enhance the basic background comms chatter; the stuff that's barely discernible but tells you something about the level of local activity. One advantage of this is that it already exists. It seems a simple matter to add a few layers of it, and use the density of traffic and cosmopolitan-level of the locale to determine how 'thick' the sound should be and from how far out. We could record a few things for freighter docking and pod spewer activites (fairly common occurrences) and see how hard it is to get them to play in the appropriate places, and how much impact this has on performance before going too far into recordings for a host of specific events.

Sounds, ship communications, and more dialog for the customs and pirates are the Traffic tasks I had in mind for the writing/dialog team - so carry on!

The events I know we can easily support in code:

1. NPC ship is attacked by player or player wingman. (this is normally when the PS traffic tells you they will shove your PBC where the sun don't shine).
2. NPC ship is attacked by non-player.
3. Player wingman is attacked.

4. Player is selected as a target by an attacker.
5. Ship is critically damaged (this is when the PS traffic announces they are dropping cargo).
6. Ship is destroyed.
7. Player wingman is destroyed.
8. Ship signals mayday and is acknoledged. Police are more active in Traffic and will be sending rescue teams. We should make clear this is happening.

9. Player moves into LDSI of station.

Here are a few more sound events I think we can support. Joco is writing the code surrounding these and could comment further.

10. A traffic groups moves within range of the station. Cargo ship give docking request. Attacking ships cause the station to warn civilian traffic. I expect this list will expand a bit as we figure out what the main traffic scripts are.

11. Each freighter that moves into load/unload says something. This should add some life. Other traffic scripts, like police patrols, station guards, etc should have a little "I am doing my job" kind of chatter. Then the player will know what they are, and can feel the world is active.

There is a real danger of needing dozens and dozens of sounds. And sounds are large and hard to get to the really high quality that does not grate annoyingly when heard many times.

I think our strategy should be to record some short clips that are indicative of what is being said. And then the written dialog can be larger and more varied. This allows us to communicate the feeling to the player, without needing a huge volume of scripts.

For instance, the customs patrol might have one short item: "Customs, halt your ship". While the dialog might be much longer and more complete a statement.

While I would like to do different speech styles based on the nation, I think baby steps are more important. Lets just get one item out for each event. And then see how we like it. There is always room to improve.