Make Vasco say almost any name

[mauvecloud]

After the Todd Howard said in the Starfield Direct told us that Vasco would say the player's name, I was disappointed to find out this was still limited to a pre-determined list of names, similar to Codsworth in Fallout 4. Text To Speech capability has existed since the 1970s, so it doesn't require advanced Artificial Intelligence here.

 

I can think of two ways to handle this:

1. Add a text to speech algorithm for the player's name, either directly (which might require some adjustment to spelling to get the pronunciation right for some names) or from an ini file which would use IPA symbols (and maybe also allow things like Japanese katakana, Korean hangul, etc.) to tell Vasco how to pronounce the player's name. This doesn't have to perfectly match up with Vasco's other dialogue, in case Vasco's VA has refused permissions for asset re-use for this sort of project. I wouldn't expect him to pronounce punctuation, dingbats, or "private use" characters if you figure out a way to enter those, but letters (including with diacritical marks) should produce a name he can attempt to pronounce.

2. Allow the player to provide their own audio file for Vasco to play back as the player's name - this could simply be the player saying the name, but there would also be the option of using a non-human voice, such as recording a pet cat, dog, bird, etc. making noise, and using that as the player's name that Vasco says.