grateful player

[puck55]

Don't usually put on forums so not even sure if right area, however felt that I had to say a big thank you to all modders for making FO3 the game it should be. I appreciate the time spent creating them, from the huge inputs like RTS down to the smaller ones like the Megaton bomb re-site, and also the mods that I wouldn't put on as they aren't what I am looking for. So all you people out there take a bow, I for one appreciate your efforts. A question from someone who knows zilch about mods though, why is it so difficult to put speech into the mods? It seems from my thinking that it would be the easier part as everyone has friends who would be quite happy to be 'actors', but I must be missing something really important and am curious what it is. That is not a crit either as I can easily live without speech to gain such terrific input.

[vforvic]

First, thank you for the kind words to the modding community. Many people seem to think that modders just sit and mod all day and have nothing else in their lives to take into consideration. Or that the GECK is some super program that makes modding as easy as pressing a button.

 

Now about voice work. First about voice actors. Sure you can find voices, but not always actors and yes their is a difference even in mods. Bad voice work can ruin a great non-voiced mod. The kids on the block might want to do your voice work, but they really are not good at it and thus sound bad. Maybe they have an accent or inflection that does not work for your mod or they are monotone or their age is too old or too young or their sex is wrong or just bad at acting the voice to make it sound even decent. Once you start doing the voice testing for actors and listening to recordings you start realize how hard it really is to get good voice work. Decent female voice actors are extremely hard to find. If your mod has more than 1 female voice then it can be hard to fill those voices. My mod for example has a need for around 15 voices with about 6 of those being females. Sure some can do double duty on the voices if they are good enough to make the difference, but not many people can do multiples and make it sound different each time. Even after you find all your voice actors you then need to sit down with them and have them read for you to make sure everything sounds like it should and they have the voice sounding like expected. Then once you get all the parts filled you can count on someone dropping out at some point or just taking forever to get you the recorded lines.

 

Second about mechanics of it. It is a long and laborious process. You have to get your dialogue into some form that the voice actors can read. The GECK will export the dialogue, but it is a messy text file that you have to go into and clean and format for voice reading. Then you have to make sure that every voice actor has a decent microphone and place to record. Otherwise your recordings will have the sound of squeaking chairs and dogs and computer fans humming and static and airliners flying over and the TV in the next room or the next door neighbor mowing the lawn and all kinds of background junk. You would be surprised how much background stuff we block out but shows up in recordings. Also you can have various levels of volume output, tone and clarity between actors that make the dialogue sound horrible as the voices move from line to line in the game. You also have to make sure they know how to record into the correct format. If they get the format all wrong them sometimes you can fix it and sometimes you cannot. Then you have to listen to every single line they read and make sure they got it right and did not miss a line or say a line twice or miss a word or 2 during the reading. So unless everything with their reading went perfect then you have to go back and have them redo part or even all of it. So lets hope you got all your voices recorded correctly and now you can move to the feared and dreaded GECK.

 

The GECK does not make it super easy to input voice. Most all of it has to be done externally in other programs. In the GECK the dialogue voice files are not named with any naming convention you can easily match up with the voice files. You must rename all your voice lines, and yes each acting line has to be a separate reading and file, to match this name given in the GECK. Then you have to do the whole lip synch thing for every line which is another separate process. The GECK lip synch is broken so you have to install and use the Elder Scrolls Construction Set and do the lip synch work in that program. Note that there is a way that you can make the GECK work by combining parts of the Construction Set with the GECK, but I have not tested it. It is very tedious to get the file names all done correctly including lip synch files.

 

Then after all is said and done you have to go back and fix all the things you find wrong when you do your testing and trust me you will find things wrong. So then you have to go back to some actors and ask them to rerecord a part or 2 or 3 or mess with the voice files to get the volume all at the correct level or even rewrite some dialogue that does not fit now that you have heard it in the game. Of course now you can't get 1 of your actors to record again because he is busy with other things in life.

 

Just the simple act of making a mod in the GECK can be a very time consuming and extremely frustrating process. As a modder the last thing you want to think when all is said and done is oh boy now I get to drive myself crazy with adding voice. Once you start the voice process you really have to stay at it and get it finished without any long delays or pauses and many modders just don't have that time to commit. If you delay with modding in the GECK you can come back a year later and pick right up where you left off. If you get delayed in the middle of doing voice work, by things in the real world like work or school or life in general, then you risk actors dropping out or equipment changing or voices changing.

 

So to sum it all up it is a long and tedious process to get done above and beyond the actual modding of the mod which itself is a long and tedious process. :smile:

[puck55]

Thank you, vforvic, for your prompt reply and detailed information which I am sure I and other non-modders will be even more grateful that people like yourself are willing to put so much time and effort into making our gaming so much more enjoyable, with little reward for modders apart from a few troll comments when some npc decides to walk into a wall during a 2-hour quest. Power to your programming skills, my man.