LE NPCs Use Your Name mod

[infidreamer]

I was reading about linguistics and phonology a while back and I just came up with an idea for a Skyrim mod. One of the things that I'd like to see in Skyrim is NPCs calling my character by name, rather than just by his titles (Dragonborn, Archmage etc). And I just came up with a way to add this feature in a mod - although unfortunately, I'm not really experienced in modding, so I'm hoping someone will teach me how to implement this via scripts etc. Here's the idea, given in the form of an algorith:

 

1. Take any voicetype preset. Eg: MaleElfHaughty.

2. Listen to as many of the voice files under that preset as possible.

3. Extract individual and consonant vowel phonemes from that preset and sort them into different folders. The English language has 27 different vowel phonemes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels) and 24 consonant phonemes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Consonants). So there'd be a folder for the "ae" vowel phoneme, "dz" consonant phoneme, and so on.

4. When the player names his/her character in the beginning of the game, he/she will also be asked to supply a pronunciation guide for the character. This may be a bit tedious, but ah well.

5. The game will run scripts that stitches together various phonemes to correctly pronounce the name. This will happen for all voicetypes.

6. The game will make Hadvar pronounce the player's name to confirm it once. If the player feels it's wrong, he/she can resupply input to correct the pronunciation.

 

I hope this was somewhat clear. I'll now explain by taking an example.

 

Let's take the name of my high elf mage, Azaril. It's pronounced AAhz-ar-iLL. To start with, I'd like all NPCs with the voicetype MaleElfHaughty to use my name. So I'd go and look at all the voice files for voicetype MaleElfHaughty, play as many of them as possible, and then make folders for each phoneme that appears in the preset voices. I'm sure that SOMEWHERE in the voicefiles for MaleElfHaughty, I can find instances of the phonemes "AAh" (as in ARGUE), "eh" (as in ANOTHER), and "i" (as in IGNORANT). I'll extract some of these instances and save them as separate voice files in appropriate folders.

 

In game, Hadvar will ask me how to pronounce my name. I'll tell him which consonant and vowel phenomes to use, and in which order (duh). He will then try pronouncing my name. If I feel he's not being accurate, I'll correct him.

 

I hope I'm making sense. It's a bit to communicate this across as I don't know much of the terminology used in phonetics. Essentially it's a very simple idea, but one that will need quite a bit of work digging around all the existing lines of dialogue in search of the needed phonemes. I think this could be a great project - not too ambitious, just quite work intensive. I'd need someone to tell me a few basic things (how to extract and repack audio files, how to edit and add NPC mouth animations, how to make NPCS match speaking animations and sounds), and in fact I'm sure I could do it myself.

 

In fact in the long run, this manipulation of phonology could open up several possibilities in terms of gameplay. We could take it beyond simply pronouncing names, and start supplying more voice options etc to NPCs. We could even collaborate with other mods. Ultimately, we could make it so that whenever the player character says anything in-game, s/he ACTUALLY SAYS IT (pronounces it). THIS is ambitious, but I think that making NPCs say PC names is fairly simple.

 

Anyone interested? PLEASE SAY YES, I'm in love with this idea.

[thestigma]

it's a great idea - but I think a "proof of concept" is required.

Can you manually stitch together you own name (and maybe a few more for good measure) and make it sound good?

 

if so then it might be worth looking into - but yea, it does sound like a lot of work.

I think there are some inherent reasons why this hasn't generally been done in games before, in that the results don't sound convincing. Otherwise it would be a goldmine as you could potentially sythezise NPC dialogue on demand from text-guides. If it wasn't too hard to do you'd think that you would have seen this used in AAA games before.

 

Even the top-end voice synthesizers made by large companies that specialize in this field can struggle to produce natural pronunciations even with guides - so to do the same using stitched together parts with dozens of variations on the voiceset to boot - and make them all sound good... it sounds like a tall ask.

 

But as I said - a proof of concept would go a long way to convincing people that it is possible, and worth doing.

 

-Stigma

Edited November 30, 2016 by thestigma