Bringing the game into the 21st Century

[Stephen]

Sorry if the title is harsh. The game is amazing!!! Anyways my idea was voice overs!! That would be soo cool to hear instead of read everything. I understand sound makes the file size very large but it does add a lot to the game.

Thats my 2 cents. I hope you implement that sometime soon. =)

[Stilgar]

This one's been proposed before, as I recall the main objection was the fact that the game's text has been translated into many different languages, and it would be difficult to find volunteers to voice-act for all of them.

In so far as having a narrator read the story segments, it could be pretty cool, if unlikely to happen. However, in the case of units speaking when clicked, like in the *craft games, it could easily become annoying if not done right.

[Baufo]

http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9474

Wesnoth is not WarCraft

[tsr]

Sorry if the title is harsh. The game is amazing!!! Anyways my idea was voice overs!! That would be soo cool to hear instead of read everything. I understand sound makes the file size very large but it does add a lot to the game.

Thats my 2 cents. I hope you implement that sometime soon. =)

Just plug festival into the engine.

Easy, peasy
/tsr

[zookeeper]

The biggest problem is indeed the fact that voice-overs require lots of good actors. Also, even the mainline campaigns change a lot between versions, and (almost) every change to dialogue and such would require redoing the spoken version. And people working on Wesnoth usually come and go pretty randomly, so we'd quickly run into maintenance problems - when the voice actor for Konrad doesn't have time to work on those voice-overs anymore and we'd add new lines of dialogue to HttT for Konrad, we'd be in trouble. We'd have to get yet another new good actor to speak every single line for Konrad in HttT again, which probably just wouldn't happen. Multiply the problems for every character even in HttT that should speak (Konrad, Delfador, Li'sar, Asheviere, Kalenz, Parandra, narrator voice, etc) and you'll probably see what kind of a big huge gigantic load of work it would soon become. It's simply not feasible. Filesizes is absolutely the least of the problems. If we'd ever do this, then more or less obviously the voice-overs would not get translated - text would be, voices wouldn't (of course the engine would most likely allow this, but it still wouldn't be used).

But good that you like the game anyway.

[turin]

IMHO the biggest problem with voiceovers is that you need good voice-actors for them to actually improve the game. It's like music - a lot of people preferred to not have the music on until we got the new and improved music tracks. Unless the voice-acting was done really well I bet it would be turned off by most people.

[gacoperz]

well, some commercial games in poland had so "good" actors used to read the translations that they went down the drain just because of that. It's simply too expensive to be done in a manner that would not discourage people from playing the game.

[Stephen]

In the War craft and star craft games those voice things do get annoying but. I understand what you mean by changes to dialog. Well i just thought it would make it better!

[zookeeper]

In the War craft and star craft games those voice things do get annoying but. I understand what you mean by changes to dialog. Well i just thought it would make it better!

Yes, it would make Wesnoth better if it was done well. But I do dare to say that we'll never have the resources to do it well.

But hey, we have to let the commercial multi-million dollar budget games have something they can do better than our zero dollar budget game, right?

[Kestenvarn]

Voice-overs != 21st century entertainment.

What an absurd title.

[Dave]

It's a good idea....if not a new one.

All we need is for someone to produce some quality voice overs and we'd love to include them.

But, we're still waiting for that to happen....

David