Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Blue Planet => Topic started by: X3r0 on February 20, 2017, 11:41:23 pm
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Just finished through BP: War in Heaven I; what an incredible story thus far.
I started the campaign for BP: WiH II and there aren't any voice overs for briefings and in game comms.. Are they out there somewhere, or is that not finished yet? I looked around and all the threads on this specific topic are dated, just wondering if there was progress in that direction. Thanks!
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Act 3 (the "War in Heaven 2" campaign) has not been voice-acted (I want to say "yet", but it's unclear whether the team has any desire to go through the massive effort to coordinate said voice acting, based on their experience getting act 2 voiced).
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It is, at this point, extremely unlikely. Purely in terms of actual amount of lines, WiH Act 3 rivals some commercial games; there are a lot of speaking roles and a lot of lines for them. Getting WiH recorded was a nightmare and took years, Act 3 would not be any different.
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Yeah. Just as voice acting Acts 1+2 happened instead of finishing Blue Planet 2, voice acting Act 3 would take as much work as finishing the whole campaign.
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The hardest part of it is script generation. You've got to break up every single line in the campaign by role and then give a blurb of context for that line. Act 3 has a ****ton of lines.
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Ah alright, thanks guys. usually I'm not so superficial about things like this, but the voice acting was just so incredible, it just kept me riveted!
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The hardest part of it is script generation. You've got to break up every single line in the campaign by role and then give a blurb of context for that line. Act 3 has a ****ton of lines.
Is there a guide or set of procedures for doing this, not in a general sense, but specifically for how Blue Planet does it? It sounds like something that can be done slowly over time by the community. Then once a complete script has done, we can have somekind of proofreading or discussion to ensure the script is acceptable, since there is a degree of subjectivity in this kind of work.
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Generating the script is actually fairly easy (there's even a few comfort functions built into FRED that make it easier), it's adding all the extra information (like intonation, context info) that voice actors need that takes some time and can become challenging.
And then, once that script is done, there's casting and recording to do, which for a project such as this means relying on the generosity of strangers who love doing voicework without getting paid. It's that latter part that takes a long, long time and a lot of effort to get right (to say nothing about the myriad of little tweaks that have to be done to missions to ensure that voice clips get played in the appropriate rhythm). It took years to make the AoA VA happen. It took longer (and, ultimately, quite a bit of money) to make WiH part one happen, and that means that whoever starts this effort has to be comfortable with the fact that it's likely to be a very long-term project.
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I'd say that the idea is pretty good - I mean, you could use any help, right? Even if there's not much to help with, there are definitely ways to support BP somehow...
And about moneys. I know, law says no one is to benefit financially from FSO, but what any donators would, instead of transferring money to BP devs' accounts, just push the cash directly to voice actors' accounts?
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That's I meant by a set of procedures. I was thinking something that went over the steps down to the details, like a fully fleshed out example problem solved by the professor kind of deal. If Battuta or someone else can show us the steps on an actual piece of the script, we can try to match the format, conventions, etc. for the rest of the script. I mean treating this almost like a FRED tutorial. I think doing it this way will ensure consistency across the script, so you don't have a dozen different styles/interpretations from a community effort.
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The whole BP2 script was public on gdocs. Should be easy to pull up the link.
The problem is that the crowdsourced line notes often end up needing revision to meet one standard and to really clarify pronunciation and context.
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The whole BP2 script was public on gdocs. Should be easy to pull up the link.
The problem is that the crowdsourced line notes often end up needing revision to meet one standard and to really clarify pronunciation and context.
Jeebus. It's like you got summoned by the mere mention of Battuta on a forum post.
But yeah, I wouldn't mind taking a look at the script. It would at least give me and others an idea of the task at hand. Is this an internal link shared by Blue Planet dev members, or is there some place I can actually look this up.
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If anyone is going to do this I would recommend saving your sanity and not trying to voice/script the Dreamscape lines yet. There's so god damn many of them and by far the biggest difference voice acting would bring would be in the big chaotic missions where it's hard to focus on both the mission and reading text.
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It was publicly linked in the top post of the VA Deathmarch thread. Should be in this forum somewhere...
I'm really grateful people are excited about this!
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Here's the script in all its 277-page glory: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NYjbAthOD0SITukgSkEX6iIhoOQ6irH-jZCvx1OrsTg/edit
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Those hungry for more voice acted Blue Planets can preorder a signed copy of "Ricardo Laporte's Exigent Adventure" on cassette or audio laserdisc, must be 18 or older to call.
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;7
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if you need characters to sound soporifically boring and/or mumble i'll be happy to reprise my role
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While describing problems with the VA process, it's probably also worth noting that there were mistakes in the WiH act 2 script (I can't recall exactly how many lines were missing, if I ever knew, but I seem to remember there being more than one instance of Battuta panicking on IRC because the script was incomplete and so a role was missing one or more lines and there was some difficulty in contacting whoever had recorded it).
Also, I'm fairly certain that 277-page google doc is missing some fairly substantial roles because they were cast before it was made? Like, I don't think Brie's lines are in there, for example. So even discounting roles that are missing lines, the script is still incomplete, so the complete script of WiH Act 2 would be even longer... and I'm pretty sure that act 3 has even more dialogue than act 2.
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Generating the script is actually fairly easy (there's even a few comfort functions built into FRED that make it easier), it's adding all the extra information (like intonation, context info) that voice actors need that takes some time and can become challenging.
Have you guys considered doing this as you go for acts four and five, or will they suffer the same fate? (As I assume the dialogue for Act 4 is all but done already)
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Just finished the first two parts of the mod as well. Just amazing. If anyone is concerting an effort for this, I would be willing to help. No computer skills but I could do VA or coordinating / recruiting people. I know the original creators got busy, but this project is just too good to let go unfinished.
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Generating the script is actually fairly easy (there's even a few comfort functions built into FRED that make it easier), it's adding all the extra information (like intonation, context info) that voice actors need that takes some time and can become challenging.
Have you guys considered doing this as you go for acts four and five, or will they suffer the same fate? (As I assume the dialogue for Act 4 is all but done already)
Unfortunately dialogue is one of the last things to be locked.
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And I believe it sometimes needs some rewrite to flow more naturally when lines are actually spoken.
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If all else fails, it's always something that can be added after the full WiH campaign is finished. Which would also be the best time to rewrite any dialogue.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but the google docs seem to only contain the script for Acts 1 and 2. Does anyone know how to access the script for Act 3 via FRED? I've no FREDing experience, so even a pointer to where I would be able to open the correct files would be handy. Seems like the first step would be to extract all the lines onto a format like Google Docs then some preliminary mark-ups to organize them.
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It is, at this point, extremely unlikely. Purely in terms of actual amount of lines, WiH Act 3 rivals some commercial games; there are a lot of speaking roles and a lot of lines for them. Getting WiH recorded was a nightmare and took years, Act 3 would not be any different.
Considering how well-developed the BP is, we've got a solid MVP here for a pitch. We need to 1) find someone with industry connections who can 2) get this in the hands of someone to make a pitch to Interplay to look at putting out FS3 based on the BP plot.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but the google docs seem to only contain the script for Acts 1 and 2. Does anyone know how to access the script for Act 3 via FRED? I've no FREDing experience, so even a pointer to where I would be able to open the correct files would be handy. Seems like the first step would be to extract all the lines onto a format like Google Docs then some preliminary mark-ups to organize them.
It all starts with using FRED's Voice Acting Manager to export scripts. Then you gotta be sure you have every line assigned to the correct role, and a consistent format used for filenames.
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I don't think the BP team would be too eager to sell the rights to BP to Interplay.
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Not to mention the fact that, as far as anyone knows, Interplay no longer owns the rights to Freespace, and at this point, nobody has publicly stated who does actually own them.
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I'm glad my OP got so much thought going into this!
Personally, I'd be more than willing to help with any kind of voice acting. I have an amateur quality mic and DAW recording interface plus software. I don't have experience with FRED or of the like, but I am in software development professionally (albeit new) and would be willing to devote time!
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Just finished act 2 again tonight. What an experience. I ultimately had more fun living this story than Halo, to be honest. Incredible.
I really hope to see this whole project finished someday. Playing it all the way to the end, including voice acting, is top of my video-game-dream list. Heck, if the rights to Freespace are ever up for sale, this could very feasibly be packaged into a standalone and released as Freespace 3 (minus a few alterations to Age of Aquarius that would fill some MAJOR plot holes...)
I'd love to help voice act in any way I can.