[Kopachris]

I read this story on Slashdot today about video game voice acting, and it got me wondering what sort of format FreeSpace modders give lines to their voice actors in.  The article mentioned that most companies simply give the voice actors a spreadsheet with each and every line, turning the experience into a somewhat dehumanizing one for the actor.

[Black Wolf]

Fixed your link for you.
I wonder if FS was made better in this regard than, say an FPS, where the potential for the player to fiddle with things is somewhat higher. FS has very well recorded vuilt in dialogue (with clear emotional connotations defined by the predictable situations in which they will be triggered) and a relatively linear set of sexp triggered messages, with deviation from this linear path almost always resulting from an event with a single, easily discerned emotional context (like the destruction of a friendly capship when it was supposed to survive).

Of course, it also helps that they got some really professional actors to do the work.

[Mongoose]

I know that when I did my two decently-large roles for community VA projects, namely Tau Sigma Station in Derelict and Command in Warzone (hope the voiced version of that gets released soon), we did get essentially a plain list of all of the lines each role had, without much in the way of direction cues.  It helped that I was familiar with both of those campaigns before voicing them, so I generally knew what tone I should be speaking in (though I hadn't exactly gotten the hang of "emotion" when I did the Derelict lines ), but I could definitely see it being an issue if someone didn't know the campaign.  A few of the random lines I've done for more recent stuff have generally had specific cues for lines that required some sort of intense emotion, which is a big help.  I think it would benefit everyone if modders threw in those sorts of directions like "angry" or "responding to the destruction of an enemy capital ship," since they allow for the person voicing the lines to get much more in-character.

(We could probably boot this over to the Voice Acting folder.)