[riomaki]

I made some missions for FS1 and FS2 a long, long time ago.  They were fairly successful, one made it to the Sci-Fi Sim of the Year Edition.  But one thing I never dabbled with was using custom voices.  It was, after all, back in the day when people were still on 56.6k modems and downloading several megs of data was out of the question. 

Anyhow, I'd like to get some input about how custom voices work, mostly from a vanilla FreeSpace perspective.

• Assuming that I want to be as thorough as possible, will a voice actor who is voicing Command or a Wingman need to provide custom takes for all the non-mission "default" dialog as well (i.e. calling support, getting killed, etc.)?  Or is there a way to disable all of that for a particular pilot or Command?
• How feasible is it to do custom voice acting for a single mission?  What would be the optimal way to distribute such a mission, ideally maintaining compatibility with vanilla FreeSpace?  It seems too much to ask to make a whole campaign (and pilot) for one mission, but I don't think individual missions can pack everything into a .VP, right?
• Lastly, if I'm using send-message-list, is there any way around having to set the delay between message manually?

Thanks. 

[Axem]

Oh wow! An ancient FREDder! (A famous one too!)

If you want to be super thorough you could have a voice actor record all the auxiliary lines. But for just a single mission, I don't think people would mind too much if lines from different voice actors came seemingly from the same ship.

But FSOpen there are a few options you can use to silence a ship from making those type of messages (ship editor, misc button, disable built-in messages). I hope that's vanilla enough for you! (I'm not sure if by vanilla you mean no mediavps or no FSOpen)

Distributing any finished mod is best done with VPs, its just one file the user needs to worry about. You could create a VP with a single mission, a campaign file is not required for it to show up, even in a VP. But nothing stops you from making a single mission campaign anyway, with the new pilot file system, the game has no problem with one pilot file being used for multiple campaigns, even ones that have modded ships.

I'm not sure what you mean about your last question. Are you looking for some automatic way to time messages? That doesn't really exist, I'm afraid. It's all manual input for things like that.

And I'm curious, which mission of yours got included on the Sci-Fi Sim of the Year Edition?

[riomaki]

I don't know about famous. 

I built Nekhbet, which was on that disk.  Before then, I made the two Taranova missions, and then Marathon.  I think that's all of them.  Like I said, they were all single missions.  They used the generic mission chirp for dialog.

By vanilla, I mean "I just downloaded it from GOG."  So, just to clarify, if you can distribute an individual mission as a .VP, alongside some audio files or whatnot, is that something vanilla FreeSpace can recognize and put in the Mission Simulator, or is that functionality that FSOpen provided?  I was always under the impression that .VP files were only an option if you were shipping a campaign.

I've absolutely nothing against FSOpen.  I know it offers a ton of new sexps and things that we all wished for back then.  But I like to maintain backward compatibility when I can, especially since what I'm thinking of is very modest. 

[Axem]

Vanilla FreeSpace should be able to see the VPs and load any files from them. There are a few multiplayer mission packs with voice files that work with FreeSpace out of the box, so it should be fine.

[riomaki]

Cool.  Well, I'll have to look into that method then.  Thanks for your help!

[Goober5000]

Solrazor!  Wow, that is a name I recognize well from the VolitionWatch mission archives!  Welcome back!

Nekhbet was indeed a famous mission -- not only did it appear on the VW archives and in the GOTY edition, but it was also referenced in Derelict, as sort of an easter egg.  And you may be interested to know that Scroll of Atankharzim, a mod under development, features the Nekhbet as well.  It's something of a tip of the hat to FreeSpace tradition.

With a bit of internet strategery I've uncovered your old mission page at Descent Network:
https://web.archive.org/web/20011118074249/http://www.descent-3.com/solrazor/freespace.shtml

[Mongoose]

Oh wow, I remember you from your Descent work way back in the day too.  (Reactor Gamma was great!)  Nekhbet always wound up being the mission I'd load to test out new FSOpen features, because of that great wide-angle view of the Nekhbet at the start.

[riomaki]

Well, it's surprising to see that it's still remembered. 

I focused on Source modding after those days.  I've wanted to do an intentional throwback for quite some time, either for Descent or FreeSpace, but the Descent situation is really mucked up in terms of editors, whereas FRED has always been easy-to-use and responsibly extended to take advantage of new features.  I've dabbled with FRED on-and-off lately - the FS Wiki being very useful in terms of highlighting the statistical differences between various ships - and I thought it would probably be a good idea to knuckle down and churn out one fun mission rather than overextend myself.  And then see where it goes from there.

My current home, if anyone wants to follow my projects -> http://www.jasongimba.com