Just asking who wants voices?

voices would be nice
the only downside i see is that, say we have randomly generated missions, or an extremely large variety of procedurally generated conversations, it will completely break the immersion if you had a text to speach mechanism, beause it would be very hard to have voice actors voice all the procedurally generated missions. But then it would be strange if only some missions have voices and some don't so it maybe would be better to just leave everything to text.

That seems highly unlikely to be a feature because of the procedurally generated nature of Starmade. I'm so used to not having voices in NPC interactions, it honestly wouldn't bother me much to not have them in Starmade. Plus, I kind of prefer silent NPCs to the Fallout/Elder Scrolls style NPCs that are voiced by like, 7 people total.

I originally answered no, but really they only need to add voice in some really specific places.

The tutorial should have voice over, and any kind of tool tip/virtual assistant would be great to have a voice.

Voices would be pretty cool imo, it's not like the game looks super retro and would be ruined by them. As for procedurally generated missions, I think voices could be doable, it would require quite a few files just for the pronunciation of names of stars and such though.

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Speak up now! Get Saber's voice for tutorial NPCs!
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Also, a more digital sounding voice would fit right in with "no thrust" or "shields down" notifs.

Yeah we don't need them everywhere in game, but definitely an AI assistant and the tutorial need something.

nightrune said:

Yeah we don't need them everywhere in game, but definitely an AI assistant and the tutorial need something.

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Like C&Cs EVA or Aura from EVE.

jstenholt said:

... Plus, I kind of prefer silent NPCs to the Fallout/Elder Scrolls style NPCs that are voiced by like, 7 people total.

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Actually Bethesda did a really good job with the vocieovers in their games. Even if it's done with only 3 voiceactors if done correctly like in their games it adds a lof ot immersion and you don't necessarily notice it or at least you can get used to it.

kiddan said:

... Also, a more digital sounding voice would fit right in with "no thrust" or "shields down" notifs.

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It definitely would. I also agree on having Saber voice the tutorial NPC

Ship status effects and fleet status notifications like finishing a certain order could have ai voices. Also getting info on importent things from the ai voice on entered sectors or getting into dangerous situtations like pirate attacks would be really neat too.

In terms of NPC voices just certain important NPCs would need voiceovers or maybe when the game gets crews the different crew members could have generic voices. It would be also neat to have them give feedback on radio to the player on your ships's or maybe fleets's condition.

The proceduarly generated quests and stuff like that could be made in a way that it does not require the player to interact with an NPC, you could just apply for different tasks and missions from different stations systems or something. Maybe if the game gets a storyline story quests could have NPCs which could have voicovers.

I think this whole idea is something which would definitely add more to the game than it would take from it.

Hum.... I think the best way to implement voices (considering random generated missions) would be to use indistinct "Mumbling". Somewhat like they used in the sims games. They are expressive of their mood or what they are trying to get across with only the tone, volume, and speed of their gibberish. I think something like that could work well. Players know they are talking, we just don't know their language. AND We have "Universal Translaters" that translate their speech to text. SO, less immersion breaking then having only some missions voiced and more practice then trying to voice every possible option.

I would prefer that a text-to-speech engine be used to dynamically generate voices. I think Google's text-to-speech project is dead, but on the other hand, I think Mary TTS for Java is still alive. GitHub - marytts/marytts: MARY TTS -- an open-source, multilingual text-to-speech synthesis system written in pure java

Voice acting of NPCs for quests or general "walked past a crew in the corridor", no thanks, I'll pass on that.

Some limited voice acting for the computer, TNG style? I could go for that. Voice as a glorified sound effect good, voice as "I don't care what you think, random NPC, just STOP TALKING!" bad.

"Did you know that some crops grow better in the cold?"

"Hey hey hey, watch the magic!"

"I was an adventurer once..."

There are a thousand things id like for this game, voices arent in that thousand

Edymnion said:

"I was an adventurer once..."

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Very few people understand what "Took an arrow in the knee" actually means. It's actually a term used for they got married.

serge1944 said:

I think voices could be based on there emotions or short sentences "can you help me with this problem" and they will pass you a paper.

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This would work pretty well! Or instead of a paper it opens a briefing window and so on.

Ratchet Hundreda said:

Even if it's done with only 3 voiceactors if done correctly like in their games it adds a lof ot immersion and you don't necessarily notice it or at least you can get used to it.

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Clearly that is not true for everyone though, because I noticed it and never got used to it. I love Bethesda, but their voice acting is shite.

jstenholt said:

Clearly that is not true for everyone though, because I noticed it and never got used to it. I love Bethesda, but their voice acting is shite.

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They had enough for me. I can understand limitations and accept them.

Thadius Faran said:

They had enough for me. I can understand limitations and accept them.

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To me, I always just think about how asininely profitable FO and ES are for Bethesda, and then I can't help thinking about how much more money they would've had to spend to hire a few more background voice actors...

Would voices be nice? Sure.

Would the devs be able to pay multiple people to do voice acting? No.

Would I like it if hundreds/thousands of NPCs in the universe shared the same couple of voices? No.

Bottom line: No. There's just going to be too many different NPCs and getting enough voices for them would be too much even for large video game companies (like skyrim mentioned above only having something like 7 voice actors for generic NPCs). In my opinion onomatopeas like in Zelda games would work much better in starmade's setting.

Also, I think that the poll isn't biased enough.
/sarcasm