Allow COVAS to fill the loneliness of space

[Azmuth Divarchchron]

Space is quiet and people want something to keep them engaged on those long lonely trips in deep space.

Its been suggested that NPC crew should be able to make commentary on their backstory. However that can be hard to implement and make it feel unique for a crew member (if you happen to need to replace your crew)

I suggest something a little easier to implement while also realistically generic to avoid the need to procedurally craft backstories for NPC crews

your COVAS (or the ship's AI) could be built to make commentary based on what it sees on sensors

For example:
Long supercruise time (10 minutes~): "It can get quite lonely out here, doesn't it captain?"

Hitting exclusion zone of a black hole: "I'm sorry captain but I'm afraid I cant allow us to approach the singularity any further"

Exploring guardian ruins: "I've heard this civilization once had sophisticated AI, do you think it was anything like me captain?"

Honking a system with 20 or more bodies: "This system appears to have an abundance to explore captain"

Honking a system with 10-19 bodies: "this system appears about average captain"

Honking a system with 9 or less bodies:
"This system appears to be sparse captain"

Plotting a journey 1,000 lightyears or greater: "Are we going on a roadtrip captain?"

Fully exploring a system: "I dont think there is anything left to discover here captain"

Encountering a thargoid: "captain I would advise caution, these entities are known to be formidable"

Mission parameters update: "captain, new mission-relevant information has become avalible"

Fairly generic things like this an AI could say would add a nice touch of ambiance without needing to generate multiple strings of flavour text.

 

[Bloodsign]

I like it, OP!

You know what I've always wondered? Why don't game devs license professional synthesized voices so that audio can be generated on the fly from text strings? It's relatively quick and easy to just write dialogue for the voices to speak, and with, say four male and four female voices a great deal of variety can be had by changing pitch and playback speed. This is the obvious way of the future, considering how voiced dialogue is a "must" in games these days.

I'm an amateur game programmer, and even I can do this with Microsoft Sam or whatever for my coding projects. I'm sure a real game studio could pull this off really well. And make no mistake, there are professional synthesized voices for applications like phone voice menus that sound so real you can't tell them from a real speaker.

 

[777Driver]

Probably because voice attack combined with a plugin already does all of the above. The devs just leave HCS packs and lone programmers to do it. Wouldn't surprise me if they also get a small cut from HCS

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

You've just described EDDI.

 

[Icybow73]

You described the key to my lock of going insane. I need the crew members to respond to my mic inputs, and not say "captain,' 'captain,' 'captain'.