Voice-pack developer kit

bitsixteen

B
Hi all, I'm just wondering if there's a possibility Frontier might release a developer kit so we can create our own voice packs? I run a voiceover studio and would love to do this in my spare time. To that end, I'd need a script, correct filenames for each piece of dialogue, file-format (file-type, bit-rate, etc,), normalisation settings (so the volume matches other voice-packs), installation instructions and anything else you can think of. :) Just posting here as Paige from Frontier suggested I do so when I tweeted this recently.
Many thanks,
Paul
 

LuxAeterna

LuxAeterna
bitsixteen said:
Hi all, I'm just wondering if there's a possibility Frontier might release a developer kit so we can create our own voice packs? I run a voiceover studio and would love to do this in my spare time. To that end, I'd need a script, correct filenames for each piece of dialogue, file-format (file-type, bit-rate, etc,), normalisation settings (so the volume matches other voice-packs), installation instructions and anything else you can think of. :) Just posting here as Paige from Frontier suggested I do so when I tweeted this recently.
Many thanks,
Paul
Click to expand...

I doubt Fdev will release a dev tool to their game for this purpose. For the moment though, try out Voice Attack (VA)! It's 10USD on their website or try it for free first then make your purchase. This will get you started into making your own COVAS and voice assistant. All you need after that is a voice recording app/software and then import the sound files into the VA commands when needed. I've even used Amazon Web Service's (AWS) Polly app to make custom voice responses for my VA profile, for the free (up to 1 million characters, I believe). You can also use your default OS's speech engine(s). Also you can use this program for any other game (EULA pending, of course)!

There are many tutorial videos on YouTube and several threads in these forums to show you how to program your commands and feedback responses. So don't be scared to hit the guys up in the threads for help!

I also suggest trying out the EDDI companion app for VA. It provides more information and some better automation using the game's player journal entries. You can find help for that as well in the forum linked above. You can't really use your custom voices for this app (yet, or as far as I can tell) but many have used the EDDI app as a second "personality", so-to-speak for their cockpit.

Hope this helps, CMDR!

NOTE: Other voice packs (for VA) can be bought on this site: HCS Voice Packs which features celebrity voices like Will Shatner - Orion Pack and Brent Spiner - Vega Pack
 

Xevyr

X
LuxAeterna said:
I doubt Fdev will release a dev tool to their game for this purpose. For the moment though, try out Voice Attack (VA)! It's 10USD on their website or try it for free first then make your purchase. This will get you started into making your own COVAS and voice assistant. All you need after that is a voice recording app/software and then import the sound files into the VA commands when needed. I've even used Amazon Web Service's (AWS) Polly app to make custom voice responses for my VA profile, for the free (up to 1 million characters, I believe). You can also use your default OS's speech engine(s). Also you can use this program for any other game (EULA pending, of course)!

There are many tutorial videos on YouTube and several threads in these forums to show you how to program your commands and feedback responses. So don't be scared to hit the guys up in the threads for help!

I also suggest trying out the EDDI companion app for VA. It provides more information and some better automation using the game's player journal entries. You can find help for that as well in the forum linked above. You can't really use your custom voices for this app (yet, or as far as I can tell) but many have used the EDDI app as a second "personality", so-to-speak for their cockpit.

Hope this helps, CMDR!

NOTE: Other voice packs (for VA) can be bought on this site: HCS Voice Packs which features celebrity voices like Will Shatner - Orion Pack and Brent Spiner - Vega Pack
Click to expand...

That sounded a bit like trying to sell eggs to a chicken-farm :D (I mean he did say he runs a voiceover studio)

But on that note.. for a while now I've been trying to decide whether I want to buy something like VA/EDDI or not.. I mean technically I don't 'need' it.. as pretty much everything I'd ever want to press is mapped to my HOTAS.. but then again it would be nice to make those ship assistants less boring :)

Meh.. still don't know. nice summary though :)
 

bitsixteen

B
Thanks for the info, guys. While I'm almost 20 years recording voiceovers, I'm not that au fait with the structure of Elite Dangerous or how I could add voices, so I'll have to read Lux Aeterna's message a few times before it sinks in. I must do a search and see if anyone's made a note of how many voice prompts there are in the game. It would at least give me an idea of how much work is involved.


Xevyr said:
That sounded a bit like trying to sell eggs to a chicken-farm :D (I mean he did say he runs a voiceover studio)

But on that note.. for a while now I've been trying to decide whether I want to buy something like VA/EDDI or not.. I mean technically I don't 'need' it.. as pretty much everything I'd ever want to press is mapped to my HOTAS.. but then again it would be nice to make those ship assistants less boring :)

Meh.. still don't know. nice summary though :)
Click to expand...
 

LuxAeterna

LuxAeterna
Xevyr said:
That sounded a bit like trying to sell eggs to a chicken-farm :D (I mean he did say he runs a voiceover studio)

But on that note.. for a while now I've been trying to decide whether I want to buy something like VA/EDDI or not.. I mean technically I don't 'need' it.. as pretty much everything I'd ever want to press is mapped to my HOTAS.. but then again it would be nice to make those ship assistants less boring :)

Meh.. still don't know. nice summary though :)
Click to expand...

Hahaha! I wasn't trying to sell him anything really (maybe VA :D because why not for 10USD). Just trying to show him examples of what others have done in respects what he would like to do.

bitsixteen said:
Thanks for the info, guys. While I'm almost 20 years recording voiceovers, I'm not that au fait with the structure of Elite Dangerous or how I could add voices, so I'll have to read Lux Aeterna's message a few times before it sinks in. I must do a search and see if anyone's made a note of how many voice prompts there are in the game. It would at least give me an idea of how much work is involved.
Click to expand...

You might want to look in Options>Audio>Ship Voice - there will be a list of responses you can toggle on/off that should get you started with a basic bill of materials. When I was creating my VA profile I also used the key bind settings to further map out my feedback responses. For the most part you'll be turning things on and off so at most 2 responses unless you want to add more for variety.

If you're that experienced with voice-overs you should really drop the EDDI app devs a line or two in the forum for Tkael, VerticalBlank or Darkcyde. They might be able to give you better answers to your questions as I'm only learning the software at the moment.
 

bitsixteen

B
LuxAeterna said:
Hahaha! I wasn't trying to sell him anything really (maybe VA :D because why not for 10USD). Just trying to show him examples of what others have done in respects what he would like to do.



You might want to look in Options>Audio>Ship Voice - there will be a list of responses you can toggle on/off that should get you started with a basic bill of materials. When I was creating my VA profile I also used the key bind settings to further map out my feedback responses. For the most part you'll be turning things on and off so at most 2 responses unless you want to add more for variety.

If you're that experienced with voice-overs you should really drop the EDDI app devs a line or two in the forum for Tkael, VerticalBlank or Darkcyde. They might be able to give you better answers to your questions as I'm only learning the software at the moment.
Click to expand...

That's really helpful, thanks a million. I shall check out the other forum when I get a millisecond here at work. Cheers!
 

Tkael

T
Xevyr said:
That sounded a bit like trying to sell eggs to a chicken-farm :D (I mean he did say he runs a voiceover studio)

But on that note.. for a while now I've been trying to decide whether I want to buy something like VA/EDDI or not.. I mean technically I don't 'need' it.. as pretty much everything I'd ever want to press is mapped to my HOTAS.. but then again it would be nice to make those ship assistants less boring :)

Meh.. still don't know. nice summary though :)
Click to expand...

EDDI's actually free and open source. VoiceAttack is not required to run it. No purchase required.
One of EDDI's strengths is the enormous variety of responses that are possible with scripting and text to speech engines. While we appreciate the shout-out, we're not looking to supplement or replace text to speech with voice acting at this time.
That said, EDDI does support playing .wav files so if a voice actor were to create a "voice pack" using EDDI as a platform they could play pre-recorded audio as responses to the many events that EDDI supports... :)
 
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bitsixteen

B
Tkael said:
EDDI's actually free and open source. VoiceAttack is not required to run it. No purchase required.
One of EDDI's strengths is the enormous variety of responses that are possible with scripting and text to speech engines. While we appreciate the shout-out, we're not looking to supplement or replace text to speech with voice acting at this time.
That said, EDDI does support playing .wav files so if a voice actor were to create a "voice pack" using EDDI as a platform they could play pre-recorded audio as responses to the many events that EDDI supports... :)
Click to expand...

Thanks for that, Tkael. I'm so out of the loop on ED you wouldn't believe. Just get so little time to play games these days because of work and home-life and last time I played, I ended up in a dead-end of systems and kept running out of fuel. It was gonna be a long way back the way I came so I gave up out of frustration to lick my wounds. :-D I will get back to it, but I'm incredibly out of the loop despite receiving the news letters and following ED on Twitter. Which kills me because I was obsessed with Elite on the Spectrum back in the '80s. Anyway, ho-hum.

So I just checked out a couple of EDDI demos and that's amazing what you guys have done and I love that the artificial voice can provide much more info than the usual prompts (unless ED does this normally now?). That's all great, but just for the fun of it, I'd like to take the standard ED voice prompts and make a new library or two using some of the VOs I work with, or indeed, my own terrible Dublin voice. :-D

So thanks for that. I'm a bit more in-the-loop now, without really being sufficiently in-the-loop. :)
 
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