Hi, I've been thinking about ways to move some of the content that is currently displayed through the chat window to some other places, to ask less reading from the player.
a) There was the option suggested by Nico: filming someone who actually talk to the player. But this option has the huge disadvantage of requiring a lot of work for each mission (actoring, video editing, code manipulations...), and makes it much harder to modify a mission once it has been recorded. b) Deborah recently shown me http://rejecter.blogspot.com/2010/11/so-you-want-to-write-novel_28.html . This wasn't related to the project, but I think it could be a very interesting solution to our problem. We could use text2speech to generate the audio, and put it together with an animation (maybe something like http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/ ?) I've looked at FS solutions for the text2speech, but in what I've seen the quality isn't good enough yet. Alternatively, we could use services like http://www.ispeech.org/ (Try to type "Good. Here is what I know. Last Monday, the day my agent went off the radar, we received the following message from him:" or "'I am in front of this painting, the only one that was ever sold by a man who said once : "). We could generate the MP3 there and distribute them, if their license allows it (to check). It would be as proprietary as a real voice anyway... c) Another lead, which is complementary, is the idea David had to have some kind of "Mission file" - where the mission goals and steps would be explained, and where you could find some content (images, video...) related to the mission. This could help to shorten the text, which would likely still be an issue even with a voice or a video. At the end of the day, in any case this is a significant work - but the result could be worth it. What do you think? If we try some of those options, who would like to work on this? Idea on the feedback tool: http://feedback.farsides.com/forums/90557-humanity-project-accessibility/suggestions/1427705-replace-the-chat-by-text2speech-ai-vizualisation?ref=title Xavier.
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