Hi all, As I am now in the process of finalizing things in Mysteries of the Ancients for 1.0 release candidate 1 I would like to get your input on a few issues I have set aside until now. One of these issues is the matter of speech output for the game.
As you all know back around beta 18 I rerecorded all the speech clips using Scansoft Tom's voice. Some have pointed out that the speech rate is way too fast for them, and they want me to rerecord the speech clips at a slower rate. I would certainly do so if I could figure out what is a comfortable speech rate for the majority of players out there. Its a bit hard for me to personally judge that is I tend to listen to speech at a faster rate anyway. However, I'd be willing to give it a try if people are still interested in me slowing the speech rate down. Others are just unhappy of the fact that I switched voices let alone speech rate. I gather quite a lot of you liked Acapella Heather, and many of you would rather see her return to the final release rather than Scansoft Tom. Again this is certainly doable if this is what the majority of you want. Either way I'm going to have to rerecord and update some voice clips. Finally, there is a third group asking for Sapi 5 support in the game. While I'm not completely against the idea I'd like to point out that doing so would require quite a bit of time rewriting all of the speech code to use Sapi 5 rather than prerecorded speech as the game wasn't developed with Sapi output in mind. Though, it is possible. My concerns with Sapi are this. First, that not everyone owns a high quality Sapi TTS voice, and therefore some users wouldn't have the same quality of experience as some of us with better voices like the AT&T, Scansoft, or Cepstral voices to use.Second, I'm working with Blind Games Brazil and others to make Mysteries of the Ancients available to foreign non-English speaking markets. Its just easier to do that when someone can record the necessary speech clips, and drop them in the speech folder. Finally, last but not least, after we are done with the Windows release I'm going to pport the game to Mac OS and Linux and it will be easier if the game isn't tied to anything platform specific like Sapi 5. So as I currently see it I can either rerecord Scansoft Tom, restore the original Acapela Heather clips, or I can record new ones using an Ivona voice like Jenifer, Bryan, or Ashley, etc. Any thoughts or opinions? Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
