Babbling Characters

[Kintsugi]

 

 

 

The purpose of this thread is to gauge opinion on the subject of an ingame voice babbler, which would play randomly-selected phonemes in order to generate nonsense words in a nonsense sentence. The most familiar example of a system like this would be Animal Crossing's dialogue, but other SS13 servers (IS12 and Goonstation come to mind) do have babblers. I'm of the opinion that a character's voice is one of the few things we have yet to capture ingame, and in failing to do so we've created an environment where certain things that might be a boon for roleplay (for example, overhearing someone speaking off-screen and using that to guess where someone may be, etc) are not possible.

 

I think this system would obviously need to be a preference toggle, and you would need some degree of control over what characters sound like - I imagine the best way to do this would be with pitch modification. Distinct species could likely use different sounds to distinguish their speech. 

[Mr.Popper]

I also wish emotes like *laugh and *scream were audible like other servers. I guess the argument against them is RPers don't want their characters voiced? But it's better than nothing imo, and if you don't like it you can just manually write the emote. Also Unathi and Skrell already have vocal emotes so it wouldn't be that much of a leap.

[Silvore]

It would certainly be unique, personally I would like it.

[LforLouiseeee]

on one hand, i dont see a necessity for this. on the other hand, it would be cool.

[FlamingLily]

I think for this to work, it has to be basically goonstation's. 1 second max for the message, something that won't be overpowering when there's 5 people talking. Don't think it should be substantially different sounds other than minor pitch variations, either.

[Fyni]

Make hearing it an optional preference and I'm all aboard. Forced - and I'm not

[Powder Miner]

I'm in agreement with Lily - a simple and brief sound functionally serves a lot of purposes (although I do think some level of customization of pitch and tone would be a fun bit of character customization) without being super disruptive or distracting like I'd think random phonemes might be. But I have found myself wanting this feature pretty commonly.

[Stripes]

The idea of little bytes of sound accompanying voices can be nice, as long as it's kept optional and maybe gets a dedicated volume control so you don't have stacking sounds when in particularly crowded conversations. It's what I'd want as an alternative to adding sounds for things like emotes that are pretty notoriously spammed on other servers (ie. SS13's constant screaming, particularly because screams are forced as a reaction to pain, laughter soundbytes, things like sneezing or coughing), and I vastly prefer it to the idea of TTS.

 

As for how they'd sound, I'd think something like Don't Starve/Vintage Story's musical version of babbling would be preferable since it leaves more room for character voice interpretation, and with alien voices you can get away with tuning them in ways that'd be more grating if it was trying to sound out sentences with blips.

[Melariara]

I, personally, would find this very annoying after a bit. I am not a fan of random babble noises such as this for this reason. Can you imagine standing in a corridor with ten people having a conversation? Event rounds where EVERYONE is trying to talk and server population bloats a lot? The noise (and probably server load) would be insane.

 

Edited to add: Also, can you imagine when there's like four mercs shooting people down and security demands they surrender and its just this? Like, high intense scenarios. I'm not opposed to having laughs, chuckles, and like, noise emojis, but constant noise would be a little too much and probably break the immersion of the server, especially when you factor in antags.

[Evandorf]

I think there are definitely uses for it; I often find myself alt tabbed and wouldn’t mind an auditory cue that someone is talking to me. I can think of a few ways to temper the experience for people who don’t care for it or ensure it doesn’t get out of hand for large crowds or intense situations.

1. Make it toggleable in preferences for those who do not like it at all. 

2. I’d want to make sure it doesn’t pass through walls if possible which might be a reason to make it-

3. Distance based. If someone is talking at a normal level (ending a sentence with a period) then perhaps the sound plays for people within 2 tiles of them. If you use a single exclamation then maybe add a couple tiles to the range. If shouting at full volume ( two exclamations ) it might be close to the range of anyone onscreen. I think if done right it can add immersion rather than take it away. Imagine walking down a hall and hearing shouting from a nearby room with the tint down. Later there’s a crime discovered in the same room and your hearing of an argument (even though you might not know the content) helps with an investigation. Or another example could be an inhibition of sound. Imagine being in space and the sound being absent or, if you are within touching distance of another, it might be slightly muffled.