I use Diane and David for similar reasons (US English) When I did my own "Spec Engaged" I used the spacetime effect I think it was, for a nice artificial ship voice.Turbo wrote:I just ran through some demo phrases on http://cepstral.com/demos and it sounds good. It mispronounced some words when I fed it a few VS lines, so phonetics might be required.travists wrote: I have two Cepstral licenses, a male and female, so could easily do text-to-speech computer voices.
I used my own (altered) voice for the translator in ship-to-ship communication* because the text-to-speech that comes with Windows was barely understandable. But the technology is getting there. Even if we leave my work as the translator in place, a Cepstral voice would be great as the voice of your ship informing/warning you, precisely because it should be different from the translator. I like the "Allison" voice because it is easiest to understand, and I always imagined my ship would be female if it had a voice (a Western-culture sailing thing I suppose).
...
Come to think of it, an audio warning for any event I did not initiate, but will affect me, is worth considering. For example:
Urgent events:
"targeted" -- someone locked on to you; maybe hostile, maybe not
"incoming" -- someone shooting at you
"critical damage, eject" (it would also be nice if critical systems like reactor, hull, and shields could give warning when they drop below 50%, can the game do that?)
Not urgent, but helpful:
"SPEC available" -- out of the base gravity well, can SPEC
"SPEC disengaged" -- intered the gravity well, SPEC disabled
"entering jump point" -- press J to jump
"entering docking range" -- press D to dock
I agree mostly with your list, but might add auto engaged/disengaged. "Incoming" I would think would be a missile launch. As for the eject warning, one of my profs back in college had some fighter-pilot experience about the time they switched from buzzers to voice alerts. For something as critical as an eject warning, he preferred the klaxon to a soft vocal "bailout". Anyway, I have no problem posting voices for the mentioned warnings. Just one question: should I post them all as one audio clip for review, or separate files for easier integration. As for the male-female, that is already handled in the code (config file). Use that as a male/female, or a vocal/buzzer switch?