Regarding unit 'voices'

You can argue machine sounds can too.

Why not use Greg Stackhouse again? He's basically your voice-acting slave at this point.

Any sound byte repeated 10000 times will be annoying as hell. Down with voices.

True, but that's only part of the argument, the other part is doing them in a way that doesn't distract you from the game, as said in the thread I linked to, it's not just the fact SupCom has machine noises, but also the fact of how subtle yet distinctive(as far as telling the sounds apart) they are.

Mike

I think synthesised voices tend not to get on your nerves as much, because they are actually machine-generated sound (albeit often modeled somewhat on someones voice originally, they are usually very far removed from the original).

Using voice synthesisers would have two advantages:

1. For the devs, they'd need to come up with less machine sound-effects so it could cut dev time by a little bit. Just a small variety of machine voices instead.
2. They could actually be useful in terms of being descriptive - even helping vision-impaired people play the game. When you click on a unit it could say it's description "Construction Robot Ready" or "Rocket Robot Ready". When you give it an order it could say it's name, and it's doing something - eg "Jethro roll out" or whatever. When you select a group containing more than one type of unit, it could say in the default voice, eg (if you selected a mixture of units 15 in total) "15 units selected".

Beyond selection and action sounds tho, it might be best to just use machine sounds or bleeps... you wouldn't want to go overboard with the voices (except if it's John Patrick Lowrie)

On top of all that, I think it's important to note that TA, while being terribly impersonal, had a little bit of soul in there. SupCom by comparison was even MORE impersonal and very dry. I wouldn't want PA to become too cartoony and certainly not like those horrible Blizzard games that drive you nuts after a while, but some subtle and different personality build into the game could go a loooong way to selling it to people who wouldn't normally try this kind of thing.

On top of that, I'm sure it's not hard to have in the options a switch to turn off unit acknowledge sounds

The support AI style voices are a staple in RTS (other than TA or SupCom) and that is something that could help with vision impared people and wouldn't really get in the way.

But before anything else the largest problems with voices are voice acting. Syntheticaly made voices sound silly and wouldn't exist for modded units (where as its simple to transfer machanical noises around). and actualy using a voice actor for even every hundred units would cost a dramatic amount of money.

Voices are awful. I hated that the commanders in SC were people. No thanks. The electronic sounds are far more endearing, less grating, and make it easy to distinguish which unit you clicked on (plane, kbot, commander, etc). I liked that.

Just give me some slight audible feedback to indicate I've selected something and don't make a big deal out of it. Id much rather listen to gunfire and explosions than the sounds of my units. I just selected them, that's how I know they're selected.

while you raise some good points zordon, there are certain usability aspects that the backup AI style allows for. like supreme commander, i'm sure there are many people where the only spoken words they heard was "nuclear launch detected". if they are in there they would need to have feedback levels customisable and all that jazz.

imo unit voices just get incredibly annoying over time. The characterizing sounds of supcom units are working fine I think.

TA style mechanical noises are fine with me.

+1 to mechanical sounds not voices

I need a mechanical voice saying "ALL YOUR BASES ARE BELONGS TO US" for like a hacker bot, or when an engineer captures a building or something :shock:

Arnold Schwarzenegger?

hahaha. As long as the sound isn't annoying I'm fine with it.

All I need to say is beeps, chirps and sequels were good enough for R2D2.

Definitely mechanical noises. In TA the noises were excellent and helped give the units a feeling of character without being annoying. One thing that is less good in Supcom is that the noises are a bit too elaborate sometimes (often a two-tone noise that lasts a second or so), and this gives the impression to me at least that it takes longer to select the unit, or that the unit is less responsive than it really is.

Small, fast units should have quick, relatively high-pitched noises to make them feel more responsive, and slow, lumbering units should have deeper, longer noises to add to them feeling not very agile.

This is really important. The interface in supcom in general felt like it took a few crucial milliseconds too long to select units in general, not helped by the sounds. TA by contrast felt instant. Like clicking a desktop icon.

That's because in SupCom it did delay unit selection. Well, visually they were selected instantly, but they wouldn't respond to commands for a moment. The sound was there to try to mask this delay which was a product of the way SupCom does its networking.

One of our programmers did a write up on this on #AltDevBlogADay from his experience working on SupCom detailing the way it worked.
Part 1: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/07/0 ... f-desyncs/
Part 2: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/07/2 ... nc-harder/

This is one of the reasons why for PA the decision was made to go with a client server model as units should respond to player input faster than they could in SupCom (though not quite as fast as TA). It also removes any possibility hacking the client to know where enemy units are as that information isn't sent to clients at all.

I disagree with whoever said the game doesn't need character. It needs as much character as possible, or it will be painfully dry. And you can convey a lot of character with mechanical sounds. Think of the way Starcraft does the protoss robots - probes, reavers, observers, shuttles. It's all just noise, but each one is instantly recognizable with a lot of personality.

Workers could sound like R2D2 or Wall-E. In the campaign thread I suggested that mass-produced bots should just make noise but the caste of more powerful/intelligent robots should be voiced. Since there's no campaign, that's up in the air: the commander doesn't have to be voiced, but his sounds are still the most important to get right. It would add some nice variety and relatability if the commander and a handful of the most powerful bots are voiced. Even tanks and mechs can be voiced if you use a program to make it sound a bit like Cylons or Daleks. It would be a fun touch if even nuclear missiles have a personality.

What he said.