Who else thinks the 50+ hot key combo's can get ridiculous in title now days? To that end my question is a simple one: voice controls. Say, 'assign group 2' is Atl+2. In the short cut menu have an option to record a sound clip that will be associated with that action. The user could say anything they like, "G2" for example, and have it associated with the Alt+2 action. Thoughts?
This would take up an incredible amount of development time and resources, so no. Even if you spend a lot on it, it'll turn out horribly for non-native speakers.
The simple answer to your simple question is: no. Long answer is you're perfectly free to get one of the hand full of third party voice command programs on your own if you want to play with voice commands. There even seem to be a few explicitly made for gaming. We have no plans on implementing it ourselves though.
PA is trying to move away from micro management. So there isn't likely to be more than a handful of hotkeys.
Instead there will be just a handful of dialogues with several hundred settings for fine-tuning the behavior of the assistant and unit AI Just joking, of course there still will be shortcuts. Just "not having micro" does not mean that you don't need powerful control methods. Take first class orders for an example, you don't have access to primitive commandos like "move to position X" or "rotate weapons towards X", but in return you get a handful of new commandos like "hold position", "scout", "advance" or "focus fire on X" which means that you have not less commands, but the individual commands just got more advanced and allow the unit to do the same job with less commands (not less individual commands, just less commands per minute!). I'm not a friend of voice control however as, it requires different concepts and is often limited. If you go by keyboard shortcuts and mouse, the normal interaction follows the pattern "activate group", "select command", "add parameters". With voice commands, it starts to get ugly at the first point already. Selecting premade groups or individual units by an unique identifier? Works great, given that you use a more voice friendly alphabet, means not numbering them but using military alphabet or alike. But what about creating new unit selections? Often enough you want to do dynamic regrouping or a split of forces. Easy enough with mouse and keyboard, you drag a rectangle to select units in an area, kick out unit types you don't want with keyboard shortcuts and 3 buttons later you have issued a command to the loose group of units. With voice, you would need to replace every single shortcut by a combination of at least 1-2 words, leave alone that you still need the mouse since the PC is unable to read your body language. Building a working PURE touch control would be a lot easier than creating a working voice command system, and thats not that easy either. The point is: Voice alone allows only for most primitive communication with a huge computational overhead for even the most simple commands. Face to face communication only becomes so powerful because you also see your opponents gestures which allows you to read additional informations like locations, movement and areas (circular hand movement), leave alone additional information from eye movement and facial expressions.
And really... when your base is being attacked, having to slow and calmly vocalize your actions so they are properly interpretted... probably not ideal. lol
You're really better off buying something like VoiceAttack and setting it up to do key combinations when you yell stuff. I used the trial a while ago and set up a bunch of 'Oh[curse]' commands for Starcraft.
Bot does something stupid.. you yell "F*CK THIS!".. now you tell me, you still think voice commands needs to be implemented? :mrgreen:
