A question about the choice of comms.

D

-danr-

Vice Admiral
I've noticed within the Standoff files, a lot of data for pilot comms that wouldn't ever have been used in the game itself.

For instance, there's a sound file for Trigger declaring that he's launching a torpedo, or knocked out an enemy bridge. But of course Trigger never gets to fire a torpedo because he only flies the Talon, Stiletto, Gladius (fighter loadout) and very briefly the Rapier. So the comm never gets used in game.

The same is true for many pilots, lots of comm calls that never get heard for similar circumstances.

So just out of plain curiosity, did you (the Standoff team) collect all the voice actor's comms for all possible scenarios before you created the campaign, and then just used the ones that you needed?
 
I would suspect that would be the case. Just remember how much trouble it was to get the major voice actors together for each episode's release - how much more so if they had to do it with all the 'extras' as well? (Not discounting the contribution that anyone has made to this project, big or small.)

It's also a lot easier just to draw up a list of all the comms/taunts/death screams/etc needed for a character and request them from every voice actor representing a pilot, instead of saying actor A only has these lines, whereas actor B has those lines.

Certainly, I think it is a good idea to cover all possibilities when asking for voice contributions.
 
That's a good point, but surely then not including the un-needed files would have saved significant amounts of space on the download?

(Not that I'm particularly bothered, obviously better to release it all so it's available and not held back, but just curious, presumably it never came up as a problem.)
 
It's not that much extra data really, not with a download the size of Stanoff. Also it's good they left the extra voice clips in, as the voice files are 'active' with the pilots they're associated with.

i.e. If you put Trigger in a Sabre on a customised mission, he's automatically set to use the torpedo calls when necessary. For modding purposes it's great, you don't need to record anything new because all bases are covered.
 
Even though I appreciate it when efforts are made to conserve space, I think this would have been to risky and time-consuming - there's always the chance that a particular line was needed in some obscure situation... but it wasn't available.

Also, the voice actors and actresses all made an effort to record those lines. I don't think it fair to exclude some just because they're not necessarily used in-game.
 
Not mentioning that the game would crash if it needed the extra comm for some reason. Better be safe and include them all than later puzzled at why we're getting strange crashes :p
 
-danr- said:
But of course Trigger never gets to fire a torpedo because he only flies the Talon, Stiletto, Gladius (fighter loadout) and very briefly the Rapier. So the comm never gets used in game.
Click to expand...
you forgot the Arrow

Also, isnt it possible to loose all your rapiers and stilettos? and be stuck with just sabers, gladii and crossbows? or would the game actually crash? or , maybe youll never fly with Trigger if this happens?
 
AFAIK when you loose some ships needed to fullfill specific missions, you'll get a debriefing that you can't continue the game because of that and the end credit start.
 
Basically, it's a matter of simplicity. You can create separate profiles for different pilots, where some will have torp-related lines, others won't... but then you have to remember all throughout the game - this guy is a bomber pilot, this guy isn't. Sometimes, for some story reason, you want a fighter pilot flying a bomber - and when you're making Episode 1, you don't even know what these folks will be doing by the end of Episode 5 ;).

At the end of the day, I never gave a moment's thought to the amount of space this stuff takes up. I guess a pilot's torp-related lines probably add up to about 100kb - even if you multiply that by 30 (which is about how many unique fighter pilot voices there are), it's precious little compared to the size of the entire package. Besides... download size may have been a slight issue when we were releasing Episode 1... but by the end of Episode 5, we were in August 2010 - who the heck has difficulty downloading 500mb these days? What would be the point of trying to reduce the package size by 3mb? Even reducing it by 50mb just plain wouldn't change anything.

To be honest, my regrets go very much in the opposite direction - we've got all these corvette, transport and capship pilots whose line sets were designed to be as limited as possible... and it sucks. Sometimes, the "special" lines we recorded for these people were lines that could and should have been included in the generic set. If I were making Standoff today, I'd happily throw in another 50mb worth of voiceovers (and that would probably add up to a thousand lines or something!).
 
I'm making a game myself, and I tend to collect more voice samples (and even sound effects and music) than are needed. It's always best to have an abundance of resources.
 
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