Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
While the speech is being played, a data stream is fed into the animation system that
tells which phoneme to show on the character at each point in time. The animation
system interpolates smoothly between each sound extreme, and you get the illusion
that the character is actually talking.
Cheap Hacks for Lip Synching
There are ways of doing lip synching on the cheap, depending on your game.
Interstate 76 solved the lip synching problem by removing all the lips; none of
their characters had mouths at all! Another clever solution is to have the
characters animate to a particular phrase like
“
peas and carrots, peas and
carrots.
Wing Commander II, a game published by Origin Systems in the
mid-1990s, had all
”
its characters lip-synched to a single phrase:
“
Play more
games like WingCommander II.
”
Recording Speech
Most games will use at most a few hundred sound effects. This relatively small num-
ber of sound files is trivial to manage compared to speech files in some games. Thief:
Deadly Shadows had somewhere around 10,000 lines of speech. You can
'
t just throw
these files into a single directory. You
'
ve got to be organized.
The first thing you need is a script
one for each character. As part of the script, the
character should be described in detail, even to the point of including a rendering of
the character
—
'
“
”
s face. Voice actors use the character description to get
into character
and create a great performance.
The recording session will most likely have the voice actor read the entire script from
top to bottom, perhaps repeating a line or phrase a few times to get it right. It
s criti-
cal to keep accurate records about which one of the lines you intend to keep and
which you
'
'
ll throw away. A few days later, you could find it difficult to remember.
You
ll record to DAT tape or some other high-fidelity media and later split the ses-
sion into individual, uncompressed files. Here
'
'
s where your organization will come
into key importance: You should have a database that links each file with exactly
what is said. This will help foreign language translators record localized speech or
create localized subtitles. It is, after all, quite likely that the actor may ad lib a bit
and say something a little differently than the original script.
The one thing I hope you get from this chapter besides a bit of technology advice is
that sound is a critically important part of your game. This topic has certainly spent