Sorry Knight, slacking on the script, been busy w/ work, and was sick in bed for a few days...

I have got a rudimentary start working, but nowhere near what it should be considering the time I could have spent on it. For some reason I seem to spend more of my free time playing VO than working on the script.

Good News, Finished the Voices, Have Plenty done for you-to work with.

Beo, in my site click your name and it should download a folder that had my idea of the folder complexity. it also has all the files in that folder so YOU DL that folder

Beo DL the folder under your name.

http://home.comcast.net/~knight_of_order/VoiceChat.htm

I get a 404 Page Not Found when I try to use that link, Knight.

http://home.comcast.net/~knight_of_order/Files/VO-VoiceChat.zip

Ok fixed problem, you need to Right Click to DL file (i don't now why) works fine in the tests but not in the net version, will looking into that further some other time.

well good luck with that, and tell me what you think.

oh and when you open it its the folder titled "VO-VoiceChat" not the max osx one (don't have any idea why thats there)

so do you think this idea will take off or not?

if yes then i will start working on the flash par of the site, if not or not yet, i will wait.

Ummm yeah, I keep doing too much VO playing & not enough coding on this...

If anyone sees me in game yell at me to stop playing & get to work. I'll try to get a version 0.1 with basic functionality finished this weekend.

[edit Sunday 06 Feb 2005]
Well, maybe not this weekend, sorry. I spent most of the weekend doing stuff w/ friends & family. I have the script to where it catches all the things I want it to trigger on, but I haven't gotten it to play the audio yet. I want the script to play the ogg files itself, so that it doesn't require any seperate player like ogg123 that some people won't have.
[/edit]

ok Beolach, I'm taking an HTML class and a JAVA class. i've decided to skip the flash and just you plain HTML because i don't want to deal with it... and flash looks good but takes forever to load.

Well, getting back to the voices, was wondering what you though about my Folder idea, and if it would work best like that.

Well, as far as the directory structure goes, I think it's easier to keep all the audio files in one directory. It really doesn't matter much either way, the only thing that matters would be where the script looks for the audio file to play, and IMO it's easier to just look in one place than many.

It's proving much harder to get it to play the audio than I expected. I can get it to play under Linux (and probably Mac OSX, although I don't have a Mac to test it), but Windows is proving to be a pain.

I wanted to make it so that the perl script uses Ogg::Vorbis::Decoder to decode & play the ogg files, and I think I'm pretty close to getting it to work, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to get it to play the decoded PCM stream under Windows. Once I find out how to do that, everything else should be pretty easy for me to code.

if you would like me to test it under mac osx just let me know, thats what I'm running. just give me a link and 1 day to get it. (i check this page every-time i open my web browser).

if you give detailed instructions on how to do it and what i need to do i will.

OK, I'm sick of trying to get the perl script to play the audio itself. It's proving to be a massive pain to make multi-platform, and for some reason I can't determine, when I do get it to play it makes really bad static, and not cool sounding radio static, but hurt your ears loud static. So, I'm going back to how I had my first bash script do it, using ogg123. The problem with this is that ogg123 isn't included in default Mac OSX (but should be easy to install, I think), and is also not included in Windows (and seems to be a massive pain to install on Windows).

So basically I'm going to do this first only for Linux, and assuming ogg123 is easy to install on Mac OSX, that should be all that's needed for it to work on Macs. For Windows, we'll need to get someone who's more used to coding for Windows & has more access to a Windows box than I do.

[edit]
Knight_Of_Order, could you or one of our other Mac users confirm whether or not ogg123 is easy to install on Mac OSX? I think & hope Mac OS X qualifies as *nix. ogg123 is part of the vorbis-tools package.
http://www.vorbis.com/download_unix_1.0.1.psp

If it proves to be a pain to install, it's not too big of a problem, we'll just need to use a different player. Anyone know of a good ogg compatible command-line player for Mac OS X and/or Windows?
[/edit]

[edit 23 Feb. 2005]
So, I decided to do it the easy way first (Linux only).... and then my PC craps out on me. So I haven't had a working computer for the last few days. I've almost got it back up, and should have the Linux client for this finished soon(tm) thereafter. And then we can start working on Mac & Windows clients. Sorry this is taking so long, it really shouldn't have.
[/edit]

... aRG!

ok, i've tried installing it with no luck... i can't seem to figure it out... it could just be me though.

i thought i'd give it more time to develop before i tried installing it. (my knowledge of Unix).

ack have to finish my thesis paper.

Well, this project hasn't been finished. If anyone is interested in seeing in finished, please post here. Also, please post if you're interested in volunteering as a voice-actor.

Also, about the problems I was having making the perl script play the audio files by itself: I'm going to redo it with the perl binding for libSDL, which should hopefully work well, on all three platforms.

I'd love to have something like this. I'll volunteer for voice acting as well. I'm an acting major anyways and I was looking to get into a bit of voice acting. I'll also start writing up some good lines.

Alright, I've come up with a rough list for chat using variable conditions that will occur ingame. Let me know if I miss something cause I'm sure I did. Under each are a few examples.

Wingman Orders/Chat:
-Comming to assist.
-I'm on him.
-You're clear.
-On your wing.
-Breaking formation.
-Engaging.
-Engage my target.
-Watch your six!
-Incomming.

Need repair/reload:
-I'm making a "Strategic Withdrawal".
-Be back with ammo.
-I'm bugging out.

Ready to engage:
-Turn me loose.
-Ready to strut my stuff.
-ooo... look what I see.
-Time to earn my pay.
-Plenty of victims here.
-Plenty of targets to shoot at.
-Well, at least it will be difficult to miss.
-Bring it.
-Stay sharp.

Taunts:
-Gonna take more than spam to knock me down.
-Something to drink with that spam?
-Prom Jock!
-Valk Jock!
-Gonna have to do better than that pal.
-1...2...3... too many.
-Need help to take me out?
-Better run.
-Go get some help.
-Look at him run!
-That gat turret sure takes a lot of skill doesnt it.
-For Itan.
-For the lady serco!
-(Pirate taunt) Arr drop your cargo! (or something like that)
-Fight or flee.
-I'm commin for ya.

Target destroyed:
-The bigger they are...
-Scratch one.
-Enemy down.
-Target destroyed.
-Boom.
-Didn't even touch me.
-Next!

Need help:
-I've got enemy up the ass, mind helping out a bit?
-Could use some help here.
-Need assistance.
-Taking fire.
-I've got half a ship...
-They're all over me!

Hit/Dead:
-Son of a-
-I'm done.
-I can't hold it!
-For Itan!
-For the lady serco!
-AHHHHHHHH!
-What the-
-Lucky shot.
-See you in hell!

etc.

Feel free to add on to the lists. Once the list is complete we would then categorize them characteristically. Then create pilot personalities with them. ie.) Cold, calm, killer pilot. Rowdy excited pilot. Nervous trader pilot. etc.

The most fun part of these is going to be the taunts. Imagine being in the middle of a dogfight and being able to send an audio taunt to your target. Perhaps if we find a way, the script could be left open in some areas for people with mics to fill in their own taunts. Or, another option might be to leave the entire script open for some people. That way they would have all the binds and aliases they needed to make it work, all they would have to do would be record their own voice and make their own chat messages.

Let me know when you think the idea is complete and we have our script. Then I'll get to work on recording some voices.

Um, yeah, I still haven't finished this, and at this point I'm not sure I'm ever going to. Now that Mac users can use TeamSpeak, pretty much all VO players can use actual real-time voice chat, so I don't know how useful this pre-recorded voice acting would actually be.

Anyway, if anyone does still want to see this, feel free to harass me about it, and I could finish it.

Another possibility, is I could leave inter-player communication to TeamSpeak/Skype/other voice-chat, and just use this pre-recorded voice acting for in-game messages, like CtC and various mission messages.