Voice Acting Capability in Custom Campaigns

[Sonicjumper]

I did a little looking around and was a little surprised no one has asked about this yet. As briefly mentioned in the post about the stretch goals, voice acting was a possibility for the main game, though not pursued. While I don't mind not having voices in the main campaign, if there's some way to do it in custom campaigns then I would like to find out what it is.

From what I know(which is iffy at best), there's two main uses of sound in the game, sound effects and music. A possibility that comes to mind is creating "sound effects" that contain voice acting dialogue and use custom campaign magic to play those sound effects at the correct moment. What are the limitations of this? Will the sound quality be good enough for this purpose? I'll eventually answer these questions myself, but I am currently busy with other aspects of custom campaign's so I was hoping to get some inside advice  ;), plus then it will be here for everyone to learn from.

[bugfartboy]

As far as I'm aware, the PlaySound action should be more than satisfactory.  I've actually considered using it for a few things, but haven't gotten around to it.  The one thing I'd be careful of:  There's no way to interrupt a sound once it's been started.  If you're using it for voiceovers, and the player just *clickclickclickclickclick*s through your dialog, it'll sound like a total trainwreck of audio.  I'm hoping for a StopSounds action, so that that kind of thing could be avoided by calling StopSounds before playing the next audio clip.

[Sonicjumper]

There's no way to interrupt a sound once it's been started.  If you're using it for voiceovers, and the player just *clickclickclickclickclick*s through your dialog, it'll sound like a total trainwreck of audio.

That's kind of what I meant by "limitations". I happen to clickstorm as well whenever I have already seen the dialogue for a certain map or just restarted because one of my characters died. The StopSounds action you're suggesting would probably the most direct solution to that issue. If I do end up using PlaySound for my sound effects I might find some way to skip the dialogue so you wouldn't have to hear/read everything again, but that's more of a workaround that a fix.

[bugfartboy]

Yeah.  Implementing custom audio is a little... flat.  No custom music, no custom loops, and a very restricted way of playing custom audio.  It isn't perfect, but it gets the job done! :D

[bugfartboy]

--added a new property to one-shot sounds wherein they can be tagged with a string.

--added an optional second parameter to the PlaySound script action: sound tag. This assigns a string to a one-shot sound effect to serve as the sound's tag.

--new script action: StopSound. One parameter: a string, the tag of the one-shot sound to stop playing. (If multiple one-shot sounds have the same tag, then if you use that tag with StopSound, all of them will stop playing.)

Well that was fast. Voice acting for everyone!

[Sonicjumper]

That was amazingly fast! Can't wait to put it to use!
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D