the sound dimension

[novangelus]

It wouldn't be an OOTP winter without the annual debate between the textophiles (fix the bugs and keep it simple) vs the animaniacs (ewb forever, and of which i may be one). What get's lost in the graphics vs no graphics discussion is the sound dimension. What about "live" broadcasters?

Part of my job is developing e learning materials. Part of that job means examining text to speech (tts) engines. Some tts voices sound like robots (Puresim's use of the awful microsoft anna voice comes to mind). There has been slow improvement in this sector, that is until recently with the development of loquendo voices. These tts voices are capable of expressing a wide range of emotion and inflextion. In short, while they may not be ernie harwell they could call a believable game from the booth.

Marcus, you quite rightly have questioned whether animation is in ootp's near future due to the enormous time, energy and money to get it right. Yet in the ongoing evolution of ootp a new feature like live broadcast using great voices that read the play by play would be yet one more aspect of a great game that would set ootp apart and attract a wider audience. Imagine listening to great play by play while we finish up our paper work in the evening and stop everything when we hear that the bases are loaded and our slugger is up. Loquendo voices are not cheap but they are a real breakthrough. Thoughts?

[Charlie Hough]

I love the idea. This seems like it would be relatively easy to implement as far as the audio goes. Programming it to time with the text output and the game engine might be more complicated.

But you don't need to use text to speech technology or hire a professional announcer to do the play-by-play. With Pro Tools and a copy of all the play-by-play text and the Lahman database, someone could put together all the .wav files needed to incorporate live broadcasting, including player names. I'd love to give it a shot personally.

One question is whether the background sound from the ballpark would need to be included in the broadcast clips or whether OOTP could actually play both the broadcast and background audio simultaneously by layering them. It would be a lot easier if they could be blended after the fact rather than recording more play-by-play tracks to account for the need to have different levels of background noise.

But I don't know that Markus is looking in this direction anyway, so maybe it's a moot point.

[Eugene Church]

Originally Posted by novangelus

It wouldn't be an OOTP winter without the annual debate between the textophiles (fix the bugs and keep it simple) vs the animaniacs (ewb forever, and of which i may be one). What get's lost in the graphics vs no graphics discussion is the sound dimension. What about "live" broadcasters?

Part of my job is developing e learning materials. Part of that job means examining text to speech (tts) engines. Some tts voices sound like robots (Puresim's use of the awful microsoft anna voice comes to mind). There has been slow improvement in this sector, that is until recently with the development of loquendo voices. These tts voices are capable of expressing a wide range of emotion and inflextion. In short, while they may not be ernie harwell they could call a believable game from the booth.

Marcus, you quite rightly have questioned whether animation is in ootp's near future due to the enormous time, energy and money to get it right. Yet in the ongoing evolution of ootp a new feature like live broadcast using great voices that read the play by play would be yet one more aspect of a great game that would set ootp apart and attract a wider audience. Imagine listening to great play by play while we finish up our paper work in the evening and stop everything when we hear that the bases are loaded and our slugger is up. Loquendo voices are not cheap but they are a real breakthrough. Thoughts?

I would love for this to be incorporated in the game, but only if it is done well. The current background sound is amateurish and not done very well.

I grew up listening to baseball on the radio...Harry Caray and the Cardinals, Jack Bitterman and the Mobile Bears and the Old Redhead, Ted Andrews, and the New Orleans Pelicans. It would really be special if Markus could do something like this.

Send him an e-mail and tell what you know about the process.

Good suggestion.

[Markus Heinsohn]

Originally Posted by novangelus

Marcus, you quite rightly have questioned whether animation is in ootp's near future due to the enormous time, energy and money to get it right. Yet in the ongoing evolution of ootp a new feature like live broadcast using great voices that read the play by play would be yet one more aspect of a great game that would set ootp apart and attract a wider audience. Imagine listening to great play by play while we finish up our paper work in the evening and stop everything when we hear that the bases are loaded and our slugger is up. Loquendo voices are not cheap but they are a real breakthrough. Thoughts?

That would rock. Unfortunately, we cannot afford the time and money for such a feature, both would be out of our range

[novangelus]

Charlie Hough wrote: "I love the idea. This seems like it would be relatively easy to implement as far as the audio goes. Programming it to time with the text output and the game engine might be more complicated. But you don't need to use text to speech technology or hire a professional announcer to do the play-by-play. With Pro Tools and a copy of all the play-by-play text and the Lahman database, someone could put together all the .wav files needed to incorporate live broadcasting, including player names. I'd love to give it a shot personally."

Thanks for the positive feedback, Charlie and Eugene.
On the question of do it yourself vs TTS speech engines: It certainly could be done in house with the right software, etc. but it is more complicated than many people think to get clear audio without a professional voice, sound booth, etc. I've tried recording my own narrative for some of the e-learning materials i do and it is a bear to get it right.
It is much easier with the high quality synthetic voice engines. The advantages of loquendo emotional TTS is that you produce your own professional sounding wav files completely without static or noise degradation of any kind simply by cutting and pasting the play by play into their speech engine and hitting the conversion button. It also allows the game designer to have complete control over the process at a fraction of the time and cost of professional quality services. endless tweaking and refining of the sound is easy with the engines. It also allows for improving the broadcast for each patch without having to rerecord using real voices.

But either way i think this could be a key step in the ongoing evolution of our beloved game.

[novangelus]

duplicate post

[novangelus]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

That would rock. Unfortunately, we cannot afford the time and money for such a feature, both would be out of our range

Marcus,
You may be right but i think you would be surprised about how inexpensive some of the tts voices are right now (maybe not loquendo) and how the cut and paste method made possible by their engines means saving time by creating wav files based on our already written play by play. But i am not a programmer so you obviously know the complexities of integrating wav files into a game even if they are cheap and quick to produce. So it may have enough merit to get on a "maybe someday" list. As we say in baseball: "Maybe next year."