VOICE PACKAGES

"Machismo"
cool_machismo@yahoo.com

INTRODUCTION

You'll need special hardware and software to do this tutorial. Hey you don't expect to hear your voice appear by magic do you :).
REQUIREMENTS:
1. A sound card with a microphone in jack.
2. A microphone.
3. A sound editing program.

WHAT I USED

I used a really cool sound editing program called called SoundForgeXP that came with my SBLive! card. You could try to get the latest version of this program at www.sonicfoundry.com. You're going to be hard put to find a better program. You'll be interested to know that Epic used Sound Forge (someone correct me if I'm wrong). So you can understand the quality of this program. I also suggest that you visit the unreal tech page and read Tim Sweeney's article on the Audio Subsystem.

HOW TO GO ABOUT IT

First do the voice recording. I've found that keeping the microphone volume at maximum can really screws up your recording by putting in more hisses and pops.. You'll have to arrive at the correct volume by a process of experimentation. This may be obvious to everyone but if for some reason your recording doesn't seem to work make sure that microphone is selected as your recording device under multimedia in control panel.

You could do the recording in sound forge itself. Make sure the sound attribute is 22,050 Hz. Save the voice recording in the wave format. I'll be discussing how to edit the file using Sound Forge. I'll give a brief into here but sound forge has a nice help file (creative users may want to check out the demo movie on CD3).

Open up sound forge and load your recording. It should look something like this:

Those heavy duty blue lines are the recording the rest is just silence that is not needed. Select the silence by dragging the slider and hit delete - do this at the beginning and the end. Hear your new wav and see that you did not delete part of your voice. This is how the final wave file should look like:

Can you make out the difference?

Your voice will still not be clear. You need to add some effects to it. You could try the following effects that I used (all found in the effects pull down menu):
- Noise Gate: Select a sample of your recording and hit tools statistics. Check out the average values. Now hit noise gate and move the bar to a higher level. Remember 0dB is a very high level and -50dB is a low level. It "removes noise from silent breaks in a sample".
- Reverb: The most important effect which adds the feeling of different places to your sound. I used medium hall.
- Try the other effects for your sound for now these two are enough. Save your recording now.

IMPORTING INTO UNREALED

Fire up UnrealEd. Under the pull down menu on the right choose SoundFX. Hit the import button to create a new package after choosing the previously saved wave file. Enter the usual stuff in the box:

Save your package in the sounds folder as an unreal sound package (*.uax). Hit play to see how it sounds in the editor. That's it you now have your sound ready for use in the game.

UNREAL EDITOR APPLICATIONS & TIPS

Lets see some of the uses that voices can be used for. I'll also give you some tips:

• The coolest application of these sounds will be in favorite genre assault. You can create a voice recording giving a full briefing on how to complete the level. Then place a trigger and special event near the assaulting teams starting point. Give the same name to the event of the trigger and the tag of the special event. Set bTriggerOnceOnly to true as you don't want the recording to be triggered again and again. Under the special events properties set object initial state to play sound effect (not players play sound effect). Under special event hit use after choosing this briefing. You may want to set radius, etc. under sound.

• I suggest strongly that you follow this tip. When having a briefing have it in a sealed off area or a little away from the starting point. For example you can have a briefing room room and in front of it the player start. Once the players have used the level a few times it'll get pretty boring hearing the same recording again and again. This way they need to specifically enter the room to hear the briefing.

• Watch what you do with those sounds, it will increase your download time dramatically. This might prove to be a hindering factor in making more people download your map. While saving your sound file you could compromise on sound quality to achieve better compression. And it is absolutely vital that you use maximum compression while compressing your maps, sounds, etc in WinZip.

• Another application of voice recordings is to have it triggered off on the completion of each objective, by having it say something like "the objective was destroyed". The way I would do it would be to have a trigger set off a dispatcher with its out events as the fort standard and and a special event with object initial state as play sound effect. Try to keep the length of the message short and sweet.

• You could also try getting voice recordings to work for the various info classes like ChallengeBotInfo where you can set voice packages for the various bot teams. You could make your own voice recordings saying die bitch, etc. and have teams use that package. Head down to Unrealized and learn how to do this by editing the *.ini files. I haven't been able to get the local message under info working maybe you can try.