Are there plans for other NPCs to actually pronounce the names of your characters and ships when they are talking to you?asked by SwordfishLspear
TL;DRThere are no current plans for NPCs to pronounce player-chosen names, since dialogue is pre-recorded and this would need speech synthesis, though it could be considered if synthesis becomes good enough.
Well, it depends on what we're talking about. If you're talking about names that you give yourself or names you would give your ship versus sort of, you know an Aegis Retaliator for instance – then right now we don't necessarily have plans for that because that would be more speech synthesis. So at the moment most of the – whether it's the NPC dialog that we have in Squadron 42 or in the Persistent Universe, that's pre-recorded. So, I would say at the moment no.If we can ever make decent speech synthesis – because I've yet to hear something that's really great – then that potentially could change but right now I would say in V1.0 that's not on the board because there's a lot of other things that we have to do.But we do have a really talented sound group, we actually have – most of them are based in the UK – we actually have 3 sound engineers, besides the sound designers and all of the rest of the stuff. 3 sound programmers. We're planning to do a lot with our sound, a lot of situational environmental stuff. So, like – we're going to have an in-game VOIP solution – if someone's behind you and they're talking to you, you'll hear them behind you in your game, they'll be filtered if they're through a helmet and stuff like that.So, there's some longer term stuff – looking at speech recognition and other stuff to help with controls and ships. So, we'll do some very cool sound stuff. Don't know if it's pronouncing the names of your characters and ships but if the speech synth stuff gets good enough then it's definitely something we would consider.