We've had the same ship computer voices for the various manufacturers for a long time. Are there plans to re-record new lines for the ships to better fit the current and future mechanics Star Citizen is moving towards?
TL;DRA full redesign of ship computer voices is on their plate, including unified warnings and manufacturer personality, but it depends on first choosing text-to-speech tech and nothing is fully signed off.
Yes. Now, I briefly touched on it with that other question, talking about the AI and having text-to-speech generating the voices and whatnot. And that's a big proponent in this redesign. We have it on the plate to completely overhaul and completely redesign the ship computer voices. And it really starts with that tech, buying into that tech and figuring out which one we're going to use. From there, not only are we trying to improve the content that we're using, but we also want to improve its role in everything. One of the things that's really important to us is unifying the warning and crit package across all manufacturers. The dialogue that's used there, the visual representation, the sound effects representation, all those three things come together to really put together a complete experience for how you would experience a warning and a crit, how they should operate and how you would expect them to. And a lot of it, we really want to look toward the military and actual fighter jets, because there's a lot of science that goes into these kinds of warnings and alerts. And we would like to treat it a bit more real-world with that and get involved in it a bit more. I mean, still really cool, but that is a huge passion project for us, to really achieve a much better ship computer in that kind of sense. And that's just one role, definitely fixing and unifying that specific experience. But we would like to look at having a better ship computer that acknowledges the essence of the manufacturer, or the luxury, or the military, or the utilitarian. We want it to have that heart and to really share that a bit better. But also one extra thing is that I personally would like to have some more ship computer roles relating to gameplay loops. I feel like it'd be great to have a ship computer for exploration that can really touch on the systems and give you more information and thoughts and dangers and lurkings and all these things about your exploration. Or maybe a ship computer voice that's more detailed for combat, to give you an idea like, danger, Will Robinson, you're heading into a dangerous system, or you're outnumbered, there's a lot of ships approaching, and it's to a point where we sense that you're not going to be able to succeed. But these ideas are in our heads. We're really trying to put them down on paper. And, like I said, it really takes getting the right tech first. But all these things are on the table, and none of them have been fully signed off yet. But what we're clearly seeing is that the ship computer currently does not fulfill the role that we would like to see it fulfill. And so very much we will be addressing this as we sort out that tech.