The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I've been messing around with SoundForge, trying to see if I could recreate the missing dialog pieces where the Mycon tell you the location of their homeworld, by copy-pasting bits of existing Mycon speech and using various effect plugins.

Here are two audio files that now correspond to the DOS version text (based on this (http://uqm.stack.nl/diff/mycon.html)).
I put them in a spoiler tag just in case - they do contain spoiler info...


What do you think?  Try to pretend you're listening to them in-game for the first time (along with the text), rather than scrutinizing them for evidence of copy/paste... I know it can be picked up here and there.  Not perfect, but perhaps it could work.

V

Sounds pretty good to me. In fact, curiously it sounds better in some ways that Valggar's efforts, and I think he actually got PR3 to say it from scratch.

I'd be happy with this to be inserted in the next UQM version, especially since I have a mate who wants to play it but I wont let him until the mycon thing is fixed.

Even if the quality isn't 100%, it is good enough for a 0.version. It can be improved for the 1.version (whenever that will be!)

Anyway, I guess I'm emploring the core guys to implement some kind of fix ASAP

Holy crap, that sounds perfect. Well...at least to me, it does. Good job. Maybe it could be added like an addon. So people, like me, could test this out.

It's not quite perfect, there's a bit of noise going on - bit way too good not to be used I reckon.

How the heck did you do it?

The voice is perfect, but there's a bit too much fuzz in these two audio clips.

As others have said, voice is create, the sound just needs to be cleaned up if thats possible.

Yeah, I've tried to avoid fuzz/noise, but most of it is due to the source speech files (which had been downsampled to 11KHz from the 3DO CD, and further underwent ogg vorbis compression) - anyway, I don't think the noise is much greater than in the existing speech files... hopefully it won't become a problem if it's encoded back into .ogg, though.

As for your quesiton, like I said above - by copy-pasting bits of existing Mycon speech and using various effects.  ;D  Namely reverb, flange and tons of pitch bending.

This sounds good, but the main reason for which my version doesn't sound as good is, I suppose, that I'm not as good at audio editing as you are (so I wasn't able to copy the original effects accurately enough). So maybe you could try something with Paul Reiche (https://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/show_bug.cgi?id=983)'s version. (Use the last two downloads -- the "Real Raw" things -- not the others, as the others are already partially edited)

Also, I know that the Melnorme MetaChron is longer, and not so relevant to the plot, but I suppose you could do it even better than this if you tried, as the Melnorme  doesn't have that background noise, and speaks jerkier. (Because I tried fixing that as well, and it was better, though I didn't have the patience to try pitch bending it) It certainly isn't worth it, anyway.

VileRancour, are you doing your editing with Audacity by any chance? I'm just wondering how far one can get with this program.

Nice job! I don't really mind the noise, but...

Woah... didn't even know that this existed!  Thanks.
I tried playing around with this a bit just now, but I can't really get it to sound quite right... probably because he couldn't have used the same microphone and recording environment as back then, as well as the fact that a person's voice changes over the years.  I may try to tackle this further when I have time, though.

And yeah, I've thought of trying the Melnorme's Metachron bit next... it's rather long though. We'll see!

I'm using SoundForge 8, but I've heard a lot of good things about Audacity, both on the web and from some semi-professional musicians I know.  Things like this mostly depend on external plugins and on experience, though, so as long as Audacity supports VST or DXi, and you have the right tools and know what you're doing, you should be good to go. ;D

This is good enough to change the question that should, in my opinion, be asked from "Should this be an add-on?" to "Should UQM include this by default?". Based on bug 327 (https://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/show_bug.cgi?id=327) and bug 983 (https://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/show_bug.cgi?id=983) (and the fact that we need a sticky comment on the forum), there should not be any objections to including this in UQM.

Even better, but I'd still like to try this before it's put into a release.

Damn straight! Good to hear that Novus, I hope the core team agree with you.

Let's not forget the Melnorme's Metachron bit. Just as useful to the player as this bit of clarification from the Mycon.

I cant see why there would be a problem with audio being added, since its relevant to the game.

If you want the orinal audio from the 3DO CD itself, let me know I can make it available.  Just let me know which smaples you would want.

Thanks - I do have the original audio files from the CD, I just haven't the slightest idea how to convert them to a usable format... something about the file sizes tells me it wouldn't be a huge improvement over using the .oggs, but I could be wrong.

I tried a little experiment: I asked a British friend to listen to the first sample without knowing the text (nor the game), and type it out. Here's the result...

This thread should give you some pointer as to how to get the audio form 3DO

http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=2045.0

So why did 3DO leave out those dialogues in the first place anyway? They both kind of convey important information that there really isn't a reasonable way to find out otherwise.  :-\  (I mean, yeah, if you're searching around long enough you'll find the Mycon homeworld, and that you're on a time limit, but it's still odd...)

Oh, also, if I just pop those files (from the top of the list on the Bugzilla page) will I get the missing audio and text in game? (my OCD RPgamer side throws a bit of a fit about acting on knowlege it doesn't have in game)

It was to generate hint line revenue.

If you mean the bug 983 (https://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/show_bug.cgi?id=983) attachments, no. If you give them the right filenames and put the in the right place, you could get some of the speech (in cases where an existing file can be replaced with one containing the missing information as well), but the text and game logic are not affected by these sound files.

Nutbunnies.