[Mod Idea] Voiced Narration and Mission Text

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Fatsack
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri, 26. Jan 24, 20:50
x4

[Mod Idea] Voiced Narration and Mission Text

Post by Fatsack » Sat, 27. Jan 24, 01:31

If I had the time to invest to figure it out, I'd do it myself, but I don't so I'll share the idea.

Transform game text into immersive narrated voice lines.

X4 has a lot of lore and world building that is in the form of plain text. This is in the form of mission text, encyclopedia entries, messages the player receives in the player information screen, descriptions of sectors in the information tab, etc.

In Elite: Dangerous, they have a radio channel you can listen to with the latest news from the galaxy, that adds a huge amount of immersion as it feels like you're in a living universe where things are happening without you. I think X4 could benefit alot from something similar. There is this mod that attempts to do this: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/494. However this mod is very static with the same exact messages over and over. It would be nice if:
  • Mission offers and briefings were voiced by the npc giving them to you
  • Messages and alerts the player receives were voiced
  • There was a 'radio' station with different channels
  • News channel with crime, war, economy, and political updates
  • A History and Geography channel that read the sector description and other encyclopedia entries related to the sector your currently in
  • Additional custom content fleshing out the X4 Universe
  • More variety and contextual radio chatter


Step one: Extract the text from the game files, such as these mission prompts, or encyclopedia entries... ... or for custom content use the free chat-gpt 3.5 to generate text. I made a little story by prompting chat gpt to pretend it was writing fan fiction on the X4 game lore and scifi books. I made a whole story about Hatikvah Free League's struggle to side with the Argon vs. with ScalePlate, a whole mini-epic about freedom versus security, even character dialogue, it was surprisingly fast and easy.

Step Two: Use an AI Text-to-speech service such as eleven labs, to generate a voice line from the text.
Download the voiced line audio file.

Step Three: Grab the .scp voice filter files Egosoft has provided to the modding community here: Step Four: Run the voiced line audio file through Cool Edit Pro v2.0 with the .scp audio filters to create copies for each of the races in the game, saying the line.

Step Five: Create a mod to play the audio file. Determining when and what to trigger will probably be the messiest part of the mod, but getting the voiced lines is pretty straight forward.


Mods could have a lot of cool new voiced conversations and lines and general immersion with this work flow.

Fatsack
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri, 26. Jan 24, 20:50
x4

Re: [Mod Idea] Voiced Narration and Mission Text

Post by Fatsack » Sat, 10. Feb 24, 22:15

Imagine if something like the following low latency speech to speech were available in X4. Even if it was just reading from the mission briefing text or giving you contextual news based on the current state of your playthrough! Check out this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k8wUfU7n4Q

moonandstar99
Posts: 24
Joined: Sat, 23. Jan 21, 21:37
x4

Re: [Mod Idea] Voiced Narration and Mission Text

Post by moonandstar99 » Sat, 24. Feb 24, 16:38

Thing is, X3 had basically everything narrated and that was way before any of this. This is a huge opportunity to easily (compared to manual VO) increase immersion and reduce the amount of text reading required. Definitely need this in X4!

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