Bjossi on 21/9/2006 at 22:47

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[SPOILER]When I first heard her voice while I was near the maint. shaft, I was pretty creeped out since I had no idea who, or what, was making those very...interesting...sounds.[/SPOILER]

:p

Ultraviolet on 22/9/2006 at 02:33

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Oh shit, I'm going to have to drive to the college and download these (dialup sux yo). But I WILL do it, and NOW.

Based on just the screenshots, though, I'd like to say that while I like the utilitarian style of this, I thought that, for example, Proov did it a lot more cleanly. In spite of any architectural shortcomings, though, any new SS2 FM is a good thing (unless someone decides to prove me wrong on purpose).

An example of an improvement in architecture I'd like to see: Non-uniform lighting. I know that using ambient lighting lets one use less light objects and thus makes for smoother performance, but it removes pitch black areas that could be cool if used right. For instance, the ceiling of the reactor room and its various recesses could make pretty good mysterious dark areas. I haven't produced anything this size (I make small areas for architectural concept work but never link them up), so I don't know if using that kind of lighting would be hampered by the engine's limits.

Another thought I had:
Someday, in an FM, I'd like to see the ships environmental systems be a bit more dynamic. One thing I thought of would be reactive lighting. You could create a custom AI object thing, and when it hears or sees you it can instantly go to its fully aware state and turn on a light, then when it loses you it can turn the light off. Power conservation. Kill the lights when nobody is around. Responds to sight and sound. Could make for interesting encounters with silent monsters, yeah? Surprise, surprise... Or how about organic surveilance equipment? Eyeballs embedded in nerve clusters attached to walls. A pad of tissue on the floor, nerve-connected to the wall, that sets off an alarm if you walk over it. I was going to keep these ideas for myself, but I don't think I'll ever really get around to implementing them. SOMEBODY TRY THIS!

Kolya on 22/9/2006 at 04:08

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My pleasure. Thank you for the new mission. :)

redrain85 on 22/9/2006 at 06:30

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I finished it after a five hour marathon session. And I have to say it's really, really good. Really good! :thumb:

The part that freaked me out the most?

When I found Peggy down in those maintenance tunnels! I just didn't know what the hell to make of her, at first. Was she some new form of the Many? :laff:

Oh, and you hid one of those power cells REALLY well Christine. It took me a long time to find it. Very sneaky. And I totally missed the first wrench, like Bjossi did. But there are a couple more later.

I felt the cutscenes were particularly well done this time. Nice work Dinksmallwood! :cheeky:

I didn't encounter any crashes. Worked perfectly. The only thing I noticed, is that a few of the textures weren't aligned properly. Particularly on the doors. And at the beginning when the prison guard died in the explosion, his body was floating in the air. Those are my very, very minor nitpicks.


I think I went in the opposite direction, and tried too hard. It's not easy trying to sound like two different people, unless you exaggerate your voice to an extreme like I did. I'm happy with my line in the opening cutscene, but that's because it's my natural speaking voice. I'm not so happy with the doctor. So I'll also have to work on that next time.

Ultraviolet on 22/9/2006 at 07:19

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Yeah, some texture misalignments. Notably the hazard-striping in doorframes. Just need to flip the texture (rotate 180) on certain surfaces so it'll work without making a seam. I would think it would be a simple enough thing for DromEd to do that automatically -- too bad IG didn't PLAN on giving us a production-quality editor. But hey, I'll take what I get, I suppose.

One gripe I've had with the three Christine FMs I've seen so far is that the custom objects should be scaled down a bit. Those are some HUGE pencils and pens and cigarettes (more like a gigantic blunt). :P Custom object quality has definitely gone up. And I chuckled when I saw that a "burgercarton" was a custom container. Haha. :P I actually sat and killed Peggy with a wrench, but all I got was a pathetic sob! Where's the explosion, the secret door trigger, the sudden teleportation into a strange cyber-dimension? :P

Still in progress. Went from the starting deck to Engineering, died, saving it up for tomorrow now.

Minor gripe about voice acting: Some of you sound a bit like you're trying to perform/recite. The way I interpret the text a lot of times is with a slightly different emotion than the voice conveys, though we all do have a different imagination I suppose. One suggestion: Fill the voice actors in on the greater plot sequence (I know it'll ruin it for them, but they knew the risks when they signed up! :P) and let them (or actually suggest to them that they do this) modify the text for their own speaking style (which I think is the crux of the problem). Rather than quoting the text verbatim, one should modify it a bit (which I saw happen a couple of times, but there were other times where the voice actor sounded like they were using words that their style of speaking would never use).

Christine, you wrote the dialog, right? (I would assume so, but I'd prefer to know so.) What is your native language? Sometimes the English spoken by us Americans/Canadians/British/etc in your logs sounds a bit non-native. Would it be acceptable to just outline what must be said in a log, along with some emotional preferences, and then let the voice actor take a bit more creative control in the flow and presentation, thus yielding a flow more natural to that speaker? For speakers who are recording in a language that is not native to them (What I would assume are Germans speaking English, to use an example seen here), rigorous grammatical correctness may even make them sound LESS natural. And then there's someone writing the dialog making different grammatical errors than the voice actor would make in translating the idea into English words; IMO it's better for the voice actor to make their own trans-linguistic grammatical errors than to repeat the writer's, but once it's recorded, the writer could hear a few different samples of the same dialog spoken a few different ways and the voice acting team (or whatever creative control persons are on the project) could all review to see what sounds the most natural and scene fitting.

I'd offer my editorial services, but I fear I may have sounded far too pompous already. :P Just so you know, I've done a couple of voice acting gigs in other game editing communities, and I know how hard it is. I know exactly what kind of self-doubt comes into play when you expose part of your physical self to a community that knows you only by a name, some posts, and possibly an avatar. So I don't mean to be unnecessarily hard. If I don't sound understanding, you're reading it wrong. :P

And I know I started really getting long winded here. :P