Author Topic: Thoughts about reviving the project (Read 66882 times)

FFreak · « **on:** 2014-06-03 19:15:51 »

OK hallo dear readers at first,
This project is realy realy old one and it is just a shame that it got frozzen for unknown time after all the hard word , evryone had here.
I nearly read all the post about this and that it is a hard work especially for the main chars. It would talkke like forever to voice evry line and put the rihght emotion into it.
After thinking about that all I just had an idea , and therefore I ama writting this just to know if the community would like to see a revival of it.
I am a student from austria and I am working there at a hmm kind of helping service for other students, working close to all the university in town.

The hardest part would be to voice the main chars, and so I thought about working with students all here in town to voice in a "studio". We get a university just for music, acting, audi engineering, ...
Also got connection to coder ...
This would be just the beginning, but I think if I get a group which would speak for the mains, and the community would just help to voice other roles, it would be possible to revive the project .

Writting this while hearing the music of FF7 palayed on an piano , is just pure awsome

Maybe somepeaople will read that all and just give a comment , if I should try that or not .

Las but not leas, thank you for reading that all

Kaldarasha · « **Reply #1 on:** 2014-06-03 20:24:13 »

Maybe some people of the Nexus forum are interested for some voice acting, there is very professional made mod for Skyrim. Interesting NPC: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/8429/?

Covarr · « **Reply #2 on:** 2014-06-03 20:34:33 »

As I've stated in other threads (and will continue stating in every FF voice acting thread ever), I am highly interested in providing the voice for Reno.

FFreak · « **Reply #3 on:** 2014-06-03 20:38:27 »

Good idea about that

I think if I would get ebought "motivation" to organisate all that I rly would to it.
Then I rly can get some acters and so on . But the thing is I wouldn't let my buddy code evrything from sketch.
I hope someoen who has got the original code will share it (again).
So I have somehting I can show the people that it is possible, most people will not believe that something lik,e that is possible
(Ok that sentence is kinda bad written but I hope u understand ^^)
--------------------------
Yeah would be great I will just try to find voices for the mains / chars with most text , just to be shure I get those. I dont want to loose a "cloud" or anyone which cant be rearanged.
If I get all lines spoken by the mains, I can let anyone speak for the rest

^^
--------------------------
Ok so I saw that dziugo wasnt online for year(s) , hmm , I just hope someone can share his work.
I think no one ever tryed to get a local group to act the mains ^^

Shard · « **Reply #4 on:** 2014-06-03 20:40:58 »

I bet Covarr already has all of Reno's dialogue voiced into sound files.

Covarr · « **Reply #5 on:** 2014-06-03 20:43:00 »

Quote from: Shard on 2014-06-03 20:40:58

I bet Covarr already has all of Reno's dialogue voiced into sound files.

Not yet, but that's a good idea.

One weekend I did practice all his lines though. Even as important as he is to the story, he's not actually present for most of it; it's easy enough to get through all his dialogue in an hour or so, even with multiple takes.

genesis063 · « **Reply #6 on:** 2014-06-04 10:55:11 »

Really all you need to do is voice the main storyline like most other games do and it won't take to long and be easier to finish. I'm interested in maybe trying for Sephiroth or Vincent maybe even Red XIII.

LeonhartGR · « **Reply #7 on:** 2014-06-04 12:49:46 »

I think your voices matches Sephiroth quite well.

sithlord48 · « **Reply #8 on:** 2014-06-04 15:57:34 »

i would do some lines . idk for whom but i would be alright with recording some.

FFreak · « **Reply #9 on:** 2014-06-04 19:00:22 »

At least it is nice to see that some people are looking at that thread .
I am not just talking ~~shit~~ here, .... I realy have the will to do that

But without a proper support from the real creator , it will not be posiible at all

Covarr · « **Reply #10 on:** 2014-06-04 20:04:41 »

Quote from: FFreak on 2014-06-04 19:00:22

But without a proper support from the real creator , it will not be posiible at all

There is some truth to that. The original founders of this project have a tool for injecting voice clips over the dialogue, and without that (or a new tool by someone else to achieve the same result) no amount of recordings can revive this project.

genesis063 · « **Reply #11 on:** 2014-06-04 20:23:56 »

Anyone have any idea if Shard's program would work with FF7?

FFreak · « **Reply #12 on:** 2014-06-04 21:27:59 »

@Covarr true that. But I think it could be kinda hard to conntact one of them, if it is eaven possible.
I think they dont want to hear anything about that project anymore. And writting a new one wouldnt be the same, I know how long it took to write that one, and coding a new one from nothing would take so long and then the recording hmm

But ok , lets just see maybe anyone on the forum knows how to conntact the dev.

Mayo Master · « **Reply #13 on:** 2014-06-07 21:55:56 »

If you manage to get the project off the ground, count me in, I would be happy to volunteer for "random unimportant NPC" such as shop clerks and the like. My girlfriend also studied voice acting - it's a shame she's not a native English speaker, and she has too strong an accent for being in the main cast - but I bet she'd be interested in voicing some NPCs, as well.

Shard · « **Reply #14 on:** 2014-06-07 23:02:43 »

Quote from: genesis063 on 2014-06-04 20:23:56

Anyone have any idea if Shard's program would work with FF7?

Kaldarasha has already requested that, and I've started rewriting the code that loads/saves the files (it turns out FF7 and FF8 use slightly different formats for the FMT files, which is why it wasn't working for 7). Unfortunately, my FF8 Voiceover Project is a month away from casting, and I'm busy dealing with callbacks so I don't have a lot of time to work on the program.

Additionally, FF7 apparently only supports up to 750 sound effects (nobody has explained to me why, I'm assuming it's hard-coded into the engine), so unless someone edits the exe to support more sounds, a VO project for FF7 isn't really viable with my program anyway. You'd need a third party program to monitor the game and play sounds accordingly from a different file or folder.

FFreak · « **Reply #15 on:** 2014-06-17 20:34:39 »

Y after reading this, that project would need a coder who can write such a thirs party programm.
But that will be a realy hard work to do so . Hmmm any ideas ^^ ?

Hellbringer616 · « **Reply #16 on:** 2014-06-17 21:18:22 »

I'm in on two conditions.

I will only do DLPB's re-translation (I simply cannot go back! haha)
And if someone remakes or can reattain the tool used to allow this.

I'd love to do a main role but i'm afraid i wouldn't have time for that while running my business..

But i have no issues voicing various other NPC's. i can do an array of voices and accents

ficedula · « **Reply #17 on:** 2014-07-02 08:18:22 »

Quote from: Covarr on 2014-06-04 20:04:41

There is some truth to that. The original founders of this project have a tool for injecting voice clips over the dialogue, and without that (or a new tool by someone else to achieve the same result) no amount of recordings can revive this project.

Morning all.

I knocked up a proof of concept tool for the original FF7Voice project, although I don't think it was my tool they went on to use for their work; it shouldn't be difficult to get something working again, if people are interested.

I only have the 2012 version to hand (I still have the original 1998 CDs - but none of my PCs have optical drives!) so I'd have to get it working on that version first, but I'm fairly sure the differences between the two aren't gigantic, right?

Cheers.

Hellbringer616 · « **Reply #18 on:** 2014-07-02 14:49:18 »

Quote from: ficedula on 2014-07-02 08:18:22

Morning all.

I knocked up a proof of concept tool for the original FF7Voice project, although I don't think it was my tool they went on to use for their work; it shouldn't be difficult to get something working again, if people are interested.

I only have the 2012 version to hand (I still have the original 1998 CDs - but none of my PCs have optical drives!) so I'd have to get it working on that version first, but I'm fairly sure the differences between the two aren't gigantic, right?

Cheers.

http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=14047.0

If you run this on your game i believe it will effectively become the 1998 version.

ficedula · « **Reply #19 on:** 2014-07-02 17:29:06 »

Yeah, it became obvious fairly quickly that the 2012 version was causing me grief, so I've reverted to the 1998 version.

I have a basic tool running that captures the dialogue display fine; next will be adding a way to trigger sound output.

Kaldarasha · « **Reply #20 on:** 2014-07-02 18:30:23 »

It would be great if we had a tool, which can replace the sound. The sound system itself is kinda buggy and it can play only four sounds at once (for some reasons there are channels which kill all other active channels

).

Someone has started to give Cloud's attack a voice over but it can start to be annoying when Cloud makes the same 'Hua!' all the time.
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=15266.msg213630#msg213630

I guess I leave the official welcome back to LeonhartGR. He will give it ... well the right flavor.

Covarr · « **Reply #21 on:** 2014-07-02 18:53:05 »

The ideal perfect solution would be a combination of scripting and expanding the game to allow more sound effects, without the need for an external tool. Unfortunately, as easy as this would be for developing a new game, I'm not even sure it's possible to make the game itself allow infinite sounds without more modding than its worth.

Shard · « **Reply #22 on:** 2014-07-02 19:36:34 »

On a related note, I tried modding the FF8 exe to expand the built-in sound effect limit (which is either 12149 or 19999 depending on who's counting), and I could not find the part of the exe that references these numbers. I even changed ALL of them (and all numbers +1 of them) and it didn't do anything (surprisingly, the game didn't crash). The hard-coded cap must be stored as some other number, and we have no way of knowing what that number is. I'm not good enough with cheat engine to read the disassembly while playing to find it that way, either.

Chances are it will be just as difficult to increase FF7's sound effect cap. I'll keep looking into FF8 and see if I have a brilliant idea.

ficedula · « **Reply #23 on:** 2014-07-02 20:02:10 »

Quote from: Covarr on 2014-07-02 18:53:05

The ideal perfect solution would be a combination of scripting and expanding the game to allow more sound effects, without the need for an external tool. Unfortunately, as easy as this would be for developing a new game, I'm not even sure it's possible to make the game itself allow infinite sounds without more modding than its worth.

Doing it from an external tool probably wouldn't be massively difficult, to be honest. Not to say it's trivial, but I'm fairly sure it could be done. Not really related to the voices project at all, though, except that digging around in the assembly to implement the voice hooks will give me a bit of a headstart making any other changes.

Anyway, I've got the hooks into the dialogue working more or less properly now;

http://www.ficedula.co.uk/voices/test.jpg

...so I'll begin working on a nice way of configuring which sound files to play.

Is anybody interested in actually managing this project? I'm happy to do the technical work of coding up the tool(s) involved, but someone will need to do the work of compiling all the audio files, naming them appropriately, and so on.

Covarr · « **Reply #24 on:** 2014-07-02 20:08:26 »

I'm totally down for the mind numbing almost-bureaucratic side of things if a proper project manager doesn't show up to do it instead, renaming files and all that boring stuff, but I have zero interest whatsoever in voice direction, or any involvement in any recording sessions at all except as an actor.