blurbs that aren't worth listening to

[bvanevery]

A fair amount of the world of Alpha Centauri is communicated through blurbs, aka quotes in the tech tree.  They are contained in blurbsx.txt.  I think some of these are filler, don't add much to the sense of the world of SMAC, and are somewhat a waste of time to listen to.  Does anyone else have opinions on which blurbs specifically aren't very good?

[Geo]

In general, the "Planet Voice" quotes are the ones I don't like.

[bvanevery]

I agree!  Why the @#$??! is Planet German?  A woman, ok, maybe a woman.  I would have directed that as a gender neutral, "alien consciousness" voice.  Not a robot, but something whose consciousness is sort of only coming into being.  I really think they blew it on voicing Planet, both in voice tonality and in dialogue.  I'd rewrite that stuff.  Maybe I'll sit down and actually do that.

As for blurbs that are a complete waste of time, here's my #1 pick:

##Matter Compression
#TECH19
Preliminary analysis indicates that our rivals have developed
a safe and reliable method to simulate conditions existing on the
interior of a stellar mass. The fabrication and transmutation
of materials possible in such an environment guarantees significant
industrial and military applications.
^
^        -- Probe Team Operations Directorate,
^           Top Secret Report

PUT ME TO SLEEP!!!  Clearly they just had another kind of armor they needed to rattle on about, and didn't put any effort into thinking up anything interesting at all.  Not only is the dialog boring as written, but the voicing is completely bored as well.  This one is the 1st into the tumbril, off to the guillotine!

Begging the question, what to do with a "matter compression" tech slot instead that would be more interesting.  If one is committed to getting rid of boring voice acting, then I don't have to keep any of the dialog or subject matter either.  Really the only thing to keep, is the icon, and even that does not strictly have to be kept.  I'm just like, why tear up icon art assets?  It's enough work to tear up other things.

In my mod, Matter Compression gives Plasma Shard and Pulse-12 Armor.  They're not interesting, they're just the next things you attack and defend with.  Maybe this is a good place not to talk about weapons or armor at all, just do something completely different.

[Vidsek]

  I have an opinion on the blurbs: I mostly ignore them. 
Obviously that also means I would be happy if they were rewritten.  Should you undertake that task, count me in: my academic background has given me some skills that might be of help.
  Oh, I'm also a scientist and anthropologist by profession, so getting those parts plausible would be within my scope.
  And as a scientist, I'm open to new information and willing to change my opinions accordingly.

  In a related topic, what about the data and quotes in the faction files?  For my personal ones, I've rewritten most of them to make them less "90's" and more apt.  Same goes for the base names.

  Perhaps a separate, strictly text mod with only "flavor" changes might be interesting to our community?

[bvanevery]

Should you undertake that task, count me in: my academic background has given me some skills that might be of help.

Heh, just be advised there are laws about works of joint authorship.  I may not have any rights doing derivative works of SMAC.  But to the extent I might have any, there are problems with collaboration.  I haven't really thought through any of that, since I don't yet have anything that warrants it.  When I produce everything myself and just give it away, I know there are no issues of joint authorship to consider.  Maybe contemplation of the various Creative Commons licenses is in order.

  In a related topic, what about the data and quotes in the faction files?  For my personal ones, I've rewritten most of them to make them less "90's" and more apt.  Same goes for the base names.

Well, someone could do that.  Indeed, you could package up what you've done for other people's consumption, so that people can see what you mean.

I think these dialog items have a small effect, not a big effect.  I think of them as a polishing exercise, not substantially new content.  I'm wary of polishing exercises because I know how long they can drag out in the real world.  That's time I should be investing in game projects that will put food on my table.  I don't presonally gain anything as a developer from just polishing things.  Compare voice acting, in contrast: I prove the viability of a skill, something I could sell commercially.  Polishing an errant line in SMAC's text, well, I already know I can do that.

What did I get from SMACX AI Growth mod?  Well, now I know how a tech tree and a narrative about the game world interface with each other.  I know how long it will take to arrange X Y Z, what kind of problems will ensue in playtesting, and what could likely be dispensed with.  I wouldn't need to do this exercise for another game at this point for free though, because now I know the drill.

Perhaps a separate, strictly text mod with only "flavor" changes might be interesting to our community?

Herein lies a fundamental deployment problem.  It is not in my best interest to put forth 2 mods that I have authored entirely myself.  That's twice as much installation work for the user, which IMO seriously decreases the odds of the stuff getting tried out.  It is in my best interest to roll all my best content into 1 mod.

If we had an extremely sophisticated mod manager, more than Wesnoth even has, that can track the collision of various game assets and block them, then this sort of problem goes away.  Distributed authorship becomes possible, and I'm thinking nobody really has to worry about laws of joint authorship, because authors are just working on their own works.  But someone has to actually write that piece of software for such a development paradigm to exist.

Presently, the learning curve of voice acting is more obviously valuable to me as a would-be commercial game developer.  So I'm focusing on that, and there's plenty for me to do right now.  I need to get to the end of that and see if I even have, say, a new Cha Dawn to show for it.  Maybe I don't.  Maybe it proves to be more work than I hoped.

Maybe I burn out on doing anything free for SMAC entirely.  I mean, I have been at it awhile.  I do have a programming language project I'm working on as well, that I've made a small progress with recently.

It would be great if some kind of sophisticated mod manager already existed, and I didn't have to conceptualize such a project in terms of doing it all from scratch.  And if someone's extant codebase didn't suck to work with, if it was actually doable to add game asset descriptions and collision checks on those.

Some of these things are more easily solved by writing a new game!

[gwillybj]

I played the game so often early on that I very quickly got tired of hearing any and all of the quotes, so I renamed the "voices" folder "voices folder" and silenced that! It doesn't affect anything. The game runs without the "voices" folder.

[bvanevery]

I never did embark upon any voice acting.  It wasn't real world to get into that.  I did finish my mod.  6 full time person months of work, spread over 1 calendar year.  Technically I'm still not done working on it, but I've clearly drawn down to a "maintenance mode" level of effort.  1st time any of my open source projects have made it to a maintenance mode.

[Trench Dog]

I enjoy most of the blurbs and have a lot of nostalgia regarding them, personally.

[bvanevery]

Well, thinking back on the blurbs alone, as opposed to the voice acting, I think they're just uneven in quality.  What I quoted before as my "#1 worst" is definitely more boring than most of them, although I'm not now sure it's #1.  They did have one decent idea in it: the interior of a stellar mass.  The problem is, they put a bunch of word barf around that one good idea.  Then they voice acted it in a very boring manner.  Which is weird because the voice actor is the same guy who did all the good Morganite comedic stuff.  So why did they screw that one up so badly?  Maybe it's somewhat true, that a voice actor can't do much when handed really bad lines.

I definitely don't have any time for voice acting.  "Maintenance mode" development turns out to be more of a "long tail" effect, where occasionally I get dragged into doing lots of work.  It's player feedback driven now.  If a player gets me to finally realize the Pirates are building an obsessive number of Transports, well then I drive myself nuts trying to fix that, right?  Then I could go a few months with players not finding any problems.