There have been many articles on Gamasutra exploring human emotions and so on. The industry seems to share Bill's opinion that the future is synthetics and better simulations.
The thing that gets me is that people used to think the same thing about voice acting in games. There were so many efforts to synthesize speech and use that, since theoretically it would save tons of storage space. Once CD-ROM and DVD-ROM was widely available (as well as bigger hard drives and sound compression), many games began featuring full voice acting and little to no text. Synthesized speech in modern games is unheard of as far as I know.
Apples and oranges. Synthesized speech is still not to the point of a good voice actor, though someday it may be. It's very, very easy and relatively efficient to utilize real speech in games these days. The reason why synthesized speech was used in the past was simply because it was cost prohibitive to digitize speech both from a financial standpoint (sometimes thousands of dollars a word!) and from a storage standpoint, when you were talking K rather than MB.
It's all a matter of improvements. All the fuss about Amazon's Kindle being able to read books was for a reason - these people are afraid it will destroy the audio book industry. Of course if you actually LISTEN to how the Kindle reads book in its synthesized voice, you really at this point it's no match for a quality audio book production, particularly one with well-placed music and sound effects. Of course there's also nothing stopping from a future Kindle synthesizer having the ability to understand basic context and attempt some emotion, and also for book authors to put in certain cues for sound effects and music that the Kindle might be able to play from a basic database. It's not that far fetched. Anyway, the point is, just like with the versatile synthetic actors (unlimited actions/camera work) replacing limited FMV actors in games today, there's no reason why there can't be dynamic audio in games some day, meaning there is no pre-written, pre-recorded script. The software just uses some clever AI to speak on the fly, generating its own speech from clever algorithms.
Matt Barton wrote:
My theory is that one day people will look back on these days of simulations and 3D animation the way we look back at speech synthesis today. Definitely worthwhile and interesting, but just not a viable substitute for real voice acting.
Quaint, but I see no evidence supporting that idea whatsoever.
Matt Barton wrote:
You really notice something like this when you're playing Oblivion. Everything looks so realistic until you start dealing with people. They move unrealistically and the facial close-ups look downright cheesy. And this is an AAA title where all the stops were pulled. I think it'd be so much better if they had just gone with FMV as in some of the late 90s RPGs.
Oblivion couldn't be done with real actors. It would be a very different game. While it has flaws, by the very size of the game world, you need synthetic actors. They look good, but are certainly not perfect, but they WILL get better in the future. Just look at the leap in quality from 2002's Morrowind to 2006's Oblivion. That was just a single generation of hardware and a one game difference. What will the Elder Scrolls V be like in 2010 or 2011? Who knows? (though it may only be a "polish" leap, as it's still going to be for the same Xbox 360, PS3 and PC platforms)
Disagree again
The thing that gets me is that people used to think the same thing about voice acting in games. There were so many efforts to synthesize speech and use that, since theoretically it would save tons of storage space. Once CD-ROM and DVD-ROM was widely available (as well as bigger hard drives and sound compression), many games began featuring full voice acting and little to no text. Synthesized speech in modern games is unheard of as far as I know.
Apples and oranges. Synthesized speech is still not to the point of a good voice actor, though someday it may be. It's very, very easy and relatively efficient to utilize real speech in games these days. The reason why synthesized speech was used in the past was simply because it was cost prohibitive to digitize speech both from a financial standpoint (sometimes thousands of dollars a word!) and from a storage standpoint, when you were talking K rather than MB.
It's all a matter of improvements. All the fuss about Amazon's Kindle being able to read books was for a reason - these people are afraid it will destroy the audio book industry. Of course if you actually LISTEN to how the Kindle reads book in its synthesized voice, you really at this point it's no match for a quality audio book production, particularly one with well-placed music and sound effects. Of course there's also nothing stopping from a future Kindle synthesizer having the ability to understand basic context and attempt some emotion, and also for book authors to put in certain cues for sound effects and music that the Kindle might be able to play from a basic database. It's not that far fetched. Anyway, the point is, just like with the versatile synthetic actors (unlimited actions/camera work) replacing limited FMV actors in games today, there's no reason why there can't be dynamic audio in games some day, meaning there is no pre-written, pre-recorded script. The software just uses some clever AI to speak on the fly, generating its own speech from clever algorithms.
My theory is that one day people will look back on these days of simulations and 3D animation the way we look back at speech synthesis today. Definitely worthwhile and interesting, but just not a viable substitute for real voice acting.
Quaint, but I see no evidence supporting that idea whatsoever.
You really notice something like this when you're playing Oblivion. Everything looks so realistic until you start dealing with people. They move unrealistically and the facial close-ups look downright cheesy. And this is an AAA title where all the stops were pulled. I think it'd be so much better if they had just gone with FMV as in some of the late 90s RPGs.
Oblivion couldn't be done with real actors. It would be a very different game. While it has flaws, by the very size of the game world, you need synthetic actors. They look good, but are certainly not perfect, but they WILL get better in the future. Just look at the leap in quality from 2002's Morrowind to 2006's Oblivion. That was just a single generation of hardware and a one game difference. What will the Elder Scrolls V be like in 2010 or 2011? Who knows? (though it may only be a "polish" leap, as it's still going to be for the same Xbox 360, PS3 and PC platforms)
Books!
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director | Armchair Arcade, Inc.