What If... You could download a pack of audio files to your computer, and then when a NPC in game says something to you, the client checks the Audio Pack folder to see if a MP3 file is available that is associated with that dialogue ID. If it finds one, it plays it. Then community members that like to do audio, voices, etc, would be able to make custom audio packs for you to download and install. Those who have aging eye sight or don't like to read, would still be able to get some of the game's dialogue instead of just taking all the quests and running to the objective with out having any idea why they are doing it. Darkpaw Games wouldn't have to do any audio production work because it would be completely community created. They would have to add a feature to lookup an ID to associate with the current quest text being said by the NPC, search the audio packs folder for a file named the same as the ID, and play the audio from that file. Just an idea...
Nice idea. I will make sarcastic ones for myself when I screw up. And the ADA connection is a nice one.
Right. Nothing could possibly go wrong with that. Personally I'd vote for custom character *ahem* "skins" before custom audio.
Sorry, but that would be a horrible waste of resources for Darkpaw Games to do. The amount of effort that DpG would have to go through in order to implement all of those things into the game. Additionally, everything that you're asking for can already be done completely via programs like GINA or to a lesser degree the in-game Audio Triggers. If you are wanting something like this, it is something that should be completely done by the community, not by Darkpaw Games.
After creating this thread yesterday, I was actually thinking about that. I'm considering trying to write a program to do just this. It honestly shouldn't be that hard. Just monitor the log file, look for NPC names saying things, running it against a database to see if what they are saying matches a pattern, and then playing the associated audio file. The majority of the work would be cataloging all the NPCs and their quest text. That honestly could be something that is community driven as well. General format of Quest table: Zone Name NPC Name Quest Text Audio ID Grab the current zone from zone in message, npc name and quest text from say, and associate the Audio ID for that line of text to an audio file name. If there is a match in the log, play the associated audio file. Where DPG could make this a whole lot easier is if they had a log entry that was a quest text key that would be logged every time a NPC said something to you. Potential key: [expansion]-[zone]-[npc]-[text] Then anybody writing this program to monitor the log file would be able to go straight to looking for an associated audio file and play it.
