[HN Gopher] Modders are using AI to put voice acting in Morrowind
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Modders are using AI to put voice acting in Morrowind
Author : makaimc
Score : 105 points
Date : 2023-02-14 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| What a grand and intoxicating innocence.
| jscheel wrote:
| Sounds like Lee Pace
| sigmar wrote:
| Very much agree. Even the pacing of :30-:45 was very Lee Pace
| to me
| tb_technical wrote:
| All the dagoth ur memes are funny as hell and I hope they never
| go away.
| 241195 wrote:
| help.
| [deleted]
| digdugdirk wrote:
| I'm very intrigued to see what comes from the "lowering the bar"
| aspect of all these AI tools. Its seems to me like the ultimate
| no-code-for-everything tool.
|
| On one hand, you've got flawless voice scam calls, but on the
| other? I can imagine a new style of fan-edit movies, but without
| any limitations of having to splice together film and audio from
| prequels/sequels/etc.
|
| We're in for a wild ride.
| thfuran wrote:
| I've seen a demo of resyncing lips movement to dubbed speech,
| which looked to work well. Combined with voice synthesis (which
| is now pretty good, though still well short of well-acted
| lines), you could already toss together something for pretty
| major edits to dialog.
| dmonitor wrote:
| I do think the YTP spliced audio still has intrinsic appeal.
| Part of the humor comes from memorable lines being reused in
| unexpected ways.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| The thing I'm looking forward to is having one voice for all
| language options.
| [deleted]
| paraph1n wrote:
| Now this is an application of AI that I can get behind!
| monkpit wrote:
| I wonder if they'll be training the AI on the same voice actors
| from Oblivion or if they'll just use some generic AI voices. Or
| maybe some other celebrities?
| Cloudef wrote:
| AFAIK Oblivion had only few voice actors
| snerbles wrote:
| With Tortoise TTS you can add input voice samples from
| different people to produce new voices that vaguely sound like
| a combination of the two. It's a bit of a crapshoot, sometimes
| resulting in wild things like a female voice morphing into a
| male mid-sentence or sudden gasps and bizarre demonic croaking.
| Playing with it has been pretty fun.
|
| I've even used Japanese inputs and the outputs _kind of_ sound
| like the originals speaking native English. Still a bit uncanny
| and less stable than inputs that match the model 's language.
|
| Forget deepfaking, it's quite literally a bottomless pit of
| unique voices that don't exist.
| natch wrote:
| There is so much more out there than just celebrities and
| existing actors. It would be a crying shame if our world had to
| stay limited to only what we have now, and only what
| professionals are willing to do, and only what there's a paying
| market for, and only what is safe and politically correct.
| rhacker wrote:
| If they start using AI to enhance all the old games, we won't
| need new games because the old ones were better.
| laserdancepony wrote:
| Morrowind will still not be popular with younger players. I
| imagine the lack of fast travel, map markers and the
| class/skill system is just too much for most.
| tsgagnon wrote:
| The visuals are pretty rough and the map is small. The map
| size actually is a blessing though since your character moves
| at a snails pace.
|
| The gameplay, especially from a melee perspective, is rough
| at best, and directly unfun at its worst.
| Arrath wrote:
| A case of limitations working in concert. The rather
| oppressive distance fog helped conceal just how small the
| world was, and it felt a lot more expansive thanks to the
| slower pace of the game.
|
| No sprinting, no mounts, no fast-travel-from-anywhere
| (beyond mark/recall and the teleport to temple spells) and
| the in-game fast travel systems were varied, thought out
| and well placed. Having to plan a route of mage guild
| teleports, boat rides, stilt striders, and/or the
| teleportation complexes helped immerse the player in the
| world.
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| > character moves at a snails pace.
|
| Boots of blinding speed to the rescue! No idea why authors
| think it was good idea to make default speed so low and
| lock game-fixing item behind some random-looking quest in
| the middle of nowhere
| linuxftw wrote:
| That was the beauty of the game. You could randomly find
| amazing things.
| pathartl wrote:
| Yep, my first TES was Oblivion and I loved it so much that
| I tried going back to Morrowind. I don't mind having to
| read and I don't mind walking, but holy hell the combat
| makes the game almost inaccessible.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think younger players can get over those things. The
| dealbreaker with Morrowind is the incredibly clunky and
| frustrating combat system. It presents as a real time first-
| person action game, but almost every action you take in a
| combat scenario is governed my hidden die rolls. When a
| player swings their sword and they see it visibly clip
| through an enemy, but the die roll calls it a miss, the
| player feels like they've been cheated by the system.
|
| The combat in this game was considered rough when it was new,
| and it has only aged like milk since then.
| godshatter wrote:
| If they had simply shown "hit" or "miss" when the weapon
| was used, it would have been less frustrating, I think.
| Even if it still intersects the character model, you would
| at least know the miss was intentional and not a bug.
| causi wrote:
| I gotta admit, as someone whose first Morrowind experience
| was on a smartphone running OpenMW, combat that requires
| aiming correctly _and_ having hit chance was infuriating. One
| or the other would be fine, like with a Zelda-esque lock-on
| feature combined with hit chance.
| tekmate wrote:
| just brand it "the dark souls of x" and young players won't
| be bothered by complexity
| coldacid wrote:
| Morrowind: The Dark Souls of The Elder Scrolls.
|
| It has a nice ring to it!
| Freedom2 wrote:
| [dead]
| herculity275 wrote:
| I mean the open world design philosophy in Elden Ring is not
| too dissimilar to Morrowind's and it was a massive hit. What
| really needs updating is the combat system, it wasn't great
| when the game came out and it aged horribly.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I haven't played Morrowind, but Elden Ring has both map
| markers and fast travel.
| dharmab wrote:
| Morrowind is similar, with map markers for major
| landmarks and diegetic fast travel, but still requiring
| the player to explore and orient to find quest
| objectives.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| Morrowind has several different systems of fast travel, the
| best being the silt strider
| chongli wrote:
| No way! My favourite method of fast travel will always be
| scrolls of Icarian flight. Sooo freaking hilarious!
| pathartl wrote:
| I remember first coming across the scroll at the
| beginning of the game. "Surely this isn't intentional? I
| have some sort of mod installed don't I?"
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| Mark-recall, teleport to temple, teleport to imperial cult,
| mage guild, silt striders, boats, propilion marks,
| overcharged jump spell ;)
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Part of the game is learning how to figure out what the fuck
| you're supposed to do.
|
| I love immersive sim games. Miss back in the day when we
| didn't have maps for dungeons and you were supposed to be
| drawing a map on paper. I never did, as a little kid I just
| learned how to memorize dungeon layouts really well and now I
| memorize any place I go on foot.
| jacooper wrote:
| Hard disagree. Amazing games like Control and Horizon zero dawn
| still exist.
| pathartl wrote:
| Control is such a great representation of what a modern game
| can be. For example, with newer games I have a hard time
| picking out enemies and items on screen. Control solves this
| by making the enemies a bright red.
| sbmyft wrote:
| The best games have already been made.
| dmonitor wrote:
| The best games were the ones released during your childhood.
| The next best are modern indie games inspired by the ones you
| played in your childhood.
| danbolt wrote:
| If we use the Atari 2600 as a (very!) rough benchmark for
| publicly available video games, the medium as we know it has
| been around for about 46 years. [1]
|
| Given that movie theaters sprang up in the early 20th
| century, [2] you could make the argument that video games
| haven't even reached their equivalent of the French New Wave
| yet. Given how far someone can go with a little bit of self-
| taught asset creation, I think the best video games will be
| made after you and I have passed away.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_theater
| dmonitor wrote:
| The internet has certainly accelerated the development
| speed of culture. What year did indie films start being
| distributed by amateurs? We're at least that point in
| gaming. We're at the point now where independent startups
| are making higher quality products than the peak AAA games
| from ~20 years ago.
| malnourish wrote:
| That couldn't be further from the truth. There are more
| people than ever creating games, and, discoverability aside,
| some of the greatest games are yet to come.
|
| Imagine you made that statement on May 27, 2019, the day
| before Outer Wilds came out.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| [dead]
| returnInfinity wrote:
| That's like saying the best movie has been made, the best
| book has been written, the best software has been created
|
| So hard disagree there.
| sschueller wrote:
| Oh god, it will be like movies. Remake after remake of old good
| games.
| brundolf wrote:
| It's already been that way for the past 5-10 years. Tons and
| tons of remasters and remakes, sometimes for games that
| aren't even that old
| causi wrote:
| Hell if I could get a Metroid Prime Remastered-type remake of
| every game from my childhood I'd never need another new
| property again. Better than playing a new game that takes up
| 120GB on my drive of which 80GB is microtransaction textures
| so some bro can have anime girls on his M-16.
|
| I cannot damn wait until the Banjo-Kazooie decompilation
| project is complete and someone starts working on a
| Render96-esque version of it.
| npsomaratna wrote:
| Yup. I still remember running Morrowind for the first time.
| My jaw dropped.
|
| Arena and Daggerfall (the two predecessor games) were
| procedurally generated, and just felt "more of the same"
| after a while. My understanding is that the world in
| Morrowind was lovingly crafted by hand. This might have
| resulted in a small in-game world--but each inch of that
| world felt special.
|
| Interestingly, the Witcher 3 is probably the one other game
| that gave me the same "this world is handcrafted" feel (dunno
| how that was built though).
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The Witcher 2 was the first game I remember really blowing
| me away in that regard. Sure, it's not quite fully open
| world (more of a series of small open worlds), but the
| design is immaculate. To make up for space constraints they
| definitely leaned into the whole "Disneyland sightlines"
| thing, where you'll turn a corner and suddenly be a in a
| new area, with all sorts of fascinating nooks and crannies
| to check out.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think this is why the Hogwarts Legacy game is doing so
| well. The story is fine I guess, and the combat is polished
| but not particularly deep. But the recreation of the castle
| and Hogsmeade are so painstakingly detailed and well
| thought out. It's easy to get lost for hours just
| exploring, something most other open world games of the
| last decade really struggle with.
|
| The illusion starts to fade when you wander further away
| from the school, but the game smartly keeps most of its
| critical path around Hogwarts and Hogsmeade.
| RangerScience wrote:
| > lovingly crafted by hand
|
| Ever play Riven? I remember reading that "every pixel was
| crafted by hand" (which probably wasn't quite true, but,
| probably not enough to matter. That game was a work of art)
| RangerScience wrote:
| I'm, ah.. I'm gonna go over here with my eager anticipation
| and prior excitement over literally this. Although I know
| you're not actually referring to these kinds of remakes, if
| only because these are much more "labor of love" than "cash
| in on a known thing".
|
| (Dungeon Keeper -> Dungeons 2; more than a straight remake)
|
| (Master of Magic; dec last year; nearly an exact remake -
| switch to hex grid, few other tweaks, maybe more down the
| road :hopes:)
|
| (Pharaoh, A New Era - tomorrow, possibly an exact remake?)
| belinder wrote:
| maybe with AI voice synthesis NPCs will finally be able to say a
| player's name
| orliesaurus wrote:
| I did a similar project for League of Legends: it uses AI
| (davinci-003) to act like a dynamic in-game announcer that talks
| to you you based on your performance in-game. [0]
|
| As someone who made this as a sideproject, I can totally see how
| if you have a team of people behind a project for a game like
| Morrowind you could go deeper and create whole narratives and
| quest systems around these "ideas" - without the need for 10s of
| voice actors and game-modders
|
| Quite fun for those who like, have been playing the same game for
| 10+ years!
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/tdONZF9iktY
| yieldcrv wrote:
| nice, glad to see someone is already on it! I had opined that
| video games won't need voice actors any more and way more fleshed
| out dialogue. A random NPC running around in Fallout in the
| distance? You can have a full conversation about some relevant
| contexts in the world, with spoken responses.
|
| several other ramifications of this is that file sizes can
| actually be smaller again. Most/significant part of the file size
| in games is audio at various formats and high qualities. But
| since pre-recorded can go away, it can be replaced with prompts
| tied to some NPCs that augment their response. The training sets
| can just be the file, and the training sets (edit: the MODEL) can
| actually come with the OS or be a shared resource on the system,
| instead of packaged with the game. Smaller additional training
| sets (edit: the model, not the training set) can come with the
| game.
|
| I have a different idea regarding compensation paths for human
| beings, but its not likely that it will be followed, or lucrative
| even if implemented.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Prerecording VA with AI is one thing (and is super cool and
| practical right now), generating it on the fly is a whole
| different can of worms.
|
| Its gonna be a some time before the "baseline" console/PC is
| fast enough to run a game, language model and voice model all
| at the same time.
|
| And it may take even longer for software support to be put in
| place and for devs to actually use it. Unity doesn't even
| natively support Opus right now, which would dramatically
| reduce VA filesizes
| oneoff786 wrote:
| You don't need the training set available to run the model.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| you're right, I should say just the model, or trained model.
| what terminology would you use? For example, with stable
| diffusion I download a.... model? and can also train a model?
| oneoff786 wrote:
| It's just the model.
|
| You might tangentially download the code to train a new
| model from scratch or update the model you received.
|
| The important bit is that the training data is HUGE and the
| model is not.
| otikik wrote:
| > video games won't need voice actors any more and way more
| fleshed out dialogue
|
| I respectfully disagree. One only has to look at Mass Effect's
| voice acting for male and female Shepard. It's (almost) exactly
| the same dialog lines, both performed by humans, but Jennifer
| Hale just kills it. The voice alone made a lot of players think
| of Femshep as the canon (despite the male model being present
| in the box art and most PR media).
|
| I do agree in that we might need _less_ voice actors - but
| mostly for non-key NPCs. Humans will still play a role.
|
| On that same note, it would not surprise me if non-key NPC's
| dialog was not written by a human any more, but by a machine. A
| human "writer" could be replaced by a "chatgpt prompt
| engineer". But again that will only apply to secondary NPCs.
| coldacid wrote:
| Honestly, I think we need _more_ voice actors, not less. One
| of my biggest complaints with the dialogue in Oblivion wasn
| 't the inanity of the "conversations" but the fact that there
| weren't enough different voices to go around so everyone of
| same race and sex would sound the same.
| punchclockhero wrote:
| Started playing Mass Effect with Knights of the Old Republic
| fresh in my mind back in the day. It was so jarring hearing
| the same voices with different characters.
| 127 wrote:
| I don't really agree. Femshep is way overhyped and maleshep
| is just fine, if not even more iconic. Femshep sounds like
| trying too hard to come across as gruff and experienced
| military veteran and it just doesn't work for me. Comes
| across as fake.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I believe that the only reason you would write this is
| because you haven't seen the services that let you train a
| voice generating AI from a few minutes of your own voice or
| from a few minutes of another person's audio.
|
| https://www.instagram.com/reel/CoVPCo2sMIj/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M.
| ..
|
| You can already feed this generated responses to say back.
|
| In the near future, humans will play a role, for 5 minutes.
| We agree on that point. In the also near future, we'll have
| enough samples for a diverse audience.
| dmm wrote:
| Starting with Oblivion the elder scroll games have voiced
| dialogue, presumably because that's what players started
| expecting.
|
| But this had the effect of dramatically reducing the number of
| options when talking to NPCs and also creating some immersion
| breaking artifacts like an NPC sadly recounting a personal
| tragedy and then immediately cheerfully discussing the weather or
| whatever.
|
| It's also strange when the same four voice actors play so many
| characters. It's just tedious and immersion breaking.
|
| AI has the potential to improve this situation in several ways.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > AI has the potential to improve this situation in several
| ways.
|
| In something of the caliber of TES they could just get a few
| hundred voice actors. It's something like 100m budget vs 1b in
| revenues.
| anonymousab wrote:
| With Oblivion in particular I think they threw a ton of money
| to get Patrick Stewart to voice a few lines. That could have
| done towards hiring many voice actors, but it may have been a
| reasonable marketing move overall - it's hard to tell given
| the shape of the market and that genre at the time.
| cardanome wrote:
| VA is a real pain, especially for an indie game dev.
|
| It completely changes your workflow because you need to have
| your script ready and finalized to record all the lines all at
| once. Say good bye to iterative development. Want to tweak
| something or add additional lines? Yeah, that is going to cost
| you.
|
| I think "AI" based voice generation (well data driven voice
| generation, I will die on the hill that it should not be called
| AI as it is not intelligent) will absolutely have a place for
| prototyping games and having filler voice acting.
|
| The problem is though, that good VA can absolutely make or
| break a game. Will players really tolerate "AI" voices? I hope
| not! There is a reason certain famous voice actors are paid
| good money: it is an art.
|
| People will watch certain shows or play certain video games
| simply because they have a voice actor that they like in. You
| can't get that emotional attachment form generated voices.
|
| Voice carries so much more information than just the text. It
| gives hints to the emotional state of the speaker, their
| background and education, their intentions. "AI" can never
| replace top-tier voice acting from humans simply because that
| would require a general intelligence.
| Shish2k wrote:
| > You can't get that emotional attachment form generated
| voices.
|
| Vocaloid managed to turn people's emotional attachment to
| generated voices into a billion-dollar industry
|
| (I'm actually crying right now, just remembering the
| emotional impact of The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku -- a
| song written from the perspective of a piece of voice
| synthesis software which is in the process of being
| uninstalled, and performed at a speed no human singer could
| match, as she tries to squeeze in one last goodbye T_T)
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I noticed that even the expansion packs for Morrowind had a lot
| more voice acting - dialogue was still textual of course, but
| NPCs' "monologues" were a lot more substantial.
|
| I know it's just nostalgia talking, but I feel like the text
| dialogue was one of the things that made MW as special as it
| was. At a certain point I think text becomes easier for a user
| to digest - you don't necessarily want some NPC talking at you
| for ages about the history of Vvardenfell. And MW was very rich
| in history like that.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _At a certain point I think text becomes easier for a user
| to digest - you don 't necessarily want some NPC talking at
| you for ages about the history of Vvardenfell._
|
| No to mention, this can sometimes become immersion-breaking.
| Especially with such data dumps, voice actors would forget
| (or not be informed) about the context in which their lines
| are being heard by the player, and then you end up with a
| random villager or space soldier suddenly giving you a TED
| talk.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| I think Oblivion is the game where all the voice lines were
| recorded in alphabetical order, so the delivery is terrible
| because the actors didn't get any context.
| Semaphor wrote:
| One of my favorite RPGs (Pathfinder: Kingmaker) had the devs
| talk about it. They had limited voice acting, and that already
| heavily limited their options for DLCs and post launch content.
| If we actually get AI voice acting, I'd stop having issues with
| it.
| coldacid wrote:
| Honestly I think that the reuse of voice actors is even more
| annoying in Oblivion than the absurd non-conversations NPCs
| keep having with each other.
| tbalsam wrote:
| How is this a detriment for both of you?
|
| It's a lovely redeeming quality of both games, by far. Having
| the same voice actor for everyone is absolutely freaking
| hilarious, too, to boot.
|
| I mean, how can you not love this lol:
| https://youtu.be/N6hVmn9FM7o
| coldacid wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, it's very entertaining, but that
| doesn't change the fact that it takes my suspension of
| disbelief and bashes it around the head and neck with a
| sock full of Septims.
| superkuh wrote:
| Yep. I saw that change from Fallout 2 to Fallout 3. It was
| dramatic and bad. Voice acting in RPGs made for much more
| limited game dialog (and gameplay!) across many RPG series.
| They stopped being role playing games and started being movies
| you played through. AI voices are a welcome potential fix...
| though I doubt the big corporate game studios are going to go
| back to the old ways.
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