I think I'm using the REQ tag right. It's kind of a suggestion. Something I want to see someone make, since I'm busy with a project.

Well, there are some pretty amazing mods out there which have entirely new dialogue and quests involved, but whenever I play them I feel horribly un-immersed due to the lack of voice acting alongside the rest of Oblivion's massive amount of it.

But it's very unrealistic to create entirely new voice acting for every mod. So I suggest either a modders' resource or automatic silence-override mod. It would contain lots of voiced/lip-synced bits of speech and "grunts" to fill the void.

Lots of, "Uh..." "Well..." "Hehehe!" "Argh!" "Ugh." and "Huh?" things. Perhaps also based on disposition.

They could be derived from Oblivion's voice-segments, and cut in certain spots.


While it wouldn't be the best voice-work, it would certainly fill the painful silence that many mods suffer from.

You know, even as someone that has done a lot of voice acting for Oblivion mods, I have to disagree with this. If quality voice-acting isn't available, then let me have silence to fill up with my own imagination. I guess I just don't understand the perspective that having to use your imagination for some things in this old game is somehow "un-immersive". I can understand finding a sudden lack of voice-acting to be inconsistent with Vanilla, thus momentarily attention grabbing, but downright un-immersive? Not so much. *shrug* Silence isn't painful, but bad voice-acting sure is. And much of vanilla OB soundsets are well, pretty meh. Or maybe that's just my perspective after hearing them day-in day-out for months when I was working on a soundset replacer... :laugh:


Just my 2 cents.

I don't mind the silence as most of my old games weren't voice acted so I'm already used to it.

I like to use my imagination as well, but it's the huge contrast that bothers me. In Morrowind it was fun to talk to people about all sorts of subjects, and mods blended right in because there was no need to use voices. But in Oblivion, a person being silent seems so "incomplete", even if everything else is wonderful.
It's that one moment that kills the mood for me.

I plan to use these little "sighs", "grunts" and body language in my own game if it ever gets going. It leaves a lot to the imagination and feels more like talking, but doesn't actually require such extensive voice work.

Given the limited number of voice actors out here and how busy most of us are, your best bet is to do it yourself. Learn and create.

Get a mic, get http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ then it's just a matter of learning how to add them to your game and there are any number of tutorials all over the web to teach you how.

There was a project over a year ago where someone was building a program that would search for similar words and phrases in the vanilla sounds, and allow you to cut and paste sound clips to match your dialog.

Got pretty far, but I left before I saw what the results were like.

Heh, maybe I actually will try it if I ever get enough time. I have the capability, but not the time.

Actually, maybe once I get to the point of sound and voice work for the project I'm working on, then I could include this as part of that...

@Showler: I saw that once! That was pretty neat.

Tuah, the actual editing of the soundfiles is pretty easy- extract them from your BSAs, load them in Audacity, and chop 'em up. But adding them to NPCs so they would sound natural ...like that droney little "uh huh" that people do when they pretend they're paying attention, or the occasional exclamatory "oh my!"- that's beyond me.

Add to that the sheer amount of dialog that is available for splicing, accounting for one race alone, then multiply that by the amount of vanilla races there are...it truly is an epic amount of editing, and fussing in the CS, of the not-at-all fun kind. At least, in my opinion.

That said, if this is something you want, then the tools are there for you to make it yourself when you have the time.

It sounds to me you want to add gibberish to blank dialog, like... did Mario 64 have that? I know Little Big Planet does. I think it is a good idea, I don't know if it fits my personal tastes. I wanted to make something like that for some alien races, kinda like Kotor. If you do manage to make something, I think some will be interested.

Actually I find very annoying default imperial voice present everywhere in game. Everyone speaks the same and that goes on my nerves. I would prefer more diversity even if the voices would be ugly. Every person in reality has it's own voice, and if it's ugly - well, it just is. The person doesn't have to be James Earl Jones to be imperial.

In Bethesda's place, I would go to some academy and hired a bunch of students to record great diversity of voices for peanuts instead of paying the same sum of Septims to a big shot voice actor for next game.

Better solution, in all seriousness, is just to turn the voice volume all the way down. That way no one will have a voice. The voice acting in Oblivion is a disaster anyway, not because all the actors are bad (most of them are, though) but because apart from three characters in the main plot, characters don't have any unique personalities because they share their voices and personalities not just with hundreds of other characters, but usually even other races! You won't get the battle alerts and taunts but those share the same problem and I would argue that it's just as well.

I think what this calls for is some serious time alone with the Christian Bale Soundboard. A little Christian Bale would really liven things up! :swear: