I recently acquired this voice communication device enabling me to talk real time to my buddies, the advantages are many and obvious, but it removes yet another aspect of “roleplay” Soon as I switched it on, my long legged beautiful sexy female elf had the voice of a 18 stone hairy bloke. “He’s a ….. He’s a Geeeza!!” my long time friend exclaimed (geeeza being slang for chap in London) A deathly silence ensued I presume some were embarrassed for their earlier flirting Life for my little elf just won’t be the same anymore. shame really I’m not wearing women’s clothes btw (well okay underwear bit of lippy thats all ;-) ...just like a bit o the ol “roleplay” Edited by - nomax5 on February 14, 2002 7:33:07 PM

LOL!!!! This is too funny! Thanks for fulfilling a personal prediction of mine, as well, btw. I''ve long thought that with real-voice communications (and video, when it comes, too), online games might lose some of their flavor unless you''re strictly playing with friends.

The one thing that would fix this and make it both cool and spooky would be some kind of digital signal processing tech that can shift your tone. That won''t do it entirely... but then again, part of the fun of role-playing is trying to fake the voice!

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Just waiting for the mothership...

quote: Original post by Wavinator
... but then again, part of the fun of role-playing is trying to fake the voice!

Yeah, but I think a guy trying to sound like a girl would be even scarier than a guy just playing as a girl, IMO

Well... I think you need to do voice recognition, turn it into text, and then run a speech synthesizer over it...

Anyone ever seen Ray Kurzweil's female alter-ego, Ramona? She is basically a 3D rendered female, her movements powered by Kurzweil, who's in a mocap suit. When he speaks, his voice is filtered through some kind of Kurzweilian speech synthesis jobbie and it comes out 'feminized'. It sounds really freaky. Personally, it didn't sound very female at all.

Edited by - Tacit on February 15, 2002 7:11:05 PM

This is not actually new technology.

Apparently, real voice communication was first implemented, albeit rather shakily, in the network version of ROTT, years ago. I don''t know if it made the final release, but the designers definitely had a prototype that just about worked, at least according to a bio site I found.

quote: Original post by Gaiiden
Yeah, but I think a guy trying to sound like a girl would be even scarier than a guy just playing as a girl, IMO

Believe me, I''ve experienced this. It is scary! Especially when the guy is bulky 300 pound bouncer material playing a medieval courtesan.



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Just waiting for the mothership...