I like Sealfins thought of excluding much of the items not important to the storyline..

still.. when you read a book, you can imagine all those items. when you play a game, you can't. Unless you have one of those wierd, but cool, kinds of games. F.ex. much of the screen could be black, and only items important to the story would be on the screen. To clarify, inside a room, you wouldn't see the wall or floor, but you'd see a picture, some keys atop of a table (but you don't see the table). You'd of course need some kind of lines to keep the proportions of the room, but that would be it.

Could be an interesting graphical genre to explore, no?

Well, I tried to make a game based purely on sound for CMG's blind contest, using OpenAL & Apple's speech synthesis, but I was rather disappointed both with the "expressiveness" of Apple's synth voices (even though I used a lot of tricks to make the voices sound better), and also with OpenAL, since the "3D" positional effect was rather weak.

I think that before a game focused on sound rather than graphics can have any kind of success, Apple is going to need better built-in audio hardware in its machines. Also, the synth voices really need an update. I just saw a movie of Tiger's VoiceOver, and I can only imagine how awful would it be having to hear any of the standard voices for more than a couple of minutes.

socksy Wrote:Wait, that's actually a good idea...

I'm not that stupid guys. I did remember about the blind contest and I was saying without graphics it would be like this...

Fruity Wrote:I like Sealfins thought of excluding much of the items not important to the storyline..

still.. when you read a book, you can imagine all those items. when you play a game, you can't. Unless you have one of those wierd, but cool, kinds of games. F.ex. much of the screen could be black, and only items important to the story would be on the screen. To clarify, inside a room, you wouldn't see the wall or floor, but you'd see a picture, some keys atop of a table (but you don't see the table). You'd of course need some kind of lines to keep the proportions of the room, but that would be it.

Could be an interesting graphical genre to explore, no?

Hmm sounds like weird artsy episodes of Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, as well as 60's/70's performance art.

PowerMacX Wrote:I think that before a game focused on sound rather than graphics can have any kind of success, Apple is going to need better built-in audio hardware in its machines. Also, the synth voices really need an update. I just saw a movie of Tiger's VoiceOver, and I can only imagine how awful would it be having to hear any of the standard voices for more than a couple of minutes.

Yes, it's really sad... I think the audio output stuff isn't stellar, but it's ok. It'd be better if there were some sort of native 5.1 output or something (maybe there is, but it's not well advertised if so), but what really blows is the voice quality. It's unbelievable. Have you guys checked out some of these web demos with recent IBM or AT&T voice products? They're basically indistinguishable from a real person talking unless you listen long enough and carefully enough. The modern OSX ones are basically unchanged from the original MacinTalk from a decade ago. There's only been one new voice addition since OSX, and even though it's something like 10x the size (byte-wise) of the others, it still sounds like a robot talking through a water pipe.

I've been pretty sad about that state of affairs because I'd actually love to get the VoiceOver and other interfaces working. One place it really comes in handy is if you're on a plane, and people are shoving their seat back at you, etc. Sometimes it's easier to just push the screen down and work blind. And it's nice if you have Project Gutenburg files on your machine, to have it read it to you like an audio book.

EDIT: Forgot to say, it's kind of telling when the vast majority of "robot voice" samples in techno songs and such come from your platform

Nayr Wrote:Pong kicks ass.

I second that

http://hegel.research.att.com/tts/speech...8b97d0.wav

I think to call that "basically indistinguishable from a real person" is a bit of a stretch. I'll agree though, it is better than the Macintosh ones.

Try this online demo http://sayso.elan.fr/speechissimo/interactive_va.asp

I'm really impressed with the Spanish voice, if you speak spanish or know someone who does, try it out. In many example sentences I tried, it was indistinguishable from a real person!
(The other voices are so-so though)

Apple used to have 2 spanish voices ("Carlos" and "Catalina"), that were very low quality, and with a marked mexican accent (not so good for any spanish speaker but mexicans ). They removed those voices in OS X, so there are only english voices now

Yeah, I guess "indistinguishable from humans" was a little bit strong, for the English ones anyway. I was playing with one from Japan a while back that was even more amazing (though I admit I'm not a native Japanese speaker, so maybe it wouldn't sound right to one).

Speaking of which, like PMX said, what ever happened to the non-English voices in OSX? That also made me kinda sad.