Blogs - Talia

So I started work on implementing my work-flow for importing voice overs and phoneme mapping them in Faceposer. I wasn't aware that Faceposer's SAPI DLLs didn't work with Windows 7, and it took me several hours to understand why it wasn't working. Luckily, Mr. Tom Edwards has spent some time on this problem already, and hacked together a DLL file that is supposed to work with the newer speech recognition libraries. This is amazing, and awesome.
Unfortunately, it still appears to be somewhat glitchy. I blame this on Microsoft. Oddly, MS is usually always pretty good about including backwards compatability on a product. I've rarely if ever had issues with a minor version update (5.1 to 5.4 of SAPI) causing this sort of regression, so I'm a bit confused, to be honest. But it definately does not have the same hooks, it appears. Tom's version of the DLL is causing it to output the right phone time mappings, but it's outputting Silence phonemes for me, basically reporting that it doesn't know what to map the phones to.
So I'm trying to work around it for the moment, and get on with the movement bits of the script. It's just nice to have in-situ audio so that way I know approximately how it should play out. It will be a bigger deal obviously when I get closer to the end and need to add final audio in. Right now I'm just doing the voice overs myself, so I can see how it plays out.
I'm mostly amazed at the amount of work some people outside of valve have put in to get some of these things working. It's pretty awesome, actually.

I've worked in several environments now, with all kinds of tools. My best friend since I was 5 is a programmer, that I've worked closely with on several projects. Occassionally he has to design tools for a project, and he sometimes ask me what kind of requirements I have for that tool. He meets the ones that he deems feasible. If you've worked in game development, you know how that goes.

I understand that in some ways, it's not much different with a larger studio.

A menu item in one of these tools that doesn't do a damned thing gets left behind, forgotten. Known crash bugs are ignored on lesser used features. There's more important things to deal with. And the public is never going to see these tools, right? Just the devs, who are used to working with buggy tools. And these are means to an end. We just need these to push this game out the door.

So. That's the standard mentality, in a nutshell. I'm not necessarily accusing any specific developer of this, so don't take it that way. It's the nature of the development schedules, and deadlines.

But if you've suddenly released a genre king... and it's been that way for OVER a decade now. And you've got a rabid fanbase, who you've now released these half-crippled development tools to. So that they can use it too, and make more content, thereby making the game more popular still.

This makes great marketing sense. You kill two birds with one stone. You make alot of your market happy, you even expand it some, and hey, you're doing everyone a favor by releasing the tools. You didn't have to. It's a great favor, 'o benevolent dictators of gaming.

On the other hand...
You're doing some of your most vocal proponents a disservice by not making sure that the tools we are using to produce more content for your game actually work as intended. These folks are the best advertising and community building assets you have. You are only helping yourselves here, in all foreseeable cases by doing this. You're giving your own devs less headaches, and you're making it easier for the modders by treating the tools the same as you'd QA the game.

I'm probably preaching to the choir here. All I'm asking; the stuff that's obviously broken, get it fixed. There's several things that the community has considered bugs for years, and aren't, that still haven't been properly addressed either. And maybe put up a bug tracker? We all use the wikis now. Give us a bug reporting service as well so we can cull some of the crap out for you. This is all easy stuff.

And one more thing. For the love of pete. If you're going to do a MAJOR upgrade to the Tools, to support different engine versions, or whatever, give us a choice of it. Don't make us upgrade to it. Or have it warn us! Don't have it automatically update! The amount of times I've almost cried because I thought I couldn't get my project to run that I'd already put months of work into, just because of a stupid automatic update. And yes, I know I can disable that, but then I'd never know about an update. There's no notes on the tools stating they've been updated.

I feel like I've had all these arguments with members of the community already. It's annoying, because it's the same ones over and over. I've figured out how to fix most of these things myself, but not without plenty of blood, sweat, and programming. And that's a leg up I have over alot of the folks I talk with. I have training in this, where alot of these kids don't. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to see more works done by these younger folk, that will show me up. But as all of these tools and operating systems and development environments get more complex and arcane, I have no idea how they'll be able to keep up. I got in on the ground floor, and I'm barely keeping up sometimes.

How's someone that starts so much later going to figure any of the nuances out? I mention a batch script, and get blank stares. I used to have to compile everything from command prompt.
Kids these days. ;)

- Didn't intend to rant, and haven't slept yet. But I certainly do feel better now. Peace.

Hi.

I have a small project that I'd like to share. It's almost ready.

It's been codenamed "Destiny" for as long as I've been working on it.
It's not called that anymore.
It derives from the genesis of the project, when I was originally commissioned to make it by some intrepid international businessmen. That didn't work out too well. They wanted too much, and I was inexperienced.

About a year ago, Phillip got a hold of me when he found the original results of my toils had been circulating near the real world location of City 17. I didn't know this was it's intended purpose when I made it. When I heard this, it made me want to fix them, and release them properly to the world. I was (reasonably) concerned by this that I would be in trouble for what the businessmen had done to my work. So, in some ways, this is my panacea.

I've started with the ruined carcass that was scavenged from the City, and some of my own archives, and I am reintegrating the entirety into a new whole, that should be a more accurate representation of my original vision. I've been working on this off and on for almost 5 years now. This Version 2 only started recently, though. I had other engagements that demanded my attention in the meantime. More dreams of others. I've probably spent around 1.3x10^4 hours or so on this project now. And I'm tired of working on other peoples' dreams. And I want to take back some of my own.

That's what will happen when you dream of other worlds. You have to make them. I also find it dangerous not to set goals, and I think some of these should be shared. It makes them more likely to bear fruit. So I'm tired of toiling away at it by all by my lonesome, when so many of my friends and acquaintances have either shared theirs, or fallen along the road.

So I decided I should share mine with you.

If I can ask you one favor, though. Please do not judge these too harshly. As much as I like aesthetics, that's not what this is about.

It's actually about play.

But you're not going to play it unless it looks pretty, are you?

I hope to be able to share more in the near future. I will attempt to watch commentary here. I will be posting a dedicated information dissemination location shortly. :)