The Nameless Mod: The Voices Compel You news

The Big Bug Hunt of 2008
You guys are long overdue another news update from The Nameless Mod. Let's start with the bug hunting we've been doing, because it can be summed up pretty quickly: It's going quite well. Two of our three alpha testers have reached the next to final mission on their playthroughs and are about to finish their respective games, after which we'll eradicate the final bugs they find, tweak a few more features, and then release our beta. Most of the bugs they find are small and quick fixes, but a few pretty epic things have cropped up. Most have been fixed, and the rest won't last until the beta. There will be no mercy.

Those who are signed up for the beta can tentatively expect the Beta 1.0.0 build to arrive some time in July.

I'm Hearing Voices
Voice acting is an indescribably huge undertaking. I've mentioned this before, but it cannot be overstated. Our programmer Nick has created a parser that can get line counts and word counts out of our conversation files, and a complete count reveals that we've recorded just over 50% of all our lines. Currently, 5891 lines remain to be recorded (that's five thousand lines), 3562 of which belong to Trestkon - our protagonist.

The only reason we can even hope to ever finish this work is because of Jeremiah Costello, Creative Director of T-Recs Studios. Jeremiah, who is a professional voice actor, has graciously recorded a couple of parts for us, including the 312-line part of Scara B. King, the implementation of which was finished a couple of days ago. Jeremiah has not only offered to also record the 241-line part of Phasmatis, but also offered us the services of volunteer voice actors that he knows. Needless to say, we are extremely grateful.

Another big step forward in the voice acting came last weekend when our most prolific sound tech Grub returned with a vengeance to work his way through about a dozen characters (including a couple of fairly major parts) in two days of non-stop audio processing. This was a big leap forward for our entire voice acting department, which now also counts dialogue editors Stephan, Brian, and Seishiro17 in addition to Grub and Spaic. With Gelo, Larry, and I now also focusing primarily on voice acting, it wouldn't be exaggeration to say we've escalated the voice acting process.

Look at the size of that thing!
I really don't like to brag (actually that's a lie), but I don't think I'm taking too great a risk if I say TNM is likely to be the largest game modification in the world. Maybe not in terms of weight - although we expect to pass the 1 GB mark pretty soon, mods for more modern games where single models can take up as much disk space as a whole map in DX can probably easily beat us in that area - but simply in terms of content, at least if you count the voice acting. 13,000 lines of fully voice-acted conversations is really insane no matter how you look at it, in fact we have it directly from Sheldon Pacotti that it's approximately twice as big as the script of Deus Ex itself.

And speaking of Sheldon, he's agreed to have a small cameo in TNM. He's writing and recording a couple of lines for a character we'll place in one of our maps as an homage to the work he did on Deus Ex. Being the lead writer of one of the best written games in history, he certainly deserves it.

Did Somebody Shout "Video"?
Now that I've tantalized you with fantastic numbers, I think it's in order that I demonstrate the general quality of our voice acting as well, so here is a ca. 4½ minute montage of different lines of voice acting. Chosen more for their availability in-game than specifically for their quality, together they should give you a pretty good idea of what's in store for you.